{"id":4402,"date":"2014-10-11T07:20:57","date_gmt":"2014-10-11T12:20:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/?p=4402"},"modified":"2014-10-11T07:20:57","modified_gmt":"2014-10-11T12:20:57","slug":"why-are-some-folks-distorting-and-dismissing-chelsea-roffs-article-on-anorexia-and-yoga","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/why-are-some-folks-distorting-and-dismissing-chelsea-roffs-article-on-anorexia-and-yoga\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Are Some Folks Distorting and Dismissing Chelsea Roff’s Article on Anorexia and Yoga?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few\u00a0days ago, this post from a yoga blogger whose work I generally like flashed across Faceblot. It body-slammed\u00a0Chelsea Roff’s recent Yoga Journal piece<\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

I’m appalled by the shoddy journalism and misleading information presented within this article.<\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

maybe Yoga Journal should be called the UNyoga journal because it truly does more harm than good.<\/p>\n

unlike. unsubscribe. done.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She followed this\u00a0trumpet\u00a0with 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\u00a0many who obviously hadn’t read the article. (To the blogger’s, um — credit? — she scrubbed her omg<\/em>\u00a0outburst from the thread after I called it out via personal message. That cost me getting blocked. Ouch.)<\/p>\n

We all love the firecracker soundbite. We all love to feel righteous\u00a0about articles\u00a0we don’t have to actually read, thanks to the efforts\u00a0of our favourite\u00a0pundits. We love making assertions about what yoga is and isn’t. And we all love<\/em> to hate YJ, right? What’s not to like about this impassioned\u00a0critique?<\/p>\n

How about the fact that it’s\u00a0totally inaccurate?\u00a0Roff’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.\u00a0YJ fact-checked her dozens of interviews thoroughly.\u00a0And by no means does Roff\u00a0suggest that yoga causes<\/em> disordered eating, because that would be stupid.\u00a0So this FB post is making stuff up about what Chelsea Roff is saying, and then saying she\u00a0must be stupid and ashamed.<\/p>\n

But wait — isn’t Roff the survivor of an eating disorder\u00a0who did a yoga-strike on a rooftop<\/a>\u00a0for 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<\/strong> an Eating Disorder”, but “Do Yoga to Help Heal<\/em> from Eating Disorders.”) If that’s her, I’m not ashamed to be with stupid.<\/p>\n

(That’s Roff\u00a0in the lead image above. Before and after yoga, actually. Plus a ton of other hard work.)<\/p>\n

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<\/em> be the exclusive<\/em> home of well-reasoned and thoughtful responses. How repressed would that be?\u00a0So I don’t blame this blogger for the\u00a0initial sentiment. Many shared her view, in fact, as we can see from the comments trailing out\u00a0under\u00a0the original YJ posting<\/a>\u00a0of the article.<\/p>\n

But when the facts\u00a0were 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<\/a>), there was some\u00a0tepid 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\u00a0my reading skills and impulse control AWOL?” Meanwhile, the misreading continued to propagate.<\/p>\n

Here’s the nut graf of Chelsea’s work, which took a whole year to produce, and such a tiny\u00a0number of keystrokes to dismiss:<\/p>\n

\n

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\u2014which includes some 80 percent of American women, according to research\u2014counting on yoga\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So\u00a0how many backbends\u00a0does it take to make a yogi\u00a0confused about what this\u00a0says?<\/p>\n

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\u00a0to distinguish itself from the toxicity of the dominant body-shaming paradigm. That in fact, its\u00a0very\u00a0pretences to therapy and spiritual renewal often cover up the psychopathologies of its practitioners.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> to be mindful. We claim<\/em> to be body-positive. We claim<\/em> to be nurturing. We profess emancipation\u00a0from 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?<\/p>\n

So the important question is: why<\/em> 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\u00a0piece appearing on a page that’s also selling clingy\u00a0pants and diet regimes? For sure: we’d all love<\/em> a magazine with a print circulation of\u00a0millions<\/em>\u00a0to turn down the clingy\u00a0pant cash\u00a0and give over free ad space to local organic farmers. Call us dreamers, for dreamers we are.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0this one\u00a0image 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\u00a0students in a more complex light? I’m sure it would.<\/p>\n

But I think there’s something more important\u00a0going on. For the first time ever, the flagship publication of modern postural\u00a0yoga 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<\/a>. But compared\u00a0to challenging\u00a0the cha-ching of the yoga body, Rama is chump change.<\/p>\n

Here is a magazine banked\u00a0on the full-colour\u00a0premise 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<\/em>. They publish an article that says that yoga can be a\u00a0place in which our core self-hatreds are\u00a0as much performed as they are resolved. It’s the end of the “It’s All Good” era on the yoga newstand. That’s big.<\/p>\n

I can actually report that it\u00a0was even bigger behind the scenes.\u00a0I now fully disclose\u00a0that 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<\/em>\u00a0on the front cover, beside Kathryn Budig’s jocular glow.\u00a0It’s her bija-thesis, after all.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If Chelsea’s\u00a0message\u00a0really sinks in, readers might feel\u00a0the ground beginning to shift beneath them. They might realize the jig is up. That not even Yoga Journal can\u00a0continue to gloss over the fact that the\u00a0drives of self-improvement and self-destruction are constantly intertwined. Not even Yoga Journal can\u00a0avoid the issue of how much wisdom it takes to distinguish tapas<\/em> from self-hatred, sauca<\/em> from self-loathing.<\/p>\n

This means that\u00a0if you haven’t done the hard work to see that every sun salute can have\u00a0a touch of self-mortification, and every yogic affirmation can hide\u00a0a hint of terror, now you’ll have to. And if YJ can do it — balancing caution and enthusiasm under the weight\u00a0of its advertising — there’s really no excuse for everyone to not come clean.\u00a0I understand how misreading the article and dismissing the whole issue as “sensationalist”\u00a0might be an\u00a0easier solution.<\/p>\n

I also understand — to drop\u00a0my cynicism for a moment — that Roff’s\u00a0article might\u00a0be very hard to take for a person whose\u00a0experience 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\u00a0to their evangelical enthusiasm. I’ve been there, and it’s\u00a0tough.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0please.\u00a0Good writing is so bloody hard to do. Chelsea spent a year on that thing. A year<\/em>. I don’t think anybody really wants to put a chill on an effort like that.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0clearly helped Roff’s\u00a0writing.<\/p>\n

______<\/p>\n

Notes: “Faceblot” is a term that comes gr\u00e0ce a<\/em> my old friend Stephen Pender, who probably hates yoga. Carol Horton, who loves yoga, gives a balanced review<\/a> of the entire issue Roff’s piece appears in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4420,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"slim_seo":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,21,116,23,24,19,28],"tags":[369,370,371],"class_list":["post-4402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-activism","category-articles","category-ayurveda","category-blog","category-featured","category-yoga","category-yoga-philosophy","tag-chelsea-roff","tag-eating-disorders","tag-yoga-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}