The Energy Body: Yoga between Evidence and Experience
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
9:00 am to 5:30 pm
- Venue
- SOAS Gallery Lecture Theatre
- Event type
- Conference
About this event
The SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies and the British Wheel of Yoga are delighted to co-host this unique collaborative event for the third year running. We look forward to welcoming you for a day that informs, inspires and uplifts.
This summit brings together academic researchers with yoga practitioners to engage in critical dialogue across a series of curated panels and practical sessions. Our aim is to create a day of learning, reflection and thought-provoking discussion on pressing issues in Yoga Studies.
The programme seeks to examine the subtle bodies of Yoga and their relevance to contemporary practice. Modern Yoga is often framed as secularised and stripped of metaphysics; by centring subtle bodies, this theme complicates that narrative and seeks to demonstrate how esoteric and cosmological elements persist, adapt, or re-emerge in contemporary contexts. In foregrounding subtle bodies, it emphasises lived, embodied experience, which is difficult to measure or verify, and thereby challenges strictly empirical methodologies.
The summit will ask: what is the subtle or 'energy' body? How has it been understood across Yoga’s history? How does it work, and can it be measured?
Through panel discussions, guided experiential sessions, and a keynote lecture, participants will examine the history and philosophy of the subtle or energy body, the roles of prāṇa, cakras, and kuṇḍalinī, and the relationship between embodied experience and contemporary research.
Attendance and tickets
All are welcome to attend. Tickets are £75 for in person and £45 for online attendance. Both ticket types include the recordings of the talks.
About the speakers
Keynote speaker
Shaman Hatley is Professor of Asian Studies and Religious Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His research is primarily in the areas of Śaiva tantric traditions in India’s early-medieval period, the history of premodern yoga, and Hindu goddess cults. Prof. Hatley will be presenting: "The Wheel, the Lotus and the Serpent: Towards a History of the Body of Tantric Yoga."
Panellists
Dr. Ruth Westoby is a researcher in South Asian Religions and a yoga practitioner. Ruth is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Jaina Studies at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, focusing on technologies of the body in Jainism and Yoga. Her book project is Bloody Bodies: Stopping Menstruation in South Asian Religions. Her PhD from SOAS (2024) is a study of The Body in Early Haṭha Yoga.
Dr. Marleen Thaler is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Graz and a research and teaching fellow at the University of Vienna. Marleen is the author of the forthcoming book Albion’s Sage for the New Age (Equinox, 2026) and co-edited Subtle Energies in Therapy, Spirituality, Arts, and Politics (Brill, 2025). Her main research interests include the transformation of religion, the modern history of yoga, religion and technology, religious traditionalism, and the history of esotericism.
Dr. Magdalena Kraler received her doctorate in 2022 from the Faculty of Catholic Theology (Department of Religious Studies) at the University of Vienna. In 2024, she was awarded the Roland Ate*e Prize for her dissertation, Yoga Breath: The Reinvention of Prāṇa and Prāṇāyāma in Early Modern Yoga. Her publications address the historical development of breathing exercises (prāṇāyāma) in modern yoga, the interplay of breath and sound in fin-de-siècle occult Vienna, and esoteric aspects of the dance and gymnastics scene.
Dr. Marissa Clarke has recently been appointed the Associate Lecturer of Contemporary Yoga Studies at SOAS University of London. She completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2025, where she researched the phenomenology of yoga, the body, and sound. Her doctoral work was funded by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities (SGSAH) Doctoral Training Partnership.
Practice teachers
Swami Saradananda is an internationally-renowned yoga mentor and author, who has been practising and teaching yoga for more than 50 years. She inspires students to want to practise; her teaching is practical as well as theoretical in nature and always enlightening! In her personal practice, Swami Saradananda tends to focus on the energetic aspects of yoga and meditation.
Sarah O’Connor is a Tantric Shamanic Energy Body Practitioner, BWY yoga teacher and teacher trainer, and founder of the Women’s Tantric Shamanic Energy Body Immersion Retreat, with over 30 years of experience in personal practice, teaching, and therapeutic work. Her approach weaves together pranayama, meditation, Tibetan Bön Tsa Lung practices, tantric yoga, somatic awareness, and shamanic energy medicine.
