In the Fall of 2020, Naropa launched a groundbreaking master’s degree program in the field of yoga studies.
Today, yoga is a billion-dollar industry. Studios, classes, retreat offerings, and yoga pants can be found all over the world – from South America to Europe throughout Asia and across Instagram—so how did a master’s degree in the subject make it to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains at a university located in Boulder, Colorado?
Yoga has been studied at Naropa since the University’s inception in 1974 when spiritual teacher Ram Dass taught a course on the yogas of the Bhagavad Gita. Since then, the study of yoga has unfolded in many ways with the academic and contemplative atmosphere at Naropa providing a rich source for its growth. Ten years ago, the University launched the first yoga studies undergraduate degree program in the United States.
The bachelor’s degree focuses on practices central to different iterations of yoga, including Classical Yoga, Tantra, Hatha Yoga, and Modern Postural Yoga, while culminating in a 1000-hour teacher training certificate. Both the undergraduate and graduate degrees explore the development and history of yoga, but the new master’s program dives deeper into the history and evolution of yoga through an academic lens.
Naropa’s graduate program does not offer a teacher training certificate or involve postural yoga practice. Instead, it is an academic training where students immerse themselves in theory and study the Sanskrit language, giving them the ability to more comprehensively access source texts in which the practice of yoga emerged.
The graduate degree is low-residency, which means students can work while completing the program and take classes online from anywhere in the world. The cohort and faculty members come together for two nine-day in-person retreats at mountain centers in Colorado before the first and third year to build a sense of community and start their classes for the semester. Students take courses like “History of Yoga”, “Hindu Tantra”, “Power, Privilege, and Diversity”, and “Yoga and Globalization”, giving them a full roadmap from the source of yogic traditions to the many streams we see today.
What I think differentiates our program in many ways, is that we take this panoramic view of the history, philosophies, and theories of yoga.
Ben Williams, Assistant Professor of Yoga Studies and Hinduism at Naropa, explains: “What I think differentiates our program in many ways, is that we take this panoramic view of the history, philosophies, and theories of yoga. We do that by tracking the best scholarship in the field and offering a training in the humanistic study of yoga. We are also true to Naropa’s lineage of practice and engaging in meditative forms of yoga in the classroom. We do that not with any kind of sectarian commitments or within a specific lineage of yoga practice, but with an appreciation of the incredible diversity, depth, and integrity of the yogic texts and traditions as they emerged.”
Nataraja Kallio, Associate Professor at Naropa, elaborates on the benefit of studying yoga in an academic setting saying, “it gives us time to study the breadth and depth of the tradition in ways it deserves.” He explains: “It enables us to emphasize cultural appreciation rather than appropriation. But nevertheless, we equally grapple with those issues that arise with the globalization of yoga because, of course, whenever a tradition travels, it’s inevitably influenced by the values and the interests of the cultures it arrives in.”
Sreedevi Bringi is a retired instructor from the Naropa Yoga Studies program but was instrumental in developing the master’s program alongside Kallio and Williams. She says the calling to “bridge science and spirituality has been there [her] whole life”. It’s “part of my family heritage,” she says. Growing up in India, her mother was a chemistry professor, and her father a spiritual teacher.
In 1998, Bringi was teaching chemistry at Colorado State University when Judith Simmer-Brown invited her to teach a course on contemplative Hinduism at Naropa. This was the beginning of Bringi’s renowned career at the University where she inspired countless students to dive deeper into yogic traditions and worked alongside professors like Andrew Schelling to develop the Sanskrit program.
Bringi and Kallio developed the yoga studies curriculum at Naropa together, and Bringi was nervous as it came time for her retirement. She compares the graduate yoga program to a blossoming lotus and says she is “pleased and honored we chose Dr. Ben Williams,” to carry on the legacy and lineage of yoga studies at Naropa.
“He so quickly embraced the Naropa philosophy and the needs of our students,” Bringi says. “He brings his unique and brilliant scholarship from Harvard University and is further developing the program through his own lineage and appreciation of yoga, Shaiva Tantra, and Sanskrit.”
The love and appreciation Naropa professors hold for the Sanskrit language is contagious. Williams’ shares how he finds studying the Sanskrit language “an inherently blissful challenge”. Research shows studying languages, like Sanskrit, that require a lot of memorization “actually transform the structure of your brain.” He says “it awakens your capacity for memory and allows you to begin to experience the texts you’re studying in a more direct and intimate way.”
Williams also highlights how studying a language, like Sanskrit, that is from “a radically different time period and radically different set of worldviews is actually a really good way to distance ourselves from our own bias.” He explains:
“Often, we are so enmeshed in our English world that we need to study something extremely far away from that world to begin to get some perspective on our own implicit worldview. What these texts afford when you start to learn the language is another way of organizing knowledge—another syntax for experiencing the world. It’s really a doorway into another way of seeing, and I think that’s a basis for a much deeper empathy, cross-cultural understanding and ability to connect to the civilization of South Asia.”
This emergence of sensitivity as a scholar-practitioner is definitely what we’re up to here at Naropa University.
Thousands of Sanskrit manuscripts live in archives throughout South Asia and the world. Many have yet to be translated, and a number of research grants support scholars in translation initiatives. The teachings these texts reveal through the doorway of Sanskrit are changing the way people understand and relate to yogic traditions.
Continued doctorate work in Sanskrit study and translation is one of the professional avenues one can take after graduating from this program. However, Cassandra Smith, Director of Marketing and Communications at Naropa and a second-year student in the graduate yoga program, says “it’s amazing to hear what all of my classmates are planning to do with this degree because none of us really want to do the same thing.”
There are studio owners utilizing the program to inform their teaching training curriculum and broader educational initiatives. There are students who plan to continue in doctorate study and become professors. There are yoga teachers who want to become better yoga teachers, and there are practitioners enriching their practice.
The graduate yoga program illuminates for many the need for more depth and accountability in the global conversation about yoga today. Smith speaks to the way her understanding of yoga has completely changed since beginning the program, and her plan is to bring this deeper understanding and appreciation of nuance to larger audiences through marketing and the publishing field.
Smith also speaks to the expertise of the faculty in the program. Professors come from universities such as Harvard, Oxford, and William and Mary, yet they are also practitioners of these traditions. Smith shares that “every faculty member [she] has had in the program has spent significant time in India. They’ve sat in ashrams and studied with Hindu masters.”
“They are a part of these traditions”, Smith says, “when they teach us about these things, it’s coming from a place of really true understanding and their own life practice in this world.”
This fusion of scholarship and practice is what sets Naropa’s Master’s in Yoga Studies apart from other programs. Students not only obtain a graduate level understanding of the culture, history, and language in which these traditions emerged, but they are also encouraged to directly experience the states of yogic consciousness they learn about.
This marriage of scholarship and practice is a technique of teaching Naropa is pioneering. It enriches one’s life personally and professionally and is really a doorway into another way of being.
“This emergence of sensitivity as a scholar-practitioner,” Williams emphasizes, is “definitely what we’re up to here at Naropa University”.
