{"id":4554,"date":"2014-11-16T08:05:54","date_gmt":"2014-11-16T13:05:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/?p=4554"},"modified":"2014-11-16T08:05:54","modified_gmt":"2014-11-16T13:05:54","slug":"wawadia-six-lenses-for-studying-mpy-draft-excerpt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wawadia-six-lenses-for-studying-mpy-draft-excerpt\/","title":{"rendered":"WAWADIA: Six Lenses for Studying MPY (draft excerpt)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following essay\u00a0is featured in the full prospectus<\/a>, released Nov 1 in support of this\u00a0<\/i>IGG campaign<\/i><\/a>\u00a0to help fund publication.<\/i><\/p>\n

_____<\/i><\/p>\n

Six Lenses for Studying MPY: Phenomenology, Biology, Intersubjectivity, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Cross-Cultural Studies<\/h3>\n

This project began as a record of injuries and injury contexts in the culture of modern postural yoga (MPY). Along the way, it has evolved into a broader meditation upon the body in our disembodied age: its timeless struggles and pains, the meanings of effort, pleasure, sacrifice, aloneness, merging, attachment, and non-attachment. It\u2019s a meditation on how we push and pull against our flesh, knowing somehow that this inner split we feel is not quite right. How we reach out beyond our skins, as if from a chrysalis. How we reach in to find sensation, or memories of sensations, revealing themselves along an infinite scale from the blissful to the abject.<\/p>\n

In the process of this study, I\u2019ve reached out for as much theoretical help as I can find, and tried to view the scene through as many lenses as possible. I\u2019ll describe some of these lenses here, briefly, to give a sense of what\u2019s going on behind the curtain, and the concerns that have driven my questioning technique in the interviewing process. All of these lenses have limitations, which means that I don\u2019t apply any of them exclusively or rigidly. I\u2019m actually interested in their flaws as much as their strengths, because the flaws show me where more study and more humility are required. Each lens can only hold a part of the story about how we hurt and heal through yoga. The fuller stories, of course, are told by people, and I\u2019ll try to let those take centre stage.<\/p>\n

M<\/span>\ny natural point of departure will be the phenomenological view<\/b>. This is a commitment to examining, as far as is possible, the immediate sensory data available in any given experience, before applying any theory at all. My own fascination with asana began with feeling it in my flesh: the sweetness of movement and strength, the frustration and pain at the limit of movement and strength, the endless dialogue between voluntary and involuntary actions, and the swell of my breath. I wouldn\u2019t be writing this book were it not for these quickening sensations. Asana was the field of mindfulness through which I rediscovered and then remapped myself after the disembodiment of an awkward adolescence and the numbness of depression.<\/p>\n

When I ask myself \u201cWhat am I <\/i>actually doing in asana?\u201d, my attention seems to focus on the sound of that last word\u2014\u0101sana<\/i>\u2014which holds a cascade of internal and external textures that have poured through me, overtaken me, and proven my very existence to myself. When I say the word, I don\u2019t think of posture or forms or teaching or teachers or ideals or goals. I think of actions that invite feelings and feelings that invite actions. The context seems irrelevant: these actions\/feelings can flow equally freely when I\u2019m alone in my study, or in a packed class in which the very walls seem to vibrate and sweat. The phenomenological approach allows me to pay attention to what something seems to be <\/i>for me, before I get distracted by the question of what it means to me or others\u2014or worse, what it should <\/i>mean.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an approach that\u2019s coherent with a theme that hums like a drone throughout the literature of Ha\u00b7tha Yoga: concepts are a weak starting point for knowledge<\/i>. The H<\/i>athaprad\u012bpik\u0101<\/i>, for example, sidelines all discussions of cosmology and ethics in favour of concentrating upon bodily realities: how to cook for your belly, how to clean your digestive organs, how to position your limbs and manipulate your breath to stimulate the most revelatory bodily responses. Some commentators go so far as to say that considerations of morality, for example, can further confuse the ambivalence of the alienated, non-present mind, and that there\u2019s no use in thinking about what the body should do before one clearly\u00a0feels it as a site of mystic discovery, and is fully awake to its possibilities. The idea is that appropriate philosophy will naturally flow from a mind first tamed and then vitalized by the celebrating flesh. More on this in a bit.<\/p>\n

But any study that stops at the phenomenological level wallows in the wish that experience can somehow be separated from meaning. As many recent commentators in yoga culture have pointed out, the meaning of every experience\u2014especially those that seem to convince us of their universality\u2014are always filtered through the pre-existing psycho-social constructs of the practitioners. Yogis the world over might be feeling similar bodily sensations in practice, but this commonality will in no way predict a shared story. The strength of the phenomenological method\u2014to value feeling over meaning\u2014is also its outer weakness. It forgets, purposefully, that the feelings generated depend on the environmental and social contexts that produce them. Its inner weakness is its focus on the irreducibly subjective. Phenomenology tells me what I think I feel myself to be alone<\/i>, when what I really am is the complex product of being with <\/i>other people. Further, phenomenology will only ever reflect my experience back to myself within the confines of my own private language. I may learn to share this language artfully, but those who hear and read me will have far more access to my literary affect than to \u201cme.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another profound problem with this starting point\u2014and one which I\u2019ll examine closely in this book, because it relates directly to our assumptions about pain and injury\u2014is that there are often strong differences between what we feel is happening within us and what is actually happening. People who have come close to dying of hypothermia report warm blissful sensations as they relaxed into the icy water. Soldiers feel surges of confidence and vigour immediately after sustaining life-threatening wounds. If they make it to the field hospital, they will often decline pain medication for the first several days. The pain of an anorectic\u2019s hunger can flicker into mystical pleasure. Most cancer sufferers are completely unaware of even substantial malignancies, because cancer cells do not provoke inflammatory responses, and cause no pain at all until they accumulate to such a degree that they create internal mechanical pressures that tissue and organ structures can no longer tolerate. All too often, our senses deceive us, even when our bodies are our focal points of mindful reflection. The best phenomenology can feel the body intimately, while utterly failing to know it.<\/p>\n

This poses a sticky problem for the yoga practitioner, who is repeatedly told to \u201clisten to the body\u201d or \u201cattune to the breath\u201d in the hope of avoiding the stresses that lead to injury. But when we ask people to \u201clisten to the body\u201d, we just can\u2019t know what they are hearing. We cannot say, \u201cHere is the precise point at which a person\u2019s effort and discomfort is turning into the pain of tissue damage.\u201d And often, surprisingly, they can\u2019t either. This means that all of the desired sensations evoked by asana can be pursued to the point of injury, while yielding many gifts along the way. Feeling open or extended or aligned is no guarantee of the health that most practitioners expect to come from practice.<\/p>\n

T<\/span>\nhis is where the nuts and bolts of the biomechanical <\/b>and neuroscientific <\/b>views come into play, to supplement the poetry of internal sensation with evidenced fact.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take the condition of \u201chypermobility\u201d as an example. Subjective sensation alone will not tell a person that she\u2019s hypermobile. She may discover it by comparing herself to other movers, or by visiting a kinesiologist who uses a clinical tool like the Beighton Scale, which measures the range of extension in key joints. If her hypermobility is the result of a genetic condition such as Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, neither her subjectivity nor physical examination alone will reveal this, unless she\u2019s a microbiologist who can evaluate how she produces collagen for her joints.<\/p>\n

To take a more generally applicable example, we cannot tell by sensation alone how our cartilage is managing the stress of daily life, let alone the pressures and twistings of asana. Articular cartilage is specifically evolved to evade nociception, or the perception of pain. A practitioner can fly through the strenuous sequences of Ashtanga Yoga for years, sustaining soft-tissue injuries from time to time that heal up well enough, while remaining completely unaware of the deterioration of their cartilage, until sudden and catastrophic pain erupts when it finally gives way, and bone meets bone with a sickening grind.<\/p>\n

To date, most yoga education, because it has proceeded on phenomenological grounds, often bolstered by myopic spiritualism, has been woefully ignorant of the most basic facts surrounding the core actions of movement that many forms of practice demand. What is a safe range of motion, and how do we detect it in the individual? (Kinesiologists know. Most personal trainers know.) Do muscles actually lengthen via stretching? (Strangely, no.) Is steady breath really a foolproof method for maintaining safety in a pose? (Nope.) Is it actually healthful to do the exact same set of movements at the same time period every day? (Most sports medicine people agree that cross-training is essential for structural integrity.) What\u2019s the actual mechanism by which our tolerance for pain increases? (The philosophy of mindfulness can help, but we really have to understand neurology before approaching this question with integrity.)<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll search yogic and Ayurvedic literature in vain for anything but poetic allusions to these questions, not to mention answers. Compared to what contemporary biomechanics and neuroscience has to offer, yoga seems ill-equipped to study itself. It must reach beyond the thrall of subjective reverie and its pre-biomedical heritage if it wants answers that can improve the safety and sustainability of practice.<\/p>\n

A<\/span>\ns soon as the phenomenon of yoga practice becomes a conversation between teacher and student, one practitioner and others, or between yoga theory and other disciplines, we\u2019re using an intersubjective view<\/b>. This is the commitment to understanding all thoughts and feelings as arising through relationship between self and other. The learning of subjective mindfulness widens immeasurably when we consider how even our capacity to be mindful has been modeled for us by others, how our sense of hidden internal reality is something that forms with the realization that the other person has an interiority that we can\u2019t access. The intersubjective lens widens away from the real estate of the body-alone-on-the-mat to take in the classroom of the studio and social life. In Threads of Yoga <\/i>(2012), I summarized it this way:<\/p>\n

\u201cIntersubjectivity\u201d is the philosophical and psychological acknowledgement that experience and meaning are co-created through human relationship. It is an advancement from the \u201cisolated mind\u201d moods of earlier philosophies (Descartes), early psychologies (Freud), and most of Western science prior to quantum theory\u2014 all of which presume clear boundaries between the observer and the observed, the \u201cI\u201d and the \u201cyou\u201d. Intersubjectivity posits that although we often feel separated from each other in private bubbles of meaning, our fundamental condition is one of togetherness and unconscious empathy, in which we intuit that the interior lives of those we are with are similar to our own, that the \u201cyou\u201d I encounter is another \u201cI\u201d looking back at a \u201cyou\u201d, who is myself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The intersubjective sphere begins to account for how we learn from each other, from how we think of ourselves to how we move. It is the realm of parents and children, teachers and students, friends, enemies, and neutral players. It describes every mode of being as a being-with. In asana, it would focus on the fact that other than the few hardwired movement reflexes (startling, rooting, suckling) that we are born with, the vast majority of our movement knowledge comes from our capacity to mirror others, most likely through the primal functions of our mirror neurology. This means that no one learns the often unnatural and counter-intuitive shapes of asana without mimicking what one sees others do. This in turn means that the asanas we learn are not even our own until our interest in mirroring has been exhausted and we begin to create new forms, driven by more original stimuli. Before this happens, we have to acknowledge that asana practice is not private, personal, or purely subjective. Asana occurs between bodies that generate their subjectivity by sharing it.<\/p>\n

A<\/span>\nlthough I have a lot of reservations about it, I find that the psychoanalytic view <\/b>can form a useful bridge between the internal sensations of asana and their intersubjective context. The psychoanalytic mode weaves a rich story of internal and internalized pressures that resonate loudly with the struggles my interview subjects present in their stories from the mat. The scope of its literature and practice is vast, and by turns pompous, myopic, and searingly insightful. Any study of yoga or mindfulness practice would be impoverished by ignoring it.<\/p>\n

Of primary importance in the psychoanalytic consideration of asana is the idea that for as much as we long for \u201cunion\u201d (with ourselves, with God, with a beloved), we are also terrified of the imagined effects of union upon the coherence of the selves we know. Every desire both conceals and reveals a fear. We want love, be we are not sure what it means or what we must sacrifice to have it.<\/p>\n

Sigmund Freud may not have set a strong personal example for the modern yogic ideals of attunement, contentment, bodily awareness, geniality, and conceptual flexibility, but he did offer a crucial insight for all practitioners to consider. He critiqued the goal of mystical, \u201cpeak-experience\u201d communion that is shared by most religious and yogic traditions as a longing to regress to an infantile state\u2014for a \u201cyoga\u201d with the mother, prior to the stress of individuation. Today, he would likely say that yoga is fantasized\u2014even hallucinated by the most neurotic adepts\u2014as a state of oceanic interdependency in all aspects of our being, something that we unconsciously remember from the womb, and something to which we can never return, unless we concoct a metaphysical womb beyond the world that will someday receive us in unconditional warmth and love. This thought alone casts a poignant shadow over the yogic effort, while shedding light on how a kind of existential frustration might be a constant if hidden companion on our mats.<\/p>\n

Strangely, the ascetic view of Patanjali\u2019s time intersects with Freud\u2019s cynicism about our happiest goals. In the Yoga Sutras<\/i>, for example, there is no return to the oneness of the womb, or anything fulfilling in material life at all. Our best bet, it is said, is to seek for something beyond birth, contact, intimacy, change, and death. The entire thrust of this \u201cclassical\u201d era of practice encourages the practitioner away from sensually immersive and unitary states, and to withdraw from action and social contact into a realm of perfectly isolated (kaivalya<\/i>) observation. The text invokes a kind of \u201cdeath drive\u201d, to use Freud\u2019s idea. Patanjali would suggest that the pleasure of psychosomatic integration\u2014arguable the primary goal for most MPY practitioners\u2014is an unstable answer to the sufferings of life, which can only be overcome by complete dissociation from everything we would know as being human. While we seem to feel in our bodies that some kind of somatic integration is possible, the psychoanalytic view suggests another way of looking at the \u2018enlightenment\u2019 goal we seek. If it really is a fantasized mirage beyond the horizon, we might wonder if we\u2019ve been chasing it off the cliff of personal injury.<\/p>\n

At its best, psychoanalytic literature provides rich insight into the process of self-formation, both through and against the development of an independent body. It tracks the early childhood attachments, and strategies for self-soothing and the acceptable expression of desire. It is very concerned with how a sense of selfhood displaces, satisfies, or neutralizes bodily needs, and whether resentment or even enmity towards the body can evolve through this process. It offers multiple narratives for the origin of self and body images: the internal ideals and disappointments that mediate both solitary and social actions. What is yoga, if not the active adjustment or even manipulation of our self- and body-images?<\/p>\n

Psychoanalytic insights into how early family structures influence the formation of the self now have widespread cultural currency. We know that how a child is cared for or neglected, how her space is invaded or respected, how she is made to feel guilty for existing, or like she\u2019s the very centre of the universe\u2014this is crucial history for understanding the kind of body and world she feels herself to occupy as an adult. If yoga is pursued by many today in an attempt to feel comfortable in their skins, well-regulated in relationship, mindful of their needs without feeling needy, interdependent as opposed to co-dependent\u2014the broad findings of psychoanalysis can be very useful. But I\u2019ll focus on just one of its threads here.<\/p>\n

The British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott described how a child who realizes that the parental object (usually framed as the mother, although today the gender-role essentialism of this position is receiving justified critique) cannot fulfill her every need may choose to interpret those needs as unworthy or even shameful. To manage this shame, the child learns to repress her needs by creating a \u201cfalse self\u201d, who masters the performance of a cheerful, apparently self-sufficient persona, refusing to display any need that would inconvenience the neglectful parent.<\/p>\n

We know this person: nothing is ever wrong in her life. Even the wrong things are welcomed, divine challenges. Not only is it illegal for her to be publically miserable, but she dedicates herself to evangelizing happiness to every dark corner that dares to remind her of what she\u2019s repressed.<\/p>\n

Decades later, in her amazing work on the psychology of anorexia nervosa, Susie Orbach extended Winnicott\u2019s idea of the \u201cfalse self\u201d into the idea of a \u201cfalse body\u201d. She suggests that as soon as the body reveals itself as needy, vulnerable, farting, menstruating, asymmetrical, or in pain, a sense of shame might overcome the person that can only be managed by fantasizing a body that must be incapable of producing these dark things. The false body is toxically vitalized by the anxious hope to please others through the performance of beauty and strength. The \u201ctruer\u201d body\u2014that vessel of aches and pains, fear and trembling, insomnia, frustrated urges and uncertain purpose\u2014doesn\u2019t go away, of course. It is still the lived-in body, wearing the fantasy as a disguise.<\/p>\n

Orbach writes:<\/p>\n

[W]here the developing child has not had a chance to experience its physicality as good, wholesome and essentially all right, it has little chance to live in an authentically experienced body. A false body is then fashioned which conceals the feelings of discomfort and insecurity with regard to the hidden or undeveloped \u2018inner body\u2019. The \u2018false body\u2019 is, like [Winnicott\u2019s] \u2018false self\u2019, precarious. It works as a defense against the unaccepted embryonic real body. Again, like the false self, it is malleable. In attempting to gain external acceptance, the \u201cfalse body\u2019 is fluid and manipulable. The woman in the \u2018false body\u2019 becomes used to trying to reform it along approved-of lines. It does not provide the individual with a stable core but a physical plasticity expressing a complex of inner feelings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s all so yoga. Orbach uses the language of \u201cinner body\u201d and \u201cembryonic real body\u201d (and later, \u201creal self\u201d) in opposition to the \u201cfalse body\u201d. This would seem to mirror many metaphysical streams in yoga that locate the source of bodily suffering in the repression or distortion of that subtler internal body that is closer to a real self. In many forms, yoga seems to be saying that the illusory physical form you identify with distracts you from the wounded energetic pattern that made it. Turn your attention to that wounded inner being, therefore. When you see what it actually is, it might dance freely.<\/p>\n

Orbach suggests that in the person with anorexia this tangle of real and false bodies leads to tragically divisive behaviour:<\/p>\n

She is caught in a tension. The separation from her embryonic self is at the same time an attempt at protecting it and an expression of her destructive impulse towards it. The push towards the latter comes out of conviction that the real self is bad, dangerous and poisonous. The real self has needs, and the mother\u2019s early failure to meet these needs are the proof of their \u2018illegitimacy\u2019 and \u2018the badness inside\u2019. The needs are what send people away and the needs are the reason that the person is not adequately related to. But since she does indeed live in her body, the bad object encroaches insistently, she cannot be released from it. (Orbach, loc. 1732-1747)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here\u2019s what I think: some people might be getting hurt in yoga because they are practicing in the bodies they fantasize about, instead of the bodies they actually have. Bodies they fantasize expressing a happiness that is not truly there. Bodies they fantasize as expansive when they actually feel like retreating, or expressive when they feel choked. What happens to the tissues when the mind presses them into the performance of a fictional suppleness and strength? Can the fantasized body push the real body, the inner body, too far, too fast?<\/p>\n

A brief personal example: I had a chronic hamstring injury for over a year that came in part by working towards Hanumanasana. As I worked, I would often visualize Hanuman\u2019s heroic leap from the Himalayas to Lanka and fantasize about that flight, that buoyant freedom. The wonder and devotion I felt in my heart could at times overwhelm the pain in the back of my thigh. But at other times, the pain seemed to amplify my devotion. Whose body was I practicing with, and towards? Is Hanuman\u2019s\u00a0body any different as a fantasy object than the body of objectified beauty?<\/p>\n

What a tangle of matter and ghost, as Leonard Cohen sings.<\/p>\n

The advice of Patanjali seems to warn exactly against working with bodily fantasies. The path of the Sutras proposes that the inner body of memory and habit emerging from socialization must be straightened out first through good ethics and interpersonal hygiene. The yamas and niyamas are directed at the subconscious patterns that generate a tense, distracted, and delusional gross self. Once these are pacified, the argument goes, the gross self of the body (a formerly \u201cfalse body\u201d, perhaps) can be repurposed through asana and breathwork towards a new type of interiority that goes beyond the psychosocial target of psychoanalysis, penetrating into the very heart of what it means to be a conscious subject.<\/p>\n

But modern postural yoga really doesn\u2019t pay that much attention to Patanjali\u2019s developmental arc, in part because it is far more influenced by the argument put forward by the more impatient Hatha literature. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, for example, presents the gross body as the first site of work and revelation. Without exploring the body first through asana we risk amplifying our internal splits by simply paying attention to them. In Saraswati\u2019s preface to Muktibhodananda\u2019s commentary on the HYP the Swami states:<\/p>\n

Self-control and self-discipline should start with the body. That is much easier. Asana is discipline; pranayama is discipline; kumbhaka (retention of breath) is self-control . . . . Why do you fight with the mind first? You have no power to wrestle with the mind, yet you wrestle with it, thereby creating a pattern of animosity towards yourself. There are not two minds, there is one mind trying to split itself into two. One mind wants to break the discipline and the other mind wants to maintain the discipline. You can find this split in everybody. When this split becomes greater, then we call it schizophrenia. (1985, 6)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I agree with Saraswati in a general sense. But I don\u2019t think his position is adequate if we want to explore the question of what kind of internal or external authority is disciplining the body, and according to what ideals, and whether the body we\u2019re practicing with is the one we actually have, or the one we want to have.<\/p>\n

I<\/span>\nn many ways, psychoanalysis might be a fractured and greasy lens through which to view MPY. Firstly, its overt atheism\u2014while perhaps a refreshing antidote to the metaphysical jargon that can predominate yoga discourse\u2014will be discordant with the sentiments of many practitioners. Secondly, the claustrophobic thicket of psychoanalytic language does not seem harmonic with the expansive and celebratory sentiments of yogic aspirations. Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and even Julia Kristeva, I imagine, would feel pretty uncomfortable at a kirtan.<\/p>\n

Most importantly, using psychoanalytic principles to view the drives, desires, and frustrations of yoga presents a bitter political problem that isn\u2019t going away any time soon. The primarily western scholars who, with varying degrees of transparency, use it to investigate yoga and the Indian religious cultures that employ it have been viciously accused of perpetuating the legacy of colonialism in academic and clinical form by infantilizing, sexualizing, and pathologizing key teachers and the core tenets of practice. It\u2019s a cold war, with one side calling for academic freedom, and the other calling for an end to cultural appropriation and distortion. From a (self-serving) psychoanalytic perspective, the pulping of Wendy Doniger\u2019s The Hindus: An Alternative History <\/i>over her secular analyses of class and gender realities in Indian spirituality, or the vitriol directed at Jeffrey Kripal over his suggestion that Ramakrishna might have been homosexual or pedophilic, are signs of a nationalistic ego-structure defending itself against the scandalous revelation of unconscious drives. From the perspective of both Hindutva defenders, and secular scholars who attack Doniger and Kripal\u2019s philology and sourcing, their work is just another way in which an empire dehumanizes its cultural and economic colony, stealing its stories to validate its own perverted and cynical view of humanity.<\/p>\n

As much as I\u2019m able, I would like to avoid this open wound by being clear that I\u2019m conservatively <\/i>using psychoanalytic concepts to investigate the motivations of global MPY practitioners of many cultures and denominations, including those who profess no denomination at all. I\u2019m not applying it to\u00a0a heritage generally, but to the experience of individuals in a transnational movement. I also acknowledge that the concepts and biases of psychoanalysis may be anathema to Indian wisdom traditions in many ways. But there is one harmony: neither paradigm is scientific. Despite the pretensions of Freud to psychoanalytic \u201cscience\u201d, and the scientific dreams of Swamis Vivekananda and Kuvalyananda, neither psychoanalysis nor yoga offer us the kinds of evidence that builds airplanes or proves the effectiveness of vaccines. The language of ego<\/i>, id<\/i>, libido<\/i>, thanatos <\/i>and cathexis <\/i>is as elliptical as the language of prana<\/i>, nadi<\/i>, chakra<\/i>, ahamkara <\/i>and atman<\/i>. Psychoanalysis offers a poetry of tensions and alienations to shadow yoga\u2019s poetry of intermingling essences and potentials. I think each poetics can learn from the other.<\/p>\n

P<\/span>\nerhaps the most withering criticism leveled at psychoanalysis is that it both dramatizes and normalizes the privileged lives of those who can afford it. In the words of one commentator, it serves the dubious purpose of \u201cmaking bourgeois lives seem fascinating\u201d, largely by ignoring the material realities of social power. Here, (the) feminist view<\/b>(s)can provide(s) a foundational critical analysis of power, inequality, objectification and overdetermination through which many other forms of critique flow.<\/p>\n

The story of MPY is a story of re-embodiment as a response to industrialization and technologization. It\u2019s a story of the development of a non-denominational global spirituality. It\u2019s a story of the evolution of self-help movements predicated upon \u201cholism\u201d. It\u2019s the story of resistance to biomedical hegemony and the clinical gaze.<\/p>\n

But it is also a story of how women have largely taken the reigns of a globalized psycho-somatic and spiritual culture for themselves, to find new expressions of strength and bodily purpose. For this reason alone, MPY tells a feminist story. And of course, any subculture that consists of 80% women must be interpreted through a feminist lens.<\/p>\n

Feminist theory provides sharp tools for investigating how yoga has been and still can provide resistance to caste structure, religious dogmatism, gender essentialism (and essentialism of all types), as well as oppressive interpretations of the body. Its modern usefulness is all the more poignant given that yoga emerges from the strongly patriarchal culture of India, which was declared in 2012 by a panel of human rights experts to be one of the worst places in the world to be a woman. Feminism, like yoga, shows up whenever the dominant paradigm reveals its cruelty. Both can mount fierce challenges to hierarchies of oppression and how they are internalized by the individual psyche as habits of self-and-other violence. Feminism isn\u2019t just about women. It\u2019s about finding new sources of power in the body, in self-image, and in community, by challenging vertical power structures that for too long have tried to tell people who they are. \u201cVisionary feminism,\u201d as bell hooks writes, \u201cis a wise and loving politics . . . [a] commitment to ending patriarchal domination of women and men, girls and boys.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the many important contributions feminism has to offer the study of MPY is in tracking and encouraging the pedagogical shift from the patriarchal\/authoritarian to the collective\/communitarian. Through scandals and the righteous cynicism that follow, then older guru-based teaching paradigms are crumbling, giving way in fits and starts to community-based systems of horizontal learning. The obstruction of this trend by the vertical forces of consumerism and commodification is a further target of feminist analysis. Feminist critics are also very well-equipped to address the overlap between yoga optics and the commercial sexualization of women\u2019s bodies. Without the lens of feminism, an examination of yoga culture and its impact on the psyches and tissues of not only women but all people rings hollow. Even the rich disagreements between various strands of feminism\u2014such as the friction between second and third-wave activists over how and in what circumstances women\u2019s sexuality can be a source of empowerment\u2014are instructive, insofar as they show a level of passionate intergenerational debate that is largely absent in current yoga culture.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also from feminist analysis that questions about normative modes of gender identity emerge. Every day, tens of millions of women throughout the world go to the mat to explore, reconcile with, revision and redefine the meanings and purposes of their bodies. As stereotypes of appearance, beauty and reproductive purpose are interrogated, the door opens for other embodiments of gendered or even genderless meaning. It has been the implicit and explicit feminist spaces of MPY, from Vanda Scaravelli\u2019s home studio in Florence to Christi-an Slomka\u2019s Kula Annex in Toronto to Sri Louise\u2019s Underground Yoga Parlour for Self-Knowledge & Social Justice in Oakland to online forums like Be Scofield\u2019s Decolonizing Yoga that have opened yoga\u2019s doors to the populations it is perhaps best suited to serve\u2014those who live and express through non-normative bodies, sexualities, identities, and politics.<\/p>\n

T<\/span>\nhe final lens is the broadest of all: the cross-cultural studies view<\/b>. I won\u2019t attempt a synopsis here, but rather list some of the questions, in no particular order, that this lens can begin to address:<\/p>\n

Is yoga a cultural heritage, or a global technology? Am I, as a white, western, privileged male, equipped to answer this question for anyone but myself? Do I need to be a Sanskrit scholar to properly engage with the history and philosophy of yoga?<\/p>\n

Am I qualified to use a feminist lens to investigate yoga culture?<\/p>\n

Does asana (still) have religious or esoteric meaning? Should it? Who has it been meant for, and who is using it now?<\/p>\n

How does the guru principle translate across cultures without hideous distortions?<\/p>\n

Should yoga instruction be professionalized and regulated, or does this destroy the intimacy at the heart of the learning process?<\/p>\n

Is yoga scientific? Can it be medicalized? Can it be tested in a double-blind controlled study, with placebo? If we start calling it a placebo itself, do we degrade the beliefs of those who practice it with religious conviction?<\/p>\n

How does the romance of Orientalism influence the drives of non-Indian practitioners?<\/p>\n

What kind of devotion can a non-Indian practitioner develop towards Indian deities? What does that devotion feel like?<\/p>\n

Are the ideals of medieval Hatha Yoga coherent with now-global ideals of therapeutic self-care?<\/p>\n

Was the gymnasium environment at the Mysore Palace where Krishnamacharya began his public asana instruction anything like the modern yoga studio? Did it sanction corporal punishment, and has this influenced the adjustment techniques of MPY? Why did apparently none of the many people who were personally injured by Pattabhi Jois or B.K.S. Iyengar lodge formal complaints with the police of Mysore or Pune?<\/p>\n

How does the fictionalization of MPY\u2019s \u201cancient\u201d roots in the soil of a fetishized India fill an aching void at the heart of an ahistorical and homeless postmodernity?<\/p>\n

\u00b0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe paths are many. The truth is one.\u201d What yoga luminary hasn\u2019t <\/i>said this, or something like it? Vivekananda, Gandhi, Krishnamacharya, and every yoga teacher influenced by Vedanta\u2014they\u2019ve all said it. They\u2019re referencing the primordial Shiva, who is said to have taught 84,000 paths of yoga, all of which lead to liberation. I\u2019d say that there are just as many interpretive strategies for looking at the impacts of yoga\u2014whichever path is taken\u2014on people\u2019s bodies and minds. But unlike Shiva\u2019s paths, these yogas of interpretation do not all lead to the same place, unless we understand \u201cliberation\u201d to mean the friction and pleasure of continuing conversation within a community struggling to articulate its goals, and to mature.<\/p>\n

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