Category: Featured
WAWADIA Update #19: Thomas Myers Misdefines Pain. But Why?
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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he ideas and trainings of Thomas Myers (of Anatomy Trains fame) have been popular amongst the yoga therapy professional class for over a decade. What Myers says carries weight in hundreds of yoga teacher training programmes throughout the world. In many ways, his impact is positive. In general terms, it has expanded the language of embodied mindfulness for many practitioners by opening a horizon of deeper anatomical consideration. Specifically, it has enriched the lay understanding of tissue connectivity, and of how loading patterns track systemically through living structures.
Looking carefully, we might say that Myers’ work is resonant in the yoga world because he has built his ideas in true modern-yogic fashion: charismatically weaving an inextricable fascia of intuition, metaphysics, and claims from complementary and alternative medicine that appear to intersect with the hard data more often than they actually do.
When it comes to his ideas about pain, for example, Myers’ followers may not be any better off if they’d gone to neuro-anatomy school in the 17th century. On November 4th, he released a sun-kissed and breezy video called “Why does Massage Hurt?”
Amongst many other things, Myers says that:
- pain is “a sensation accompanied by the motor intention to withdraw”,
- pain consists of three types: “pain that enters the body”, “pain stored in the body”, and “pain leaving the body”. Although he says at (4:30) that he doesn’t share the no-pain-no-gain ethos of many of his fellow Rolfers, Myers implies that the “leaving” kind of pain might actually be therapeutic, because “stored pain” must be felt as it’s “coming out” (6:45)
The claims are poetic, and might be inspiring for many. But they also avoid or ignore the last fifty years of neuroscience. Additionally, they might actually be dangerous in a therapeutic context, if they create the expectation between yoga teachers and students, or bodyworkers and clients, that pain is an inevitable part of the healing or “releasing” process, and should be provoked and/or tolerated to prove that the therapy is working. As this project so far is showing, this sacrificial description of pain is common in yoga discourse.
Nick Ng debates each one of Myers’ pain claims in this thorough article of November 10th. Joseph Brence makes some additional refutations. I encourage you to follow both links, but I’ll also summarize the critique here, as best I can (not being a pain researcher):
Pain does not necessarily involve the “motor intention to withdraw”. Several types of pain – including chronic pain, or the excruciating cramp of a phantom limb – do not provoke any such intention. Additionally, nociception – “the neural process of encoding noxious stimuli”, according to the International Association for the Study of Pain – may not register as pain at all, as in the example of the quick, pre-pain withdrawal of one’s hand from a hot surface. If pain seems to saturate the burned tissues over time, it does so after the reflex to withdraw has activated and completed the protective movement. Most mystifyingly, pain can also emerge in the complete absence of a noxious stimulus, or tissue damage.
There is no “pain from outside the body”. This is Myers’ most Cartesian anachronism. Simply refuted: there is no “pain” but that the coordination of feeling and naming makes it so.
Pain is the collaborative product of tissue stimulus, nociception, cognitive awareness, and numerous psychosocial factors. It is a neurological and then cognitive meaning that evolves in a person responding to stress. The tissue stimulus may not even be noxious, as in the case of the feather-stroke that causes searing pain for those who suffer from a particular type of neuropathy.
The full background for this non-mechanistic understanding of pain can be gleaned from the work of Ronald Melzack’s “neuromatrix theory”. The upshot is: pain does not “enter” the body. Pain is a relationship between sense and meaning. Like every relationship, it is co-created by its constituents in the moment. To his credit, Myers does elaborate on pain as an interpretational process, which makes his language of “entering” an odd choice.
“Pain stored in the body” might be a misunderstanding of adaptation. In the video, Myers supports a popular claim: that the effects of injury, trauma, or emotional stress constitute a kind of “latent” pain. He suggests that latent pain accumulates silently, manifesting through symptoms that are actually pain itself, though disguised: lack of vitality, distorted posture, or distorted movement. He then goes on to claim (admitting to going out on a limb from 7:15) that latent pain not only builds through an individual’s gathered experience, but through the social and historical fascia within which the individual is bound.
While this last bit is supremely evocative, and could definitely shed insight into the physiological effects of intergenerational trauma, the larger idea seems to be built on a confusion of terms. Ng’s informant Jason Erickson says Myers is “misinterpreting changes in posture and movement as pain instead of as non-painful co-occurring symptoms.”
The problem with identifying postural and kinetic adaptations to stress as signs of stored pain is that it may encourage practitioners to believe that correcting those adaptations will force latent pain out. The likelier reality is that the adaptations are preventing the experience of pain. That’s why they exist. If correcting them is painful (as is likely), the practitioner might believe they’re doing a good job, instead of ignorantly violating the Hippocratic Oath. This leads to the last problem:
There is no “pain leaving the body.” If it’s not “stored”, it’s not leaving. This is more than semantics. Through Myers’ suggestion that massage or other forms of tissue manipulation “release” embedded pain, instead of more likely causing it, the “releasing therapist” becomes more aligned with an exorcist than a health care provider. In this model, both the exorcist and the possessed client are taught that the stored pain will cause as much damage going out as it caused going in. Pain is seen as the angry demon of one’s history – sleeping in repression, a terror when awoken.
The idea of “pain leaving” shares an affinity with the literature and practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, in which the past emotional wounds of the client are actively evoked and perhaps recreated in a transference relationship with the therapist, so that they may be observed transparently and navigated differently. Setting aside the fact that this seems to work for some and not for many others, are all the bodyworkers who use Myers’ ideas also qualified as mental health care workers?
At about 7:00 in the video, Myers acknowledges that the release of stored pain can be “really disturbing” and “really emotional” for the client, but that “it’s really important that they go through it.” It would be ironic if this idea provided cover for the possibility that the therapist is simply hurting the client in the present moment, instead of doing what they think they’re doing, which is provoking the release of an invisible hurt.
We should consider that highlighting the psychic side of the therapeutic equation can obscure a lack of material evidence. We can also reflect upon the fact that this approach is conveniently familiar to the largely science-sceptical (or illiterate) subcultures of yoga and bodywork.
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[dropcap]I[/dropcap] don’t know enough about the work of Myers to know how much he might be short-handing his themes for a lay audience here. Nor do I know whether he modulates these views elsewhere. The video doesn’t have an academic feel to it: he might be speaking only to a specialized audience he’s confident won’t take these misdirections to heart.
But let’s say he does actually believe in this three-part model of pain. Where might this belief be coming from, and why is it more important to him than decades of established neuroscience?
To speak of pain that “goes into” and “leaves the body” resonates not only with the psychotherapeutic literature that saturates our entire self-help zeitgeist, but with a very old metaphysics from which we can’t seem to release ourselves, no matter how firm our philosophical foam-rollers are. It’s a belief system that may even be more attractive to Myers’ followers than his specific claims about tissue health.
What does this metaphysics say? It says that the body is a vessel, built to contain the life-force, its tensions, and its distortions. (“Contain” being the operative term here.) It says that experience enters into the passive flesh, and can stay as long as it likes, until it is pulled back out of the flesh of those who are blessed to encounter magically attuned therapists. Pain as an experience becomes objectified and seen as a thing that has invaded.
In Myers’ model, pain is like the soul, but in shadow form. This anti-soul of pain enters the body, wreaks its havoc on the temporary home it holds in contempt, and then departs to find another home.
It is a dualistic view, to the core. This a paradox for someone like Myers, and everyone in body-mind work who tries to bind embodied realities to psychic realities. (“Body-mind” as a moniker only deepens the confusion.)
These beliefs are as old as time, and they aren’t going anywhere soon. The mechanistic pain theory of Descartes, and the old spirit-flesh split upon which it stands, is not only embedded in the very structure of the social and medical sciences, as well as the grammar of most human languages, but it also resonates too closely with lived experience for us to ever cast it out completely. The work of Drew Leder in The Absent Body is the best presentation I know of the conundrum of dualism in sensual experience, in which the flesh is felt to contain things, rather than express them.
In Leder, the spirit-flesh split is built upon the simple fact that our internal bodies are, in the end, unknown to us. Despite every yogic aspiration we may have, our interoceptive capacity has a hard limit. Where our mindfulness of the internal body ends, our dreams of the soul – along with our intuitive healing theories – begin.
The metaphysics of Myers may compel his students to seek ever deeper for embodied meaning, and to that extent they may have deep value. But they also limit the metaphors that illuminate that search. The nondual body, in which conscious life emerges from material life only to try to refashion it, is not a dumb vessel, or an empty book for experience or God to write in. The nondual body, which Myers and everyone else wants to see, treat, and love, is something his pain theory would miss, something so strange it’s almost inexpressible.
Bear with me:
The non-dual body doesn’t contain anything that’s not it. Its experience or movement doesn’t “enter in”, to animate this slab of meat. Its movement is inseparable from the meat, until the meat stops moving, like a ball stops rolling. Similarly: consciousness is an epiphenomenon of neural activity. Thought doesn’t “enter” the brain, but is secreted by it, like a juice the body itself — and bodies around it — will “drink”.
The memory of the non-dual body is not “stored”, as in a book. If experience wrote upon you, it wrote like a stylus on a wax tablet, and continual reading warms and reshapes that wax.
More than a book, the non-dual body is the reader of experience. It is experience, however, that trains the reading process. If we were to say that the non-dual body is like a book, it would be more like a collectively-written play, unfolding in real time, in which each character has habitual lines and reactions, but none of them knows where the plot will lead.
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[dropcap]I[/dropcap]’ll finish with a hard left turn.
The body of our sciences and humanities is not a collection of separable parts. It is, as Myers describes the human body, a single fabric, woven of many threads. For generations we have been aware of the independent action of each muscle: we know the language of religion when we hear it, or physics, or history, or sociology, or geometry, or chemistry, or ethics, or politics. But now, thanks to the dissections of deconstruction, we are slowly becoming aware of the hidden glue.
The conceptual split between flesh and spirit is the sticky fascia that knits our dreams together and makes them move as a fractured whole. Like bodily fascia, this metafacsia is a non-living detritus, the hardened junk of metabolizing uncertainty and fear. It gathers in the spaces of not-knowing, increases with age, and slowly chokes out the imagination.
It’s time to roll that shit out. Gently would be best. There’s probably no point in causing more pain.
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WAWADIA Update #18: One Hundred Years of Yoga in One Big Apple Day
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I spent October 13th in Manhattan, doing two interviews for the #WAWADIA project. I’ll tell the story of that day here, and then publish excerpts from some of the source interviews soon.
My first meeting was in the morning with Lindsey Clennell, a 40-year practitioner of yoga from Britain, and an award-winning film maker to boot. I wanted to ask him about the documentary that he’s making with his son Jake, called “Sadhaka”. The film is an homage to the legacy of his teacher, B.K.S. Iyengar. I was especially interested in asking about the visual metaphor that opens the gorgeous trailer they’ve released to help promote their project. (The trailer is linked below.) In the metaphor, Lindsey and Jake compare the work of Mr. Iyengar on the human body to the work of a local stonecutter carving an icon of Hanuman.
The first words of the trailer belong to the grizzled artist:
One cannot begin work on a sculpture without courage. The nature of a stone is that it is strong. To transform it into a sculpture, and see God within it, requires immense strength. If one gives up or is daunted by the strength of the stone or injuries, the sculpture will never come to life.
Continue reading “WAWADIA Update #18: One Hundred Years of Yoga in One Big Apple Day”
WAWADIA /// My Left Hand: I Am That (draft excerpt)
The following essay is featured in the full WAWADIA? prospectus, released Nov 1 in support of this IGG campaign to help fund publication.
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1979.
Years later, I heard the story of the warrior Arjuna learning archery from his guru Drona. The target was a dead bird, spinning on a wheel overhead. Arjuna drew the bowstring and took aim. Drona asked him: Do you see the arrowhead?” Arjuna replied, “No.” “Do you see the bird?” “No.” “Do you see the space between the arrow and the bird?” “No.”
“What do you see, Arjuna?”
“I see myself.”
“Then release the arrow!”
Arjuna’s arrow threads the eye of the bird. Catching that baseball felt like that.
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]t the age of 30, I went to a yoga class in Manhattan, trying to pull myself out of depression. It was at Alan Finger’s old place. The instructor was a woman my age who seemed charmed in a way that both irritated and attracted me. Like she had some pleasurable secret. Smiling, she said: “Today we’ll try to see if we can join the small self to the larger self.” The words jostled some memory of the Arjuna story, but they didn’t help my mood.
The postures in the class seemed simple, but they were extraordinarily difficult to do. And painful. I didn’t think the pain was physically damaging, because I remember feeling buoyant and relaxed for days afterwards.
The pain seemed to come from an angry recognition. Like when you fight bitterly with a brother or lover about something essential, and then try to reconcile, perhaps prematurely, with an embrace. Or when you survive something with another person— like a car crash—and you grip them tightly, as if to prove that you’re both still there. How many times, in some moment of crisis, did I squeeze my little brother hard around the neck, telling him I loved him through clenched teeth? He hugged me back fiercely, tears squeezing out of his eyes.
The sweat and pain in that yoga class was just like that. I was reconciling with a body that had survived my neglect and even abuse, a body that I also loved and depended upon, a body not quite ready to forgive me for my absence. My body reached back and gripped me in a catharsis of anguish and rage that completely dissipated when I lay myself down, trembling, into corpse pose. I disappeared into the earth.
When I came to, I rolled to my right side and opened my eyes. Sunlight poured onto my drenched mat. I found myself gazing at the palm of my left hand, the same hand that caught that ball. The same hand that plunked out base lines on the piano I used to play, and that now darts over the left side of this keyboard. But in that moment, my hand wasn’t an instrument for me to use. It was me. Somewhere I’d heard the Upanishad refrain I am that, and it came to mind like a bell ringing. I had remembered something about my existence. I am that. I have a hand. I am this hand. Through the warmth in the palm of my hand, I had joined the small self, as the instructor had said, with something much larger. This shivering present body became continuous again with the shivering present world.
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t’s my pattern to get obsessed with anything that makes sense to me, or makes me feel smarter, or gives me a little relief. So it was with yoga. I wanted to learn as much as I could. I leapt into teaching—way too soon—so I could continue to learn, and finance more learning. My diet changed for the better, and along with it, my digestion. My mood regulation got more resilient. Libido and sleep improved. I seemed to be less socially anxious. I remember walking into rooms and realizing with quiet surprise I’m standing up straight and breathing freely. How did this happen?
But it wasn’t enough. What I really wanted was to revisit that initial revelation, in which I’d felt like I’d seen myself clearly and simply. It never repeated itself. I’m not sure that you can practice to see yourself clearly. Maybe it happens when you relax the searching that amplifies all of your self-distortions.
After about five years, my efforts in practice began to injure me, although I didn’t want to admit it. Neck pain, shoulder pain, lower back pain, a partial hamstring tear that nagged my every waking hour for over a year. I was humiliated, because I’d expected asana to provide a continual upwards curve of self-knowledge, and through self-knowledge, bodily release and mental freedom. I wondered what my lack of suppleness was telling me about my psyche. I blamed my technique, and tried to learn more, which of course led to overthinking and micromanaging every movement. I blamed my supposed new sensitivity to the technologized world. I made my schedule more austere, sought out more retreat time. I blamed caffeine, and cut it out entirely. I got very attached to the idea of being non-attached to the idea of being pain-free. I blamed myself for pushing, being greedy, and tried to back off in intensity. But slowly and deliberately doing the same movements that had hurt me, still hurt me. The weird part was that these movements that I was realizing were hurtful often brought pain relief first.
I told myself that now, finally, the real spiritual work was beginning, and it was dirty. I told myself that the asanas and the meditation had finally burrowed down to find the tangled mess of my soul. Exposed, this soul could now show its wound, its unworthiness, by speaking through physical pain. The ache in my hamstring was a message in a bottle, bobbing in the ocean of memory and identity. It gave me a mythic journey to consider. It made me real. This was a very powerful story.
It felt like the surface benefits of yoga had become normalized, and lost their shine. An older teacher I respected told me: “Yoga is a deconstruction of your whole personhood: who you think you are, and why you think you’re here. It hurts. The hook is that it makes you feel good at first.”
I looked around my community and saw that everybody was still suffering: injured, anxious, depressed, insomniac, amenorrheic, disordered in their eating, struggling in work or miserable in relationship. I turned the story I was telling myself onto them: yoga had brought us all to some existential edge at which we could feel not only how deeply wrecked we were, but we could understand and even consciously embody the suffering of the larger world. We had tuned in to reality in some fateful way. There was no cure for reality but to keep practicing.
I’ll say more about this personal dynamic in the pages that follow. For today, I wonder how many of us become injured in yoga while trying to recapture the exact thing we cannot: a first revelation we had on the mat that reminded us of something else, so far gone. Can we confuse the discomfort of that revelation with the pain of trying to recreate it? Does it make sense to use a highly formalized structure of asanas to rebuild the spontaneous pleasure of childhood movements? In how many ways can it hurt to swim against the tide of time and fatigue?
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here’s another yoga moment featuring my left hand. As the pain of asana and the physical discomfort of meditation increased, I turned to philosophy and the Vedic arts. These were paths of self-inquiry that I could pursue in a posture that had comforted me from childhood: at my desk, surrounded by books. I dove into Ayurveda, Jyotish (East Indian Astrology), Vastu (Vedic spatial arrangement), and Hasta Samudrika (Vedic palmistry). This last subject felt particularly magical to me. It’s a collection of very old ideas about how experience might write itself upon the body. My teacher was Hart deFouw, and under his grumpy kindness I learned a vast catalogue of bodily markings and their supposed meanings. But most of all I absorbed the idea that the body holds a story as old as myth and as tangled as a novel, and that yoga is often a process of reading.
In one of my first seminar days with him, Hart said: “The best light to view the hand in is direct sunlight. So on your lunchbreak, go outside and look at the palm of your hand in the sun. You can do this anytime you want. You might be amazed at what you see, and how it changes.”
An hour later, I stood at the corner of Toronto’s busiest intersection and looked at the palm of my left hand in the midday summer sun. I saw a blazing, fractal map of lines and webs nested within lines and webs. Am I that? I wondered. Yes.
As a child I had become self-aware through my left hand in a moment of pure action. At 30, I remembered that my hand was there, still holding that childhood night, and that my body, which was my hand, was still me, and that I could still move and be happy in movement. At 38, I saw a story in the lines and glyphs of my skin. Perhaps all of the attention I’d paid to the asana instructions about the “movement of my skin” had left their mark, beside down-sloping lines of periodic depression, spikes of acute pain and elated discovery. The palm of my hand holds an unfinished story, which may or may not tell me who I am, but which drives me to look closely at the embodied experience of others, to see what is strange and what is familiar in our arcs of suffering and relief.
WAWADIA: Meeting Nancy Cochren (draft excerpt)
The following essay is featured in the full prospectus, released Nov 1 in support of this IGG campaign to help fund publication.
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n the morning of June 19th, 2013, Nancy Cochren, aged 32, was 38 weeks pregnant, and teaching yoga at the studio in Hamilton Ontario where she’d worked for seven years. She felt strong and supple, and almost ready for the enormous change ahead. She remembers the sweet feeling of squatting in malasana that morning, and the elation of side-lunges.
In the afternoon, her obstetrician at St. Joseph’s Hospital performed a stretch-and-sweep during her checkup, and accidentally broke her membrane. A gush of clear, sweet amnion splashed off the examination table and hit the floor. The doctor took her hand and said “Well. You’ll be having that baby now.” Continue reading “WAWADIA: Meeting Nancy Cochren (draft excerpt)”
WAWADIA: A Working Thesis
The following page is featured in the full prospectus, released in support of this IGG campaign to fund publication.
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Over the past fifty years, modern postural yoga (MPY) has improved the lives of countless people worldwide. It has awakened millions to the intimacy of embodiment and deep breathing, and the realization that mindful movement can both heal and evolve the spirit.
But people are also injuring themselves—and getting injured by their teachers—in asana studios around the world. Hard data on rates of injury is non-existent. Anecdotally, it would appear that people are being injured at a higher rate than either yoga marketing or its spiritual pedigree would suggest.
These injuries occur for many interweaving reasons. Obvious factors include prior conditioning, poor education in biomechanics, overbearing instruction, sacrificial attitudes towards pain, and group pressures to fulfill presumably shared spiritual ideals.
More subtly, many people are first driven to asana by feelings of inadequacy or the memory of trauma. These experiences can motivate the desire for bodily reclamation and redemption, but they can also acidify practice with anxiety and impulsiveness. Asana is a crucible in which some attempt to forge new selves, and in the process, burn their bodies and minds.
The body of modern yoga is a body of longing, possibility, and revelation. But it’s also a body of shame, confusion, and suffering. Injury can mark the place where these two bodies wrestle on the mat.
This dynamic is likely at play in any physical discipline through which a new self is sought—from ballet to Crossfit. But in asana culture the struggle is complicated by a diverse array of philosophical ideas and commitments. Whether ancient or modern, body-negative or body-positive, some ideas are communicated directly, while others are transferred through cultural osmosis.
The ideas that support asana form a double-edged sword. They can glorify injury as a necessary sacrifice to spiritual development—proof that the body is illusory, or subservient to the divine. Alternatively, they can help students recognize injury as an opportunity to change paths and self-perception.
Asana can injure. But it can also introduce us to the yoga of discovering what injury tells us about the world, and ourselves.
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WAWADIA: The Cremation of B.K.S. Iyengar (draft excerpt)
The following reflection is featured in the full prospectus for WAWADIA, released Nov 1 in support of the IGG campaign to help fund publication. In the eventual book, this piece will help to set the historical stage for the current flood of change and innovation sweeping through the world of modern postural yoga. Notes and citations are are the end. I welcome all feedback.
All of these practices make us into a true human being, because we are still not fit for the divine level. —B.K.S. Iyengar
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n August 14th, 2014, the news flashed through the yoga world that Mr. Iyengar had been admitted to a private hospital in Pune following a three-week illness. He was accompanied by daughter Geeta, son Prashant, and their family physician. His blood pressure, regulated by decades of equanimity in standing postures, was dangerously low. His breathing, famous for demonstrations of control and retention, whistled shallow in his barrel chest. The doctors placed him on a ventilator for the first day, but he insisted it be removed. His heart, which had thumped faithfully through countless backbends, was feeble. His feet, which had stepped on the backs of devotees prostrated in child’s pose, which students gazed at for hours as he instructed the subtleties of ball-mound rooting and inner-arch-lifting, and which, in later years, devotees touched to show their respect, were now swollen with deoxygenated blood and pooling lymph.
By August 18th, the man who had introduced the principles of “kidney breathing” to the world of postural yoga was placed on dialysis, as his kidneys began to fail. On the 19th, doctors administered a nasogastral feeding tube. Reports of his earlier refusal to be hospitalized expanded, suggesting that most if not all of these interventions would have been unwelcome. The man who had enthusiastically worked to open dialogue between yoga and biomedicine was now firmly in the clinical grasp of the latter. It would seem that a precious goal of the experiential yogi—to be able to feel the approach of death unmediated and in solitude—was now lost to him. In his last hours, his lifelong passion for self-observation—for carefully monitoring the qualities of every twitch and pulse for the signs of grace or its absence—was occluded by the clinical gaze. If he’d been able to continue to listen to his heart, its faltering thump would have been drowned out by the heart monitor that amplified it.
On August 20th at 3:15 am local time, Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar died. On social media, some refused to use the word “death”— insisting on “mahasamadhi”, which describes the ultimate absorption of a meditator.
[dropcap]G[/dropcap]lowing tributes flooded the web, hailing the “Lion of Pune”, the supreme innovator, inspiration of millions. Hundreds described how Light on Yoga appeared in their lives at critical junctures, and changed their paths. They posted photos of their broken-spined copies, scribbled on on every page, held together by rubber bands. Senior students issued somber and tender memorials.
Amongst my several thousand yoga contacts on Facebook, only one dared to share an openly conflicted response. She wrote that she was grateful for his “keen eye and passion for precision,” but mindful of his “patriarchal, old-school guru” persona, known to “humiliate, bully, and shame his students.”
Another friend posted a possibly sardonic homage: a photograph of a female Lego figure stuck to a Lego baseplate in a hands-free headstand. The caption read: “Thanks, Guruji.”
I took it this way: Iyengar’s yoga seems to recall a child’s dream of perfect order and uniformity. As if a body—a woman’s body especially—unfolded its potential by being folded just so. As if a teacher is meant to provide a template in absolute symmetry with his idea of virtue, if not with the curves of the world. But there was also a touch of melancholy in the Lego image, glinting out through its sepia Instagram filter. It seemed to say: Yoga has made children of us, in good ways and painful ways. Maybe we recaptured a sense of play and wonderment. Maybe we regressed into depending upon a new parental energy. Now that he is gone, we must grow up, and put away our toys.
The best mourning is complex, avoiding mystification and hagiography.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Iyengar family brought the patriarch’s body home, dressed it in ivory silks for the cremation rites, and laid it out on a simple bamboo mat. They draped it with garlands of flowers. I imagine they felt the silent questions of every mourner: Where did his movement go? Where is the prana he sculpted and nourished for seventy years? Where is the cellular intelligence he spoke of now? Does it just fall silent? Is it in the air around him? Has it become part of us?
Those more remote are left to wonder what this death, for all of its preparation, felt like. Was it different from any other death? Did his obsession with breathing yield some final flash of insight or consolation as it collapsed? Did he feel the skittish rise of udana vāyu dart through his spine with his last exhales? Was that sensation obstructed by the feeding tube? Did radiance slowly fill the space left by his retreating senses and mind? What did his yoga do for him in the end?
No one can know. Iyengar’s body in death is as enigmatic as it was in life, as silent and strange as the millions of photographs he leaves behind. The most demonstrative yogi in modern history used this body to form shapes purported to be windows to a brighter internal reality. His brash display both allied him with a revisioned Hatha heritage and alienated him from the philosophical bent of other streams of yoga evangelism, like those initiated by Vivekananda and Aurobindo. With every extension, flexion, and rotation, he insisted that the material perfection of a form—or the actions towards a form, however subtle—was sacramental. To a rapidly disembodying world, he offered forms of the body in attitudes of sombre praise. Students the world over learned and mimicked those forms, and many now testify to transformation and healing. But their reports are marked by equal amounts of pleasure and suffering.
We can never grasp the internality of another person—even less, perhaps, one upon whom we project our wishes. We have the artifacts of Iyengar’s flesh: his words on paper, his bombast on scratchy video, his fading echo in the spines, hips and shoulders of the thousands who studied with him in person. But no one can say for sure, without quoting Iyengar’s grand self-reporting, how his yoga felt for him. No one knows the ratio of bliss to pain in his body, how he managed the anxiety of that youthful dream he confided to Victor, and what dissatisfactions drove him to demand so much of his students. We cannot ask him: Was it worth it?
Had his life-long experimentalism not collided with the ancient rites of his family, Iyengar may well have donated this vacated body to science. No one would have been more interested in his autopsy than him. Was his marrow transformed by a lifetime of practice? Did he avoid the brain-tissue calcifications of other men his age? Did his arterial system remain plucky and plaque-free till the end? Were his lungs really as enormous as they seemed from the outside? Did he have the world’s largest diaphragm?
But there can be no autopsy of the guru. We cannot dissect him, for this would reduce his body to the same substance as our own. We cannot find his myth within his corpse, for either it is departed, or we realize it was only ever in ourselves. The Iyengar family is both abiding tradition and protecting his devotees when they scramble to cremate him at the earliest possible time.
Early on in the research for this book, I tried to parse one of Patabhi Jois’ more provocative aphorisms in an article online. One slightly chafed reader suggested that I pick on Mr. Iyengar’s words instead, because he was “still alive to set me straight.” She was pointing out something I’d long felt in my own practice—that if I were ever to make it to Pune, all of the niggling questions about technique that his senior students seemed to disagree on would be resolved. I could ask him exactly what he meant by this instruction or that, as though it would help me understand my body or my life better. Well, he can’t clarify anything now. Soon enough, we will have to stop asking what he meant, forced to turn to our peers for less certain answers. Arguments and insights into the great man’s methods, dictates, gregariousness, warmth and tantrums will dissolve as his living memory dissipates.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he giants of the modernist age of yogic entrepreneurial globalization are now all departed, debilitated, or disgraced. Sivananda is gone, along with most of his disciples. Kripalvananda, who taught asana as the dance-like expression of spontaneous bliss, is gone. Muktananda and Swami Rama are gone, their magic and abuses leaving a trail of the ecstatic wounded. Yogi Bhajan is gone, leaving his aphorisms blurring on millions of wet Yogi Tea teabag tags. Pattabhi Jois is gone. T.K.V. Desikachar, one of the last living links to the grandfather of modern postural yoga, T. Krishnamacharya, is reportedly suffering from dementia, and has been hidden away by his family, ostensibly to save face. In a completely different and ignominious fall, Bikram Choudhury is now facing charges of having raped several students.
With the exception of Jois (through this grandson Sharath), none of these evangelists has left a successor of note, and those who have presumed to succeed them—Amrit Desai, John Friend, and Kausthub Desikachar, among others—have all been quickly cut down to size, on the surface by their own ethical failings, but on a deeper level by a more skeptical culture that is less tolerant of idols, and more seduced by irony than it is by charisma. The death of Iyengar marks another step towards the growing democratization of the yoga world—perhaps not in terms of who has commercial clout, but certainly in terms of who holds authority.
When no one is left to tell us exactly what to do, can we finally say we are adults?
The death of a great man also erodes the Great Man Story, leaving space through which more hidden stories may emerge. I’m thinking of Vanda Scaravelli, ten years Iyengar’s senior, one of his few female students who didn’t seem intimidated by him, who would punch him playfully in the belly and tease him about his weight. She went on to teach a small cache of students, one at a time, who have all gone on to influence yoga for decades without grandiose institutes, certification programmes, or even websites. Scaravelli died in 1999 in Florence, where she lived and taught for over thirty years.
I’m also thinking of Dr. Karandikar. He was Iyengar’s personal physician until he was reportedly worn down by the teacher’s constant stream of verbal abuse. Karandikar left the Ramamami Iyengar Memorial Institute to found Kabir Baug Sanstha just three kilometres away, across Pune’s Mutha river. Kabir Baug is a sprawling yoga therapy clinic and therapeutic college that serves thousands of mostly Indian clients and students every year. While Iyengar globally advanced the hypothesis of “yoga as therapy”, Karandikar seems to have quietly proven it by staying at home and using a seamless blend of ancient and modern techniques. Most injured clients who come to Kabir Baug for asana instruction receive a spinal x-ray before they even begin. This clinic is unknown to the global yoga community, I think, because Karandikar’s skill is not occluded by the projection of intuitive wizardry, but rather demystified through the medical technologies that have almost replaced divine vision. Karandikar has flown below the radar of Western fetish and orientalism, perhaps because his work is to show us that embodied insight is not the domain of a charmed few, but is democratically available to everyone.
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]ithin twelve hours of his death, Iyengar’s body was brought from his home to the Vaikunth crematorium by ambulance. It was laid in perfect savasana upon a pyre of sandal and rosewood. Prashant touched the flame to the kindling at 3 pm. There were only one hundred people in attendance—most of them Western students. The pujaris chanted Vedic hymns, perhaps including the oldest funeral verses of all: “I am because you have been. You will be because I am.”
A certain vision might emerge through the white smoke. It rises in the hearts of those who he loved, strutted before, taught, harangued, slapped, kicked, injured, hugged, and healed. It might reflect how his soul now sees itself, if one believes in souls:
It is of a white-haired man, walking through clouds towards a simple gate. His leonine bearing is disrupted by his worried mood. Perhaps he wonders if he is standing tall enough, breathing deeply enough, if he is pliant enough in his spine to adequately bow to his forbears, his austere guru, and the earth itself. He puzzles over which asana to assume to ask forgiveness from those he burned with his zeal. He frets over whether he is finally fit to honour the thrilling and awful gift of being a body.
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Notes:
Epigram: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=4t2OLXi2xvY&feature=youtu.be, time cue 5:08.
On August 14th, 2014 . . . Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/pune/Yoga-guru-in-hospital-stable/articleshow/40218765.cms. Other details come from the 8/13 edition of Indian Express: http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/pune/ yogacharya-b-k-s-iyengar-admitted-to-hospital/.
By August 18th . . . Source: http://timesofindia. indiatimes.com/india/Yoga-guru-BKS-Iyengars-condition-worsens/articleshow/40424031.cms. The irony of Iyengar’s hospitalization wasn’t lost on the global community. On 8/19, Leslie Kaminoff posted the following to his Facebook wall: “Is this the way for “the Lion of Pune” to spend his last days on earth? He has lived an incredibly full and productive life for 96 years, and has nothing left to prove – except apparently to his followers, who make absurd declarations like: ‘…Everything is in control and as we all know Our Dear Guruji is a LION hearted man, he can come out of any storm . . . ’ As if Iyengar were some kind of immortal being not subject to the laws of the physical universe. I wish the people around this man would let him die with the dignity he deserves.”
On August 20th at 3:15 am local time: Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/ Yoga-guru-BKS-Iyengar-passes-away/articleshow/40462779.cms.
Amongst my several thousand yoga contacts on Facebook. . . Denise Benitez, Facebook status update from 8/19/2014, 7 pm PST: BKS Iyengar, the great progenitor of yoga in the West, has died at the age of 96. As one of the minions who trained in and taught Iyengar yoga in the 70’s and 80’s, I am grateful to him for his keen eye and passion for precision and order. I learned so much from Iyengar teachers, and all of it changed my body and my life for the better. Probably none of us would be doing yoga without his influence, or at least not the way we do yoga now. I am immensely grateful for his presence on the planet. And yet, my “relationship” with him was complex. I never met him personally, but I saw him in action at Iyengar conferences, and he humiliated, shamed and bullied his students and teachers, mostly women. He was highly patriarchal and was an old school “guru” who expected his word to be obeyed without question. In the 80’s, one of his senior male teachers was inappropriately touching women in classes. I was one of those women. When this was told to Iyengar, he said that all of the women who had reported this were lying. So on the occasion of his death, I am left with an unsettling mix of emotions — the passing of an era, the jewel of yoga that he brought forward, his narcissism and ferocity, the fact that he had been homeless, sickly and lost as a boy, and that yoga saved him, as it has saved so many of us. All I can do is wish his spirit well, with all my heart. May his soul rest at ease.
Those more remote are left to wonder . . . Udana vāyu is the upward-moving “wind” of yogic physiology, said to be the material mechanism by which the atman is ejected from the flesh at death. The radiance of death is common trope in Tantric literature. Most famously elucidated in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, popularized by Sogyal Rinpoche in the 1990s.
Early on in the research for this book . . . http:// matthewremski.com/wordpress/wawadia-update- 10-lazy-people-cant-practice-thoughts-on-a-yoga-meme/
No one can know . . . Both Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo were antagonistic, to differing degrees, to the physical heritage of Hatha yoga. “Sacramental”: In my early Catholic education, a sacrament was defined as “an outward sign of an inward grace.” This formulation goes back to St. Augustine’s early catechism, later formalized at the Council of Trent in the mid 16th century.
With the exception of Jois . . . Note: many conversations with “older shala” students of Jois from the 70s and 80s, reveal the common opinion that Sharath does not command the same grandeur as his grandfather, who many considered to be a shaktipat guru.
The death of a “great man” . . . About Vanda joshing Iyengar: this anecdote comes from Sandra Sabatini via interview.
I’m also thinking of Dr. Karandikar . . . This report comes from an interview with David McAmmond, one of the few Western students to study extensively at Kabir Baug Sanstha: http://www.kabirbaug.com/.
Within twelve hours of his death . . . http://www.rediff.com/news/slide-show/slide-show-1-bks-iyengar-cremated-amid-vedic-chants/20140820.htm.
(A working bibliography is available at the end of the prospectus.)
WAWADIA Update #17 /// Question: Is Injury-Free Yoga Possible?
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n November 1st, I’ll be releasing a 52-page prospectus for a crowdfunding campaign to support the two years I think it’ll take to produce this book. In preparation for the campaign, I’ve fielded a lot of really good questions online, from my interview subjects, and in various public forums where I’ve presented preliminary findings from my research.
(I was at Yoga Morristown two weeks ago, hosted by Omni Kitts Ferrara. Then I gave a brief presentation to the entire faculty of Octopus Garden in Toronto last Wednesday. And the second WAWADIA night at 80 Gladstone, hosted by Diane Bruni, was on Friday night. Everywhere, the conversation is searching, lively, and runs late. I’ll be at Evolution Yoga in Cleveland this Saturday, hosted by Sandy Gross, and at Portland Union Yoga on Nov. 8th, hosted by Todd Vogt and Annie Adamson.)
The questions I’m getting have a lot of nuance, but here are the nuggets:
WTF is your end-game here?
Or:
Do you really think you can stop people from getting injured in asana classes? Continue reading “WAWADIA Update #17 /// Question: Is Injury-Free Yoga Possible?”
Lululemon: Wide Right. No Goal. Tone Deaf. Class Blind.
So Lululemon does two years of marketing research in the rust-belt city of Buffalo, and somehow comes up with the idea that evoking two local sports tragedies totally out of context in a fancy floor-mosaic in their new store would express solidarity with the hoi polloi.
I think I know why that Lulu fabric goes all sheer. Clearly, the market researchers moonlight as quality controllers and test the pants by shoving their clueless heads up their asses while wearing them.
The dumb-dumb mosaic in question is the centrepiece of the new Lulu digs at the Walden Galleria mall. It’s emblazoned with the phrases “Wide right” and “No goal.”
“Wide right” was the phrase that NFL announcer Al Michaels used to seal Buffalo’s defeat in the 1991 Super Bowl when Bills kicker Scott Norwood (head hung in anguish) missed a gamer-winning field goal with zero on the clock. “No goal!” is the chant that all of Western New York hollered for years in bars and in their dreams after Bret Hull illegally put his skate in the crease and tipped in the game winner that robbed the Sabres of the 1999 Cup.
Oh Lulu. You have no idea what real passion is, or what you’re messing with. For all of that “sweat everyday” and “do one thing a day that scares you”, you obviously know zilch about the deeper meanings of sports to people who don’t have the leisure to use it to express their neoliberal fabulousness, because they’re too busy using it to survive.
See, if your manifesto had been written in Buffalo it would say things like “Try to get that first shift at least three times per week.” Or “Even though you’re exhausted, go easy on the coffee.” Or “You can’t ask John Galt for a living wage.”
Maybe you thought that because “No Goal” was a popular bumper sticker in the Buffalo area throughout the early 2000s that everything was coolsies. But you don’t get to appropriate the battle chant of a group you want to be part of just so you go on to make them feel inadequate about their workout pants from Walmart. You don’t get to capitalize on the memory of something you don’t care enough about to understand.
The Buffalo news reported this tweet from @allysebian: “We can make fun of ourselves. You can not.”
But really — what can we expect from the cynicism of trying to ersatz-localize the franchises of a transnational McStore?
Sure — bring in your Bangladesh-made product, available only in sizes that can fit the bodies you want your logo on. Make sure you brush the collapsed-building-dust off each unit.
Then: pull on the local heartstrings. Create hometown buzz by reaching out to people you’d never have dinner with. Hire tile-cutters. Those old Italian guys struggling to make ends meet will do. Ask them to tile in painstaking detail key phrases that still smolder in their hearts. Practice radical acceptance and metta when they come in with cigarette smoke on their breath and salami in their lunchboxes.
You might feel all peace, love and leggings inside, but you’re really laughing at the tile-cutters. They probably know it. And all because you want their daughters to buy your stretchy pants. That’s what mindless capitalism and dissociative privilege does.
Lulu, you wanted to express solidarity. I have great faith that you think you wanted to do just that. But your business model is constitutionally incapable of expressing solidarity with anyone, from plus-sized women to sweatshop workers to Buffalo sports fans. It’s a bit of a problem, no?
Hey I have really great idea. Let’s hire unemployed Buffalo steel-workers to make shiny steel yoga mannequins. Let’s dress those mannequins up in stretchy pants with “Yoga Is the New Steel” printed across the butts. Then we can make tank tops that say “Who needs a union when you’ve got yoga?”
Joe jobs and football are so old-paradigm, fellow light-seekers. We’re in a new era! We’re taking over abandoned factory spaces to offer mindful movement at $22/hour. The ashes of the American dream are the vibhuti we wear to Landmark meetings and our yoga-inspired trance-dances. The dumpy folks sucking on Pabst down at the bar may never understand. But hey, what can you do?
I hope that yoga peeps far and wide can grok the whole class thing involved here, because it would suck to be as tone-deaf as the protégés of Chip Wilson. I’m having a dirty old laugh at the whole thing, but the mosaic isn’t really funny. The cracks between those tiles are the fault lines in means and sensibilities between the yoga class and the (no-longer-)working class. That mosaic is at ground zero of why liberals with enough money to buy $90 stretchy pants can be really crappy at even seeing the world they live in, let alone helping it become more just.
I hope yoga peeps get it, but I have my doubts. After Yogadork reports the story, Lucy, the first commenter, starts the stupid ball rolling:
“Anyone who takes a game played by men in tights this seriously needs to grow up and get a real life.”
Really? Isn’t this a store dedicated to selling tights? Who exactly has to “grow up?” Are you talking about men and women who work like such dogs during the week that they long to watch their bodily aggressions and glories played out in the gridiron cathedral?
And what’s a “real life”, anyway? Have you ever watched a wide receiver dive at full speed into a crushing tackle to try to get just their fingertips on a ball thrown like a bullet? Ever hear about Brett Favre breaking the fingers of his receivers with the force of his passes? Have you seen defensive linesmen vomiting at the sidelines after the exhaustion of a long series? These guys play so hard that they’re in chronic pain from their thirties onwards. Yet they continue, maybe born for it, because they were born there, on that piece of earth they fight over. What else do you do under the Friday night lights of your small town where your dad just got laid off? What is this body good for, anyways, if it doesn’t feel its own strength and pride?
Here’s a haunting parallelism brought to you courtesy of global capitalism. Maybe football in Buffalo runs as deep as Vedic ritual in Bangladesh. Both game and religious sacrifice help to keep people alive and vital while they forge steel and sew stretchy pants. Or while they beg for better wages from people who believe in progress and assure us that everything’s all good.
In the Buffalo News, commenter “Memetic” nails it:
“The Bills and Sabres are the furthest thing from the minds of the upscale clientele drawn to this store. In fact, they probably appreciate a good dig at the galoots that live and die by them.”
I can say that I didn’t really get football until I tried to run a yoga studio in rural Wisconsin. The studio had to schedule around not only Packers games, but Packers practice reports on the radio.
There I was, bringing a different type of movement into a land of muscle and impact, pain and glory. It only really worked when I realized I was just a guest of people whose souls cut deep into those frozen lakes and chalk-lined fields in ways I did not understand.
WAWADIA Update #16: Two Ways of Blocking the Yoga Injury Conversation
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here’s no doubt that the focus I’ve chosen for this project, the data generated by the interviews, and the analysis I’ve applied to that data so far is triggering for many yoga people.
I can totally relate: the whole subject was triggering me for years before I began more formal research. I was too professionally invested in asana culture as a teacher, yoga therapist, and community organizer to let myself really hear and absorb the stories of injury and harm coming from colleagues. More intimately, I was also heavily identified with yoga asana as a key plot point in the story of my personal awakening. That hasn’t changed, but the story has certainly become more twisty. Continue reading “WAWADIA Update #16: Two Ways of Blocking the Yoga Injury Conversation”
Why Are Some Folks Distorting and Dismissing Chelsea Roff’s Article on Anorexia and Yoga?
A few days ago, this post from a yoga blogger whose work I generally like flashed across Faceblot. It body-slammed Chelsea Roff’s recent Yoga Journal piece:
I’m appalled by the shoddy journalism and misleading information presented within this article.
EVEN if I’m to believe results of an uncited study, not knowing how many were sampled, other variables and the correlation/significance etc – the results of this supposed research found yoga students are (get this!): as at risk for an eating disorder as the general public. DUH!
and yet to read, you’d think yoga CAUSES it. Lets be clear: the asana practice does not make anyone immune. In fact, it’s most likely simply a common variable because it is a common practice of ALL people, and mostly women. The article does a horrific job of clarifying this and therefore should be ashamed.
maybe Yoga Journal should be called the UNyoga journal because it truly does more harm than good.
unlike. unsubscribe. done.
She followed this trumpet with a Bronx cheer in the comments: “omg though … I just called it journalism! hahaha!!!” This further magnetized the thread for the likes and comments of many who obviously hadn’t read the article. (To the blogger’s, um — credit? — she scrubbed her omg outburst from the thread after I called it out via personal message. That cost me getting blocked. Ouch.)
We all love the firecracker soundbite. We all love to feel righteous about articles we don’t have to actually read, thanks to the efforts of our favourite pundits. We love making assertions about what yoga is and isn’t. And we all love to hate YJ, right? What’s not to like about this impassioned critique?
How about the fact that it’s totally inaccurate? Roff’s piece is not shoddy journalism. There’s zero misleading information. The study she referred to briefly and inconsequentially is not uncited, but merely unlinked-to, which is standard for many popular formats. YJ fact-checked her dozens of interviews thoroughly. And by no means does Roff suggest that yoga causes disordered eating, because that would be stupid. So this FB post is making stuff up about what Chelsea Roff is saying, and then saying she must be stupid and ashamed.
But wait — isn’t Roff the survivor of an eating disorder who did a yoga-strike on a rooftop for I can’t remember how many nights and days straight to raise 51K to pilot her “Yoga for Eating Disorders” non-profit? (Not as in “Do Yoga to GET an Eating Disorder”, but “Do Yoga to Help Heal from Eating Disorders.”) If that’s her, I’m not ashamed to be with stupid.
(That’s Roff in the lead image above. Before and after yoga, actually. Plus a ton of other hard work.)
I understand internet impulsivity and am certainly not immune, and I would rather gnaw my arm off than moonlight as a thread-cop. I don’t even think the internet should be the exclusive home of well-reasoned and thoughtful responses. How repressed would that be? So I don’t blame this blogger for the initial sentiment. Many shared her view, in fact, as we can see from the comments trailing out under the original YJ posting of the article.
But when the facts were made clear, there was neither retraction nor apology. When Chelsea herself had the spunk to show up on a thread on which she’d been laughed at to offer further clarification (repeated here in a YJ talkback page), there was some tepid deference. But no retraction, no apology. No hint of “Oh — maybe this article is saying something subtler than I imagined an article could actually say.” Or “Oh — I wonder what was so triggering about this article, that it sent my reading skills and impulse control AWOL?” Meanwhile, the misreading continued to propagate.
Here’s the nut graf of Chelsea’s work, which took a whole year to produce, and such a tiny number of keystrokes to dismiss:
As a healing practice, yoga has helped countless people recover from physical and emotional ailments as varied as migraines, sciatica, and PTSD. But for people with disordered eating habits, or those with poor body image—which includes some 80 percent of American women, according to research—counting on yoga’s promise of emotional and spiritual healing can be perilous. Drawn to yoga as a means of self-care, they instead may find reinforcement for dangerous weight-control behaviors in a studio culture that increasingly celebrates thinness, flexibility, and perfection of form.
So how many backbends does it take to make a yogi confused about what this says?
Roff is obviously not saying that yoga causes eating disorders. She’s saying here and throughout the piece that for all its marketing of therapeutic benefit, yoga culture has more work to do to distinguish itself from the toxicity of the dominant body-shaming paradigm. That in fact, its very pretences to therapy and spiritual renewal often cover up the psychopathologies of its practitioners.
The article says that asana/yoga culture can amplify the meticulous and control-oriented food behaviours that express distrust of the body and border on disordered eating. It says: we claim to be mindful. We claim to be body-positive. We claim to be nurturing. We profess emancipation from neoliberal consumerism and its demands. But where are we using these claims to cover up the illnesses we are too ashamed to face? Where are we using the promise of yoga as a bypass?
So the important question is: why has Roff’s piece been misread? Is it another critical-skills-fail in Yogaland? Probably. Is it “I-can’t-believe-anything-good-could-come-out-of-Yoga-Journal” syndrome? That’s reasonable. Is it the cognitive dissonance of Chelsea’s piece appearing on a page that’s also selling clingy pants and diet regimes? For sure: we’d all love a magazine with a print circulation of millions to turn down the clingy pant cash and give over free ad space to local organic farmers. Call us dreamers, for dreamers we are.
Was it triggering to read about Kelly Parisi, found dead in her apartment in Reclined Hero pose, after months of practicing up to three hours a day and being socially rewarded for her “dedication” at her home studio? Absolutely. Would this one image alone force devotees and teachers and studio owners to check their messaging a little more closely? Maybe to see their juice cleanses and purification retreats and the financial benefits of obsessively practicing students in a more complex light? I’m sure it would.
But I think there’s something more important going on. For the first time ever, the flagship publication of modern postural yoga culture — whatever one thinks of it — has displayed a shocking level of self-inquiry by drawing back the curtain on the core ambivalence of its central meme: the yoga body. YJ has kicked up some yoga shit in the past, as in this amazing 1990 investigative takedown of Swami Rama. But compared to challenging the cha-ching of the yoga body, Rama is chump change.
Here is a magazine banked on the full-colour premise that the yoga body is a klieg light of physio-moral virtue radiating feminist empowerment. And here it is, publishing an article that says: that body throws a dark shadow. They publish an article that says that yoga can be a place in which our core self-hatreds are as much performed as they are resolved. It’s the end of the “It’s All Good” era on the yoga newstand. That’s big.
I can actually report that it was even bigger behind the scenes. I now fully disclose that I had the honour of reviewing and commenting on one of Chelsea’s early drafts. Her original title was “Yoga: The Double-Edged Sword.” Imagine that on the front cover, beside Kathryn Budig’s jocular glow. It’s her bija-thesis, after all.
If Chelsea’s message really sinks in, readers might feel the ground beginning to shift beneath them. They might realize the jig is up. That not even Yoga Journal can continue to gloss over the fact that the drives of self-improvement and self-destruction are constantly intertwined. Not even Yoga Journal can avoid the issue of how much wisdom it takes to distinguish tapas from self-hatred, sauca from self-loathing.
This means that if you haven’t done the hard work to see that every sun salute can have a touch of self-mortification, and every yogic affirmation can hide a hint of terror, now you’ll have to. And if YJ can do it — balancing caution and enthusiasm under the weight of its advertising — there’s really no excuse for everyone to not come clean. I understand how misreading the article and dismissing the whole issue as “sensationalist” might be an easier solution.
I also understand — to drop my cynicism for a moment — that Roff’s article might be very hard to take for a person whose experience of healing through yoga has given them a religious devotion to practice. They might read it as an attack on the one thing they are sure has helped them and could help everyone else, a roadblock to their evangelical enthusiasm. I’ve been there, and it’s tough.
But please. Good writing is so bloody hard to do. Chelsea spent a year on that thing. A year. I don’t think anybody really wants to put a chill on an effort like that.
Maybe a little yoga — what with all the deep breathing and non-reactivity stuff — might help people with their reading, in the same way it has clearly helped Roff’s writing.
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Notes: “Faceblot” is a term that comes gràce a my old friend Stephen Pender, who probably hates yoga. Carol Horton, who loves yoga, gives a balanced review of the entire issue Roff’s piece appears in.
