May 26, 2014
In a wildly entertaining tour-de-force of deconstructive research, David Gordon White’s The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A Biography (Princeton University Press, released today), is an extended meditation on the red violin of modern Yoga.
May 10, 2014
Ayurveda today is more properly regarded as an interpersonal, intersubjective art form, with great potential for fostering an appreciation for embodied difference. Nowhere is this potential skill more called upon than in the practice of considering “constitution”: the individual’s unique psychosomatic profile, known as prakṛti. And in no other area is the promise of Ayurveda more confused and oversold. I would like to argue that the principle of constitution as popularly practiced is an ideal lens through which we can see both the shortcomings of an old medicine that has not yet exposed itself to the epistemological rigours of our time, and also the potential Ayurveda has to model therapeutic intimacy in an increasingly data-driven world.
April 6, 2014
Claiming that all it takes for Wild Thing to be therapeutic is the right attitude and some pranic pixie dust is not that different from saying that the good feelings and intentions we privately generate from yoga practice in general are enough to heal a world that we ourselves are actively and ignorantly fucking up.
April 2, 2014
My therapist once said that a relationship can only really begin after the romance is over. I’m beginning to think that yoga is what occurs when people become disenchanted with yoga.