Yoga philosophy

November 23, 2014

WAWADIA Update #21: You Are Not the Problem… Your Yoga Culture Is

Consider this anonymous, borderline-abusive post from the Ashtanga Picture Project on Friday, entitled “The Yoga Is Not The Problem… You Are.” On one hand, it chapped my ass hard on behalf of those who tell the stories above, plus myself, plus countless others who injure themselves or are injured by teachers in the strange shadow of yoga’s therapeutic marketing. On the other hand, seeing the megalomaniac victim-blaming hubris of modern postural yoga parade in full monty makes my job a lot easier, if a lot less pleasant.
November 20, 2014

WAWADIA Update #20 /// The Kaminoff-Matthews Interview: Full Transcript

This is the full transcript of my 10/13/2014 conversation with Leslie Kaminoff, Amy Matthews, and Sarah Barnaby over dinner in Leslie’s office at The Breathing Project. I published the first bit of it in an earlier update, and will pick up the action from there, midstream, breaking into our reflection on the sculptural metaphor with which film makers Lindsey and Jake Clennell open their unreleased film Sadhaka.
November 14, 2014

WAWADIA Update #19: Thomas Myers Misdefines Pain. But Why?

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.