Category: Blog
Anything Is Possible? Um, No. /// A Yoga Selfie Blog Fail
As a rule, I try to avoid the low-hanging fruit on the ever-blooming tree of yoga idiocy. But every once in a while my news feed is smeared with dreck that so astounds me with its orgasmic smugness and contempt for critical thinking that I have two choices: punch back, or gnaw my arm off. And if I gnaw my arm off – oh no! How will I ever again do one-armed peacock and snap selfies at the same time?
On Tuesday of this week, the Ashtanga Picture Project published a (unconsciously, I hope) tone-deaf piece of body-shaming snark called “The Myth of the Unattainable Pose”, featuring a fine selection of impossibly beautiful Ashtanga selfies, some pithy hits from a Pattabhi Jois Quote Generator, and all the reasoning power of a gerbil on a wheel. If common sense is prana, this blog is doing some serious retention on the exhale. Continue reading “Anything Is Possible? Um, No. /// A Yoga Selfie Blog Fail”
WAWADIA update #7 /// Pain, Performance, and Politics in Yoga: a Conversation with Mike Hoolboom
Out of these pieces, it was left to us to put ourselves back together again in such a way that the cracks would surely show. – Mike Hoolboom
My general policy with the interviews for this project has been to maintain the anonymity of my subjects so that they can speak freely of yoga injury experiences that involve particular teachers and studios without fear of social, professional, or legal reprisal. But some subjects don’t need this protection, either because they are not dependent upon professional yoga culture, or because they are personally able to clear their stories with the people they reference, or because they bring a certain expertise from beyond Yogaland that we both feel would enrich the conversation. And, of course, they have to also want to be on record. My interview with Mike Hoolboom – or his interview of me – fits the bill here. Continue reading “WAWADIA update #7 /// Pain, Performance, and Politics in Yoga: a Conversation with Mike Hoolboom”
WAWADIA update #6 /// “I Was Addicted to Practice”: A Senior Teacher Changes Her Path
My colleague Diane Bruni opened the first What Are We Actually Doing in Asana? event on 5/29 with a personal story of injury, confusion, recovery, and innovation.
Diane taught the very first ashtanga class in Toronto over twenty years ago, and has been a fixture of the yoga scene here ever since. I first walked into her now-famous now-ex-studio in 2005. I saw her name outside, on a rain-soaked poster, next to a class called “Ashtanga Level 2”. I unrolled a borrowed mat in a packed and steamy room.
I was struck not only by her creative intensity, but by the way in which the entire two-and-a-half hours was an immersive ritual of pulsing breath. Nothing was static, no movement was overly-defined. Nobody seemed to know what was coming next, and yet it all seemed to make primal sense. I don’t think I ever heard her use the words “pose” or “posture.” Every instruction pointed towards values like “grace, fluidity, circularity and resilience,” as she recently told Priya Thomas.
Quivering in a pool of blissful/shocked sweat in the dressing room afterwards, I said to a guy covered in mantra tattoos, “So is this ashtanga yoga? I thought that there was a fixed way of doing things.” The guy snapped out his wet towel, folded it neatly, and smiled. “That’s Diane. She knows the ashtanga sequences like no one else. She’s studied with the masters. But now she’s doing her own thing. She knows that yoga means change.” Continue reading “WAWADIA update #6 /// “I Was Addicted to Practice”: A Senior Teacher Changes Her Path”
WAWADIA Update #5 /// “First Do No Harm”: an M.D. on Asana-Related Injuries
Doctors and yoga teachers have the same first principle: Do No Harm. If we do things blindly, and if we don’t mine data, we won’t fulfill that principle. — Dr. Raza Awan
What I love about listening to Dr. Awan talk about yoga injuries is that he has all the relaxation of someone with no conflict of interest. He’s the medical director for Synergy Sports Medicine in Toronto, so he can show up for an intense yoga injuries discussion forum on a Thursday night, drop some data-bombs, and go back to work on Friday morning like nothing happened. Meanwhile, the rest of us yoga teachers wake up wondering what we should do next.
I can say this: he inspires to me move forward as if I have nothing personally at stake in this difficult discussion. But I do. How do I report to the yoga world I’m so invested in, to which I owe my livelihood, and that I spent over a decade teaching in, that several basic staples of asana practice might be definitively unsafe? Continue reading “WAWADIA Update #5 /// “First Do No Harm”: an M.D. on Asana-Related Injuries”
WAWADIA Update #4 /// Emerging Psychosocial Themes in Asana-Related Injuries
Ten days ago, Diane Bruni and I hosted a public event called “What Are We Actually Doing in Asana: an exploration of yoga-related injuries.” There were about seventy people in attendance at Diane’s studio here in Toronto. When Diane asked who had been injured through asana practice, virtually everyone raised their hands. Of course, we get injured doing all sorts of things in daily life. But in the majority of its discourse, yoga holds forth a therapeutic promise that its culture might not be fulfilling. What’s more is that most of those in attendance were teachers, who one might assume to be better versed in avoiding injury than most.
We were joined by Dr. Raza Awan, medical director for Synergy Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation. He gave an overview of the epidemiological research he has begun with the yoga injuries that his clinic has been treating over the last several years. Diane shared a personal account of her 20 years of dedicated practice, and how injury has led to innovation. I nervously presented some preliminary themes from my own research, based so far on over sixty interviews. Kathryn Bruni-Young spoke on her transition from vinyasa-only practice to the more eclectic (and, she claims, healthful) mix of strength and movement disciplines she engages with and teaches today. Continue reading “WAWADIA Update #4 /// Emerging Psychosocial Themes in Asana-Related Injuries”
Tara Stiles in a Glass Box. Dead Guru in a Freezer.
“The loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular language, from the objects it glorifies to the behavior it regulates, stems from the basic nature of a production system that shuns reality.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
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Two very similar yoga stories splashed across the web this week.
In what she called her “David Blaine moment in New York”, Tara Stiles busted out all the asanas in a glass box decked out like a miniature high-end hotel room, complete with stilettoes and a champagne-bucket, mounted on the back of the W hotels Yoga Truck, which rolled slowly from one W location to another. It was a promotion for – oh, so many things.
Another story emerged from Jalandhar, India. A high court there has been asked to determine whether the wealthy guru Ashutosh Maharaj, who his followers have been keeping in a commercial freezer under armed guard (you might want to read that twice) is as dead as one might guess, or whether he is in a state of profound meditation. His family insists he died of a heart attack back in January. His followers are expecting him to resurrect from his mahasamadhi when he’s good and ready, and are committed to preserving his corpse for his saintly re-entry.
The Telegraph quotes an unnamed aide: “Maharaj has been in deep meditation. He has spent many years meditating in sub-zero temperatures in the Himalayas, there is nothing unusual in it. He will return to life as soon as he feels and we will ensure his body is preserved until then.” In the interim, the aide and his cohorts will maintain control of the guru’s $170M estate, thank you very much. The family really, really wants him declared dead, so all frozen assets can be released. Continue reading “Tara Stiles in a Glass Box. Dead Guru in a Freezer.”
The Yoga Sutras and The Red Violin: a review of David Gordon White’s New Book
Canadian director François Girard’s 1998 film “The Red Violin” tells the fable of a miraculous instrument, crafted by one Nicolo Bussotti (a character modeled on Antonio Stradivari) that passes through the hands of several virtuosi over four centuries and three continents. Its rapturous tone beguiles generations of listeners. Several of its players die in ecstasy while playing it. Don McKellar’s chronologically labyrinthine plot sweeps the violin towards a fateful auction in the present day, concealing to the very end the source of the violin’s deadly mystique. Spoiler alert: We learn in the final minutes that the blessing and curse of the instrument is apparently soaked into the very grain of its soundboard. Bussotti had been crafting the violin for his unborn child. As he’s finishing the final sanding, he is summoned home to find that his wife has died in labour along with the baby. In abject grief, he bleeds her corpse to create a final vermillion varnish for the instrument, before going mad. The violin’s power is rooted in this single terrible, revelatory night: so say these storytellers, who in uncovering the mystery play the taut strings of our yearning for an essence we dream we could rescue from the vrittis of history. Continue reading “The Yoga Sutras and The Red Violin: a review of David Gordon White’s New Book”
Reevaluating “Constitution”: A Challenge to Popular Ayurveda
As the cosmic movement of air, sun and moon are difficult to know,
so is that of vāta, pitta, and kapha in the body.
Caraka Samhita VI 28:246
This post deconstructs what I feel are some common but avoidable problems with the practice of Ayurvedic constitutional typology. I realize that there are several forms of Ayurveda (including that represented by the modern BAMS syllabus) that do not necessarily foreground constitution in practice. My focus here is limited to the popular and global modes of practice supported by English language literature and often associated with modern global yoga culture. My intention is to clear a path for future research into what the old insights of typology might reasonably offer today. Because this piece is lengthy, I’ll begin with a redux of themes:
- While Ayurveda and contemporary science share a common empirical root in the systematic observation of natural patterns, Ayurveda no longer belongs to the discipline of “science” as it’s commonly understood today. It is now perhaps more properly understood as an interpersonal and intersubjective art form, ideal for any therapy and counseling that seeks to bridge categories of body and mind. Claiming that it does more than this makes Ayurveda vulnerable to the charge of pseudoscience.
- The popular and now global practice of Ayurvedic constitutional typology (prakṛti) is particularly vulnerable to pseudoscientific claims, cognitive fallacies, essentialism, unchecked transference and countertransference, and blindness to how bodies are assigned meanings through social construction. These flaws are often amplified or excused by romantic Orientalism.
- If they can first uncover and then reach beneath these flaws, modern Ayurvedic practitioners may be able to access layers of awareness rooted in the intimacy of their mirror neurology — a kind of “hardwired empathy.” Their task, if it is possible, would be to isolate this “first sense” of how another person feels themselves in the world towards therapeutic ends, before it is distorted by the sweep of cultural ideology, whether global-capitalist or antique-Orientalist.
- If it resists cultural ideology, the art of constitution can utilize the poetry of bodily states to initiate empowering dialogue about how different subjects experience the world organically, emotionally, and socially. In this way, a truly dynamic theory of “constitution” might take shape and be of benefit to a wide spectrum of healing disciplines.
- The most empirically honest and psychologically effective use of typology leaves the subject unlabeled and undetermined, and therefore able to construct for themselves a rich dialogue with their evolving body-mind patterning.
Continue reading “Reevaluating “Constitution”: A Challenge to Popular Ayurveda”
No Magic to Protect You in “Wild Thing”, And No Magical Way in Which Yoga Changes the World /// Plus We Heart Be Scofield
Nugget: The claim that Wild Thing can be done safely might involve the same wishful/magical thinking as the claim that yoga and meditation will automatically “shift consciousness”, whether individually, communally, or “vibrationally”. Both claims seem to depend upon overlooking concrete material conditions in favour of nurturing faith in vague metaphysical principles. Concrete material conditions demand specific learning objectives. If yogis want to be smart on the biomechanics front, yoga needs physios, osteos, neurologists and kinesiologists. If yogis want to be at all relevant on the cultural front, yoga needs anti-oppression educators and activists.
WAWADIA Update #3 /// “Wild Thing” Pose: Impossible, Injurious, Poignant
Certum est quia impossibile est. — Tertullian
I’m closing in on fifty interviews for this project, and it’s getting richer every week.
Continue reading “WAWADIA Update #3 /// “Wild Thing” Pose: Impossible, Injurious, Poignant”
