Indra Devi

Common card · No. 475351

Eugenie Peterson (Latvian: Eiženija Pētersone, Russian: Евгения Васильевна Петерсон, romanized: Yevgeniya Vasilyevna Peterson; 12 May 1899 – 25 April 2002), known as Indra Devi, was a pioneering teacher of yoga as exercise, and an early disciple of Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, the "father of modern yoga". She went to India in her twenties, becoming a film star there and acquiring the stage name Indra Devi. She was the first woman to study under the yoga guru Krishnamacharya at the Mysore Palace, alongside B.K.S Iyengar and K. Pattabhi Jois who went on to become yoga gurus. Moving to China, she taught the first yoga classes in that country at the house of Soong Mei-ling, wife of Chiang Kai-shek. Her popularization of yoga in America through her many celebrity pupils in Hollywood, and her books advocating yoga for stress relief, earned her the nickname "first lady of yoga". Her biographer, Michelle Goldberg, wrote that Devi "planted the seeds for the yoga boom of the 1990s".

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