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The IGG campaign<\/a>\u00a0to support this coming book is galloping to its conclusion. (Four days left, 3K to go!) Thank you to every contributor so far, and to everyone who’s spread the word. Thank you especially to my crack editorial\/promotional team: Jason Hirsch, Carol Horton, Roseanne Harvey, Laura Shaw, and Alix Bemrose. <\/em><\/p>\n _____<\/p>\n <\/p>\n — Leonard Cohen, “The Window”<\/p>\n _____<\/p>\n I<\/span>\n\u2019m about to take some time off from the post-pushing phase of #WAWADIA to plunge into a few corners of quieter research. One of them will be this:<\/p>\n A crucial but mostly-unacknowledged premise that roots the tree of modern postural yoga is the principle of prescriptive<\/em> kinesiognomy<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n Of course, if I make up a term, I have to define it. “Kinesiognomy” would be: The practice of assessing a person\u2019s character from the appearance of their movement<\/em>. MPY makes this practice prescriptive<\/em> insofar as it suggests postural and movement solutions for insufficiencies of character. Anxiety, depression and poor self-esteem are presumed\u00a0to be remedied by altering the architecture and flow of physical poise. Freshly sculpted poise is taken as evidence of moral and emotional change.<\/p>\n I believe\u00a0that analyzing\u00a0this premise is crucial to the discussion of why \u2013 beyond practicing with poor\u00a0instruction in\u00a0biomechanics or receiving harsh adjustments \u2013 some people injure themselves in asana. It\u2019s not enough to understand\u00a0that practitioners can drive towards postures and movements that are constitutionally inappropriate for them. It\u2019s not enough to understand\u00a0that some\u00a0are influenced by the charisma of teachers who are actually elite athletes affecting the public personae of therapists without appropriate training. It’s not enough to understand that many\u00a0hounded by an advertising discourse that relies on as much or more manipulative female bodily objectification as any other industry. Intense drive\u00a0on the mat is not only provoked by dreams of physical prowess or idealized visions of beauty or sexuality. Driven yogis are also breaking themselves against the physical premise of psychological virtue.<\/p>\n It’s been a common theme in the interviews I’ve conducted so far, but I’ll illustrate with\u00a0a personal example. Ten years ago, I greatly admired my teacher\u2019s ability to slide into Hanumanasana without warming up. We never\u00a0talked deeply about the philosophy or psychology of the pose, but\u00a0we didn’t need to. I unconsciously correlated his psychological openness and emotional intelligence to his postural mobility. So I began to pursue this posture and others like it with conviction, feeling that if I could be that<\/em> \u201copen\u201d in the pelvis, I would have a renewed inner self. This feeling kept me working at the posture long after it began to tear up my hamstrings. I felt like my pelvis was a tangle, and that using the pose to loosen that material knot would loosen the etheric knot of my soul. Along the way, I surrendered to the fact\u00a0that it would be painful.<\/p>\n Did the postural work fulfill the\u00a0expectation with which I burdened it? Not on the surface. Not according to the implicit claims of the Iyengar-influenced teachers I studied with.<\/p>\n But then again, I\u2019ve often wondered whether meditating on the pain of that\u00a0posture eventually helped to push me towards psychotherapy, where my knots, which were interpersonal in origin, could actually be loosened\u00a0on their own terms. I gradually understood\u00a0that my flesh\u00a0held and perhaps had shaped itself around psychological meaning, but\u00a0that\u00a0forcing a new shape upon the flesh would only twist and complicate that meaning.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n W<\/span>\nith kinesiognomy, MPY presents a newish take on an idea as old as the hills. Physio<\/em>gnomy was the practice of assessing character according to physical and especially facial characteristics. It held pride of place within many pre-scientific-method medicines from East to West. In Greece, Aristotle set the stage for Galen\u2019s theory of \u201ctemperaments\u201d in the Prior Analytics<\/a>, 2:27\u00a0(trans. A.J. Jenkinson)<\/em>:<\/p>\n It is possible to infer character from features, if it is granted that the body and the soul are changed together by the natural affections.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In India, the earliest strains of Ayurveda related bodily proportions and features to predominances of dh\u0101tu<\/span>\u00a0(the energy-textures of kapha, pitta, and vata), and then those predominances to psychosocial behaviour and affect. In a crude form, this theory remains in active service in today\u2019s global Ayurveda, played out in\u00a0countless dosha questionnaires and on the blogs of Ayurvedic hobbyists. It provides a way for selves to be diagnosed with a deterministic \u201cconstitution\u201d to which specialized products can be marketed. I analyzed this a bit\u00a0back in the spring with this post<\/a>.<\/p>\n Although some researchers \u2013 like psychologists Jerome Kagan and Hans Eysenck \u2013 have broken new ground in relating personality traits with physiological tendencies, physiognomy\u00a0in both\u00a0Eastern and\u00a0Western forms is now mainly regarded as pseudoscience. Yes: we feel we know things about others based upon their stature, features and movements, but these feelings are rife with cultural biases and cognitive fallacies that strip them of every power but that of poetic speculation. Yes: we encounter differences in others, and these differences mean something. They may even lead to rich therapeutic discourse. But we can never give positive definition\u00a0to these\u00a0differences\u00a0in any clinical way. Those who try are playing at the margins of the fascist eugenics that claims that physique equals destiny.<\/p>\n Pseudoscience or not, the physiognomy of archaic\u00a0medicine has survived, morphed, and\u00a0thrived\u00a0through the prescriptive kinesiognomy of modern postural yoga. Today it is ignorant to the point of absurdity to suggest, for example, that a facial or structural (or racial!) feature of a person is evidence for a particular\u00a0emotional characteristic. Yet we have no hesitation in correlating\u00a0all kinds of character traits with\u00a0the achievement of posture. It just seems to feel right, and MPY alignment strategies capitalize upon this primal intuition.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n M<\/span>\ny questions are:\u00a0Do we even know we’re practicing kinesiognomy? How does it impact our assessments of self and other? What embodied voices and needs do we override in light of this hidden premise?<\/p>\n The roots of the phenomenon make sense. Early MPY figures\u00a0—\u00a0Krishnamacharya, Ghosh, Yogendra, and Kuvalyananda, among others —\u00a0sympathized\u00a0with the anti-colonialist Indian physical education ideals of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh<\/span><\/a>, which viewed postural strength as being essential to the reclamation\u00a0of moral, spiritual, and cultural power in a land yearning for freedom and dignity.\u00a0(See Mark Singleton’s Yoga Body<\/em>\u00a0for more on this.)\u00a0But today, kinesiognomy\u00a0has reached\u00a0far beyond this early revolutionary thrust.<\/p>\n Beyond its\u00a0obvious display on the magazine stands, the elision between form and virtue is now pervasive in most\u00a0globalized branches of MPY, with the possible exceptions of the Sivananda\u00a0brand. It’s as prominent on\u00a0the vinyasa side of things — represented by the teachings of Jois and his students — as it is on\u00a0the alignment side, held by\u00a0the legacy of B.K.S. Iyengar.\u00a0Brad Ramsey, senior student of Jois, says\u00a0(in Stern and Donahaye, 2012): \u201cThe series is just a mold toward a body that meets the requirements for spiritual advancement, I believe.\u201d Iyengar says, while demonstrating a ramrod Tadasana (time cue 5:08 in\u00a0this<\/a>\u00a0video): \u201cAll of these practices make us into a true human being, because we are still not fit for the divine level.\u201d Beyond the hallowed halls of Mysore and Pune, this attitude lurks in every studio where the air is thick with the teacher’s adjusting gaze, where\u00a0at times it feels\u00a0that you are there to be corrected more than you’re there to explore your uniqueness, or to simply play.<\/p>\n To see how this premise has been furthered refined while being stripped of overt religious content, consider the marketing\u00a0of\u00a0David Regelin, which\u00a0is\u00a0taking the form = equals virtue meme to new and dizzying heights. For Regelin, virtue and posture combine at the horizon of geometrical abstraction. A few months ago he released this promotional video for his alignment-based method, which he calls \u201cVesica\u201d. The video is called the “Geometry of Yoga.”Oh chosen one, oh frozen one \/ Oh\u00a0<\/em>tangle of matter and ghost.\u00a0<\/em><\/h3>\n
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