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January 1, 2015

Seeking the Gita

Today's reader is hurtling through the subway tunnels of a digital matrix with a paperback or an e-reader in her hand. Between chapters -- verses even -- she is overwhelmed with waves of data from across the globe. She is so saturated in neoliberal propaganda it has become invisible to her, but something hasn't felt right for a long time. She knows that climate change will be catastrophic. And the book she's holding -- which her YTT director assigned her to read without much explanation -- describes how a male Iron Age warrior talks with God in a chariot, and is eventually convinced of the necessity of war.
December 15, 2014

Boycott Satyananda’s Literature and Methods Until Reparations are Made for Sexual Abuse

Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse heard testimony from over a dozen witnesses who resided at Satyananda Yoga Ashram at Mangrove Mountain from the mid 1970s through the late 1980s, including eleven who were children or young teens at the time. The ashram was founded to spread the practices of yoga. But without exception, the former child residents told harrowing stories of pervasive physical and sexual abuse.
November 28, 2014

WAWADIA Update #22: The Prescriptive Kinesiognomy of Modern Postural Yoga

Everything is impeccably clean, yet somehow not good enough. Every body part is be placed just-so through an endless series of micro-adjustments, addressing flaws undetectable to the uninitiated. The corrections are so subtle, they must be referring to esoteric aims, visible only to some divine eye. David apparently has the eye, and his Greek-god good looks seem exalted by his magical finger-wand that traces post-production Euclidean forms over his student’s leggings and feet in a fantasy of symmetrical flesh. The graphics are phallocentric: if there are circular forms, they emerge in perfection from a priori vertical lines.