Tag: Yoga
“Am I Even Teaching Yoga Anymore?”
“Honestly, I don’t know whether what I’m teaching is yoga anymore.”
If I had a dollar for every time I heard this sentence from the fantastically skilled yoga teachers I talk to in North America, I’d be able to afford the rent on a yoga studio in a gentrified neighbourhood.
Just joking.
But seriously. There’s a pause after they say it. Something between fear and equanimity hangs in that pause. Continue reading ““Am I Even Teaching Yoga Anymore?””
When Yogis Stiffen Up And Find the In-Between
One of the richest things for me about presenting on the post-extreme-asana paradigm with Diane Bruni is listening to her describe her former capacity to tolerate and then sublimate pain while she practiced.
“You get really good at directing your mind away from pain,” she said at a recent event, “or reframing it, or feeling the cortisol and endorphins you’re releasing as pleasure.”
As she’s talking, Diane will half-gesture at some of the things she used to do and teach. At one point she begins to lift her left leg up with both hands as though she were about to put it behind her head. She gets half-way, her spine begins to flex, and she quits, laughing a bit, and sets her leg down.
And then I’m flashing back to the first time I went to her studio, probably 2005. There she was in the Mysore class, rolling effortlessly through dozens of legs-behind-the-head postures with her eyes closed, in a deep trance.
I remember watching her back then and thinking to myself: she has something, she’s discovered something. She has a space of her own. She’s free. Continue reading “When Yogis Stiffen Up And Find the In-Between”
“So Now What?” A brief composite of convos with yoga teachers after #WAWADIA? workshops
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When I present on the tangled history of early modern postural yoga, I detail what we know about the teaching modes at the Mysore Palace, the privations suffered by the young Iyengar, and Jois’ accounts of beatings. I ask participants to consider whether it’s possible that this colonial-era cruelty and spiritualization of pain has vibrated through yoga pedagogy ever since, given the stories of intrusion and injury and abuse coming to light, which are made less visible under the stories of healing and awakening.
I ask them to consider whether the basic premises of bodily goodness, personal agency and consent in adjustments that the broader yoga culture claims to value might in some ways be occluded by these historical echoes, especially as they blend with any unresolved sadomasochism in the personal psychologies of those who practice. I talk about becoming aware of assumptions towards bodies, and the power of projection upon and transference onto teachers, especially if they are charismatic, and especially if their physical instructions are grounded in metaphysical imperatives or anxieties.
This can all feel sticky in a room full of yoga teachers. Sometimes a participant will approach me with a troubled look while I’m packing up my gear. We’ll have an exchange that I’ve had enough times that I can offer a composite here:
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Participant: “That was a lot to take in. I teach (lineage x), and now I’m having doubts about whether or not I should.” Continue reading ““So Now What?” A brief composite of convos with yoga teachers after #WAWADIA? workshops”
The Love Songs of J. Brown Yogi
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
— Eliot, “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
J. Brown makes transparency in the yoga biz bittersweet. He consistently points to the sorrow in the shadow of yoga marketing: perpetual change, impossible economics, anxious upselling, getting older, seeing through the dross, living with pain.
Laying Down the Guru’s Tools, for a While – A Response to Christopher Wallis
For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.– Audre Lorde
Christopher Wallis asked me to respond to his eloquent piece on gurus-gone-bad, and how to stay away from them. I’m happy to do just that with this short post.
(Positional statement: I’m writing here as a non-Indian yoga practitioner who has interacted with echoes of the Indian guru-shishya system that have been borrowed, adapted, appropriated, or manipulated during the globalization phase of yoga.) Continue reading “Laying Down the Guru’s Tools, for a While – A Response to Christopher Wallis”
Elliott Goldberg Rides the Elephant: An In-Depth Review of The Path of Modern Yoga
4.5/5 stars: Highly recommended. One bump, and some questions about framing.
Inner Traditions | 544 pages | ISBN 9781620555675 | August 4, 2016
Order here.
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Remember that old Indian fable of the rajah who blindfolds his pundits, asks them to grab onto different parts of an elephant, and then report on what the object is?
The guy grabbing the leg announces that the elephant is a pillar. The one touching the ear says it’s definitely a woven basket. The pundit touching the head is convinced it’s a big clay pot. The rajah compliments each confident answer, and then reveals what they’ve missed.
It’s an apt metaphor for the recent explosion of modern yoga research in English. So many pundits, so many hands on the elephant. But who’s the rajah in this parable? Continue reading “Elliott Goldberg Rides the Elephant: An In-Depth Review of The Path of Modern Yoga”
“But He’s Not Erect”: Rationalizing Videos and Lies
This post might mark a shift of this blog into firmly opinion-column/commentary territory, as a lot of what I’m working on now beyond book projects is mostly higher-stakes investigative journalism, and when I publish on a corporation like Jivamukti, for example, it needs to be on a U.S. site with a U.S. server, because libel laws in Canada are pretty stiff. Here I can be sued on the premise that I’ve harmed a company’s reputation, even if the reporting is accurate. Because the major paying publications in the U.S. yoga world have turned down these articles and I have no independent liability insurance I’m grateful to Be Scofield at Decolonizing Yoga for taking them on.
I’ve published four articles on the now-settled sexual harassment case against the Jivamukti Yoga School. One about what the plaintiff actually had to say after the school essentially called her a liar, one on how JYS and other yoga groups use silencing tactics when complaints emerge (including the failure of the Ashtanga world to address the open secret of their guru’s sexual harassment), one on how the case has provoked a powerful discussion about the need for trauma-sensitivity training in yoga culture generally, and a fourth on how JYS and Michael Roach, the charismatic and controversial American Buddhist leader, exchanged both form and content from 2003 to 2012.
This post is about a side-issue that’s emerged in the online dialogue surrounding these articles. Continue reading ““But He’s Not Erect”: Rationalizing Videos and Lies”
The Problem of Pain in Yoga
This essay first appeared in Yoga International: thank you to Kat Heagburg for editorial help.
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You’ve probably heard a number of translations for the haṭha part of haṭhayoga.
“Forceful” is commonly cited. Others prefer a more esoteric take: they say that ha- and -ṭha stand for “sun and moon,” or “inhale and exhale.” They propose that practice is aimed at the integration of opposing forces.
According to yoga scholar Jason Birch, the esoteric translation is probably a later addition to the early literature of haṭhayoga. “Forceful” is the older meaning.
But what kind of “force” were the originators of haṭhayoga describing?
Birch writes that the hugely influential 19th century Sanskritist Monier Monier-Williams, along with other European Indologists of his era, “confounded haṭhayoga with extreme practices of asceticism (tapas) that appear in the purāṇas” or epic literature. Together, they put forward the notion that haṭha implied the force of violent exertion or self-mortification.
Traces of this meaning elide with the “no pain, no gain” heroism of the modern fitness era—and with the notion of moving, or being pushed by teachers, toward the “edge” of tolerance—usually at the end-range of a joint’s motion. The edge is typically viewed as a potential threshold of revelation, perhaps because its shadow is the threshold of injury.
But as Birch carefully points out, the consistent refrain of the early haṭhayoga manuals is that if practices are done śanaiḥ, śanaiḥ —”gently, gently”— spiritual awakening will inevitably occur. In other words, with enough gentleness in your practice, you’d be forced to wake up. Continue reading “The Problem of Pain in Yoga”
Guru Google
B.K.S. Iyengar would have been 97 on Monday, and Google honoured him on the home page of globalization. The guru, rendered in cartoon avatar, doodled through pigeon, triangle, and headstand twists. The illustrator gave him the silver mane of his elder years, but also the litheness of his youth.
My first reaction was cozy. “Google” can still be a fun word, and who doesn’t love the doodle? The white page implies a wintry playground, and the brown stick figure sweeps angels into the snow of search-engine possibility.
For a moment, I felt a warm sigh roll through me: “The practice is truly for everyone. Yoga has come of age.”
But what age?
An age in which it makes perfect sense for techno-capitalism to co-opt yoga as its go-to religion. In which a virtual power aligns with an embodied practice to foreshadow its plans to reach into our very breath and cells with its web-crawlers. Continue reading “Guru Google”
Yogagate: The Downward Dogwhistle Story
Last updated: December 6th.
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Liquid Facts, Solid Derision
On Friday, November 20th, the Ottawa Sun broke a story that went viral. The global backlash has distorted and minimized an issue that South Asian thought leaders in yoga culture have been grappling with for years.
“Student leaders have pulled the mat out from 60 University of Ottawa students,” the story began, “ending a free on-campus yoga class over fears the teachings could be seen as a form of ‘cultural appropriation.'”
The class was administered by the student-run Centre for Students with Disabilities (hereafter “Centre”), under the umbrella of the Student Federation of the University of Ottawa (hereafter “Federation”).
“Jennifer Scharf,” the piece continued, “who has been offering free weekly yoga instruction to students since 2008, says she was shocked when told in September the program would be suspended, and saddened when she learned of the reasoning.”
The Sun reported that Scharf was told via email that:
“Yoga has been under a lot of controversy lately due to how it is being practiced,” and which cultures those practices “are being taken from.” The centre official argues since many of those cultures “have experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy … we need to be mindful of this and how we express ourselves while practising yoga.”
In a phone interview with me, Sun reporter Aeden Helmer clarified that these quotes came from a single participant in a 17-page email correspondence between the Centre, the Federation, and Scharf that ran from September through November.
The Sun article concluded with the comments of Federation official Julie Seguin, which argue against the validity of the cultural appropriation reasoning. Helmer confirmed via email that Seguin’s quotes were drawn from that same correspondence, which suggests that the Centre and the Federation were not in agreement on the issue as it was being discussed. Continue reading “Yogagate: The Downward Dogwhistle Story”
