'Yoga Breath': open-access book launch

SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies is delighted to host Dr Magdalena Kraler (University of Vienna) to launch the open-access version of her book, Yoga Breath.

In this open-access book launch, Magdalena Kraler presents her 2025 book Yoga Breath, which offers the first comprehensive history of modern prāṇa and prāṇāyāma, tracing their transnational expressions between 1850 and 1945. A central practice of both premodern and modern yoga, prāṇāyāma ('breath control') is practised in yoga classes worldwide. Like the notion of prāṇa ('breath', 'vitality'), prāṇāyāma has a longstanding history in South Asia, constituting the fourth limb of Patañjali’s yoga.

Since roughly 1850, prāṇa and prāṇāyāma have been reinterpreted in light of the ideas of Hindu reform movements, nineteenth-century occultism, science, biomedicine, and transnational hygiene. Kraler reconstructs how prāṇa assumed a central role in the cosmological frameworks of modern yoga and how prāṇāyāma came to be understood as a form of self-cultivation. Engaging one of modern yoga’s key practices, this book not only offers a thorough academic analysis, but also responds to a growing worldwide interest in breath cultivation.