Showing posts with label yoga blogosphere. Show all posts
Showing posts with label yoga blogosphere. Show all posts

Thursday, December 12, 2013

This Blog Has Moved!

To consolidate my online work, I've shifted my blog location to my personal website. Please join me there! The URL is: carolhortonphd.com/blog.

I published my first post on that site, "The Bikram Scandal and the Shadow Side of Yoga," yesterday. Hope you'll click over and join the conversation there.

Email subscribers to Think Body Electric please note: In order to keep receiving notifications of new blog posts, you'll need to go to the new blog spot and sign up there - the mailing list won't be automatically transferred. My apologies for the inconvenience.

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Celebrating Yoga in America

Saluting American Yoga! with thanks to YogaDawg (July 4, 2013)

[Note: This post was originally entitled "In Praise of American Yoga." I decided to change it in response to comments from several people who feel that the term "American yoga" is inherently offensive and objectionable. I see it as simply descriptive, and interchangeable with "yoga in America." However, titles form first impressions, which are important. So, I've changed that, but left the rest of the wording alone.]


I like to think of myself as a cultural critic. Flag-waving patriotism turns me off. Nonetheless, when it comes to the subject of American yoga, at the moment I’m feeling oddly cheerleader-prone. Why? Because while I’m all in favor of critiquing the commercialism, narcissism, and cultural shallowness that runs so rampant in American yoga culture, I’m also opposed to caricaturing the entire endeavor as the hopelessly corrupt offspring of an otherwise pristine yoga tradition.

Of course, it’s certainly true that the American yoga boom of the past 15 years has generated its own peculiar set of problems. Critical issues of commercialism, cultural appropriation, and cheapening a rich tradition absolutely need to be raised. From my perspective, the issue isn’t whether critiques of American yoga are warranted: they are. The question, rather, is how to levy those critiques constructively.

Trying to neatly separate “corrupt” American yoga from some supposedly “pure” alternative (whether Indian, Hindu, Tantric, traditional, countercultural, old school, 1990s, or whatever) is not constructive for two key reasons. First, it’s inaccurate and misleading. Real life is messy. This has always been true, both within the yoga tradition and beyond it. Second, splitting the complexities of life into all-good and all-bad categories is unnecessarily divisive, and generates unintended negativity.


Looking for Shangri-La?


Ironically, dichotomies of “pure” versus “corrupt” yoga encourage well meaning Westerners wishing to honor the yoga tradition to unwittingly reinscribe colonialist stereotypes of the “mystic East,” imagining India as a timeless, mystic land beyond the reach of modernity and even history itself. Even in the 21st century, the iconic image of Shangri-La continues to loom large in the American yoga imaginary. (A "mystical, harmonious valley, gently guided from a lamasery” featured in the 1933 novel, Lost Horizon, “Shangri-La has become synonymous with any earthly paradise, and particularly a mythical Himalayan utopia — a permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world.”)

For example, xoJane recently published an earnest article entitled "Like It Or Not, Western Yoga Is A Textbook Example Of Cultural Appropriation."  The author, s.e. smith (a self-described white atheist who rejects normal gender pronouns such as “she” in favor of the gender-neutral term “ou”) shares her (or rather, ous) reservations about practicing yoga, which ou describes as “an aspect of the Hindu faith with origins that are thousands of years past.”
until very recently . . . I did asanas and pranayama myself as a way of focusing, centering, and strengthening myself. I liked how these practices made my body and mind feel, but I also felt deeply troubled by my use of some of the eight limbs of yoga in a way that didn’t feel in accordance with the practice’s roots, and by my practice of yoga as an atheist.

If I wouldn’t dream of taking Communion at a Catholic Church if I was attending as a guest, why would I practice yoga? Aren’t there lots of explicitly fitness-oriented options for me to choose from that don’t require me to appropriate religious practices from former colonies?
This line of reasoning ignores the fact that the term “Hinduism” was a Western invention that lumped the disparate religious traditions of India into a single category modeled after our own monotheistic faiths. True, Indians quickly appropriated the term and used it means of building a unified national identity and fighting British colonialism. That shift, however, soon birthed a new, deliberately modernized variant of Hinduism – which, in turn, provided the cultural context for the development of modern yoga.

Given that modern yoga was intentionally crafted to speak to people of all faiths, nationalities, and cultures, ou’s feeling that ou should not practice it since ou is not Hindu is, in fact, a rejection of Indian tradition, not an affirmation of it! However, as long as India is implicitly assumed to be a land beyond history, it's impossible to imagine such a possibility, as it's based on a recognition that Indian spiritual practices (including yoga and Hinduism) evolve over time, just as they do in the West.

Image via Decolonizing Yoga (excerpt from Yoga PhD)

Similarly, in a recent Huff Post article, Yogi Cameron Alborzian denounces contemporary asana-based yoga on the grounds that “postures were never supposed to become the centerpiece of the entire practice, and it was only through the ego that people started to focus on them. As a result, more postures have been invented in the last few centuries.”

Again, while well intentioned, the assertion that the development of modern asana practice was solely driven by “ego” isn’t supported by historical fact. (The larger point of the article, that it’s good to move beyond a simple fixation on the body, is a good one, and particularly notable coming from an .) T.K.V. Desikachar, for example, once explained that his father, Sri T. Krishnamacharya (the most influential figure in the development of yoga as we know it today), “evolved very important principles in the practice of asana,” developing so many new postures and techniques so quickly that he was “unable to keep track of his new discoveries.”

Modern asana-based practice, in other words, was not a corruption of an otherwise pure yoga tradition produced by out-of-control modern egos. Rather, it was a deliberate reformulation of what has always been a vast and diverse tradition, re-crafting yoga in ways designed to meets the needs of the modern world.


The Pure and the Impure?


In "Stepping into the Yoga Time Machine: Before the Yogamagedon,” Chris Courtney attempts to cut the yogic wheat from the chaff in a new way. Rather than rejecting modern or even American yoga as a whole, he limits the corruption of yoga to what’s happened with it during the past 15 years in the U.S.:
Imagine a time before ex-cheerleader mean girls and lecherous douchebags had taken over yoga studios. Imagine a time when classes were harder to find, but were also less likely to suck . . . Imagine a time before yoga became an 'industry.' When there was a genuine sense of community and collaboration, rather than competition. The time you’re imagining is the late 1990s in America.

 . . . When I think of what we’ve allowed yoga in America to become, it seems that instead of holding steady in our practice to consciously navigate our way through the Kali Yuga, we’ve doubled down on its worst aspects. With every new yoga fad, gimmick, or distraction from the practice, we’re moving farther from the divine and speeding our own degeneration.
While I appreciate the desire to lambaste the slavish commercialism that’s become more and more present in American yoga culture, neatly dividing recent history into the “good” yoga of the 1990s versus the “bad” yoga of today is absurd. I’ve heard enough stories about L.A. yoga culture in the 1990s to believe that this idyllic time of “community and collaboration, rather than competition” didn’t exist. My best guess would be that then, like now, the yoga world contained pockets both of cut-throat competition and inspiring cooperation. In most cases, however, I suspect that people found themselves spending a lot of time in that big, grey area in between.

Similarly, the idea that we’re speeding away from “the divine” and toward “our own degeneration” is a bit much. It's worth noting that there have been some positive developments that didn’t exist in the 1990s: the yoga service movement, the expansion of yoga into prisons and other major social institutions, the explosion of the yoga blogosphere, the development modern yoga studies, the integration of yoga with somatic psychology, the development of trauma-sensitive yoga, and the expansion of female leadership, to name a few.

Back cover image: 21st Century Yoga c. Sarit Z. Rogers / Sarit Photography

Problems of Polarization

Since I'm sympathetic to the critical project, I wouldn’t be harping on the need to be more balanced if I wasn’t concerned that the public conversation about yoga has started to become overly polarized. Not long ago, we had the opposite problem: except for a few lone bloggers, yoga discourse seemed firmly sealed in a big, pastel-colored bubble, in which no negative observations were allowed. Now, the bubble has clearly burst – and that’s a good thing. The question, however, is how to build an inclusive conversation that balances honesty and critique with respect for diverse experiences, commitments, and points of view.

While it takes a variety of forms, there’s a recurring tendency to try and divide the sprawling, vast, diverse world of yoga into fixed camps with clear boundaries separating the good from the bad, the commercial from the authentic, and the pure from the corrupt. I believe that it’s important to resist these tendencies toward neat categorization, which present an inaccurately simplified view of reality, and promote interpersonal division.

Of course, it’s tempting to pit “commercial yoga” against “authentic yoga" (or whatever) to dramatize a valid critique. Yet setting up such hard-and-fast categories carries a cost. Dividing the yoga community into a good “us” versus a bad “them” encourages self-righteousness on the “us” side by creating a stereotyped “Other” to measure one’s superiority against. At the same time, it tends to generate hurt, anger, resentment, and/or alienation among “them.” Once such dynamics are in play, the negative blowback overshadows whatever good may have been intended by the critique.

For Americans in particular, there are also big problems with the social ethics of such “corrupt vs. pure” paradigms. Writing off contemporary American yoga as hopelessly tainted provides an excellent rationale for immersing oneself in a yoga subculture that’s uninterested, if not actively resistant to connecting with others in our society. At the same time, it undermines faith in our ability to confront with the enormous challenges of our particular time and place.

Given the sorry state of our country at this time, I personally feel that those of us lucky enough to have received the gifts of an effective yoga practice would be better off seeking ways to share this knowledge with others. Doing this, however, requires accepting the realities of American yoga and the society it’s part of in all of its maddening messiness and contradictory complexity. This doesn’t mean dropping critique or embracing the lazy apathy of “it’s all good." It does, however, require tempering criticism with concern for others who may not share our perspectives or commitments, yet still in their own way love yoga as much as we do.


Saturday, January 22, 2011

Slim Calm Sexy Yoga Round II: What I’ve Learned & Where I Hope I’m Going

I know, I know. Most everyone who even caught a whiff of the acrid smoke generated by the fire that burst out over the launch of Tara Stiles' last summer doesn’t want to go anywhere near that topic again. Even if you weren’t singed by the sparks or upset by the flame throwing, you probably ended up feeling burned out by the experience. As a participant-observer in this strange new culture of contemporary yoga, I know that I certainly arrived at a feeling of: Let’s just give it a REST.



But as I’m wont to do, I kept on thinking about it. And today’s New York Times story about Ms. Stiles’ skyrocketing popularity has made me want to share a bit about where that’s taken me.

Because my perspective on the whole commercialization-of-yoga debate has been shifting. And since the SCS debacle was the most recent epicenter of it, it’s a good (if dicey) topic to revisit in the course of rethinking the whole thing.

So: At first, I found the and burn-bra-fat-and-become-a-size-00 marketing that I discovered in conjunction with the SCS launch horrifying. Yes, really. That’s not too strong a word. As an oldster babe in the new cultural woods that had been busily growing up around yoga while I was off practicing in my little subcultural bubble, I had really had no idea that such things were happening. So, it came as a bit of a shock.

And my gut reaction was pretty negative. This isn’t yoga! This is BAD! But then I started to realize that this is a new wave. And that maybe it’s counterproductive to fight the tide. And that maybe I should listen more closely to people who were saying that it was lifting them up and helping them. And that maybe I could learn something valuable by wading through the internal wave of discomfort and reactivity that the whole thing was generating in me.

Just to be clear, this doesn’t mean that I now buy into the view that thinking critically about what’s happening in yoga culture is “judgmental” and “un-yogic.” I still see this as a good thing, at least for those of us who are so moved.

But at some point in the midst of the whole SCS tirade, I read a blog that kinda clicked on a new light bulb for me. Someone had written about how all of this controversy about yoga being too commercial had started making her feel bad about her practice. But then finally she decided that hell, she really loved doing her vinyasa flow to blasting pop music in her Lululemon outfit – and what’s wrong with that? 

And I had to stop and ask myself, really, given all of the shit going on in the world, given how many people are overweight and not exercising at all and stressed to the max, do I really want to put my energy into taking a stand against something that’s making people feel happier and healthier? It just doesn’t seem right: kinda churlish and ungenerous, really. 




But I don’t want to just “shut up and do my practice” as one friend suggested, either. Because I still think that there’s important issues at stake in this discussion. I still believe that there’s something compelling about the critiques that were made last summer (and in other iterations in the ongoing commercialization of yoga debate before then).

But I also feel that this needs to be better balanced with the equally compelling value of respecting other people’s experiences and examining the deeper nature of our own reactions.

For me, I think that a lot of my reactivity had to do with the fact that I felt like I had something personal to lose by yoga becoming a more and more shamelessly commercialized pursuit. I remember well that during the Bush II years – the politics of which I detested with heart-felt passion – I used to say that "yoga is one of the few things that I still like happening in America today.”

I felt heartsick that so much of what I loved about my country was being trashed and lost. And yoga was the one thing that I loved that was, in contrast, flourishing and growing.

So to see it seemingly swept up into the mainstream pop-cultural tide felt alarming. I wanted my subcultural refuge to remain protected, uncontaminated.

But what about all the other people out there who don’t share my alienated political-cultural views? Don’t I want yoga to be accessible to them too?

And what about the people who are just not for whatever reason ready to deal with the deeper dimensions of yoga – but who could really use some new sense of connection with their bodies, some stress relief, some physical health benefits – and maybe just some fun?

Like the lady asked, what’s so bad about that?

Milky Way over Owachomo Natural Rock Bridge in Utah
Wally Pacholka/Astropics.com

Well, nothing, I think – as long as bridges to the deeper experiences of yoga continue to be strong, visible, and accessible to as many people as possible as well.

It would, I believe, be a tragic loss if “yoga lite” eclipsed the other, deeper potentialities of the practice.

And I think that we we're fooling ourselves if we believe that these bridges will appear automatically, regardless of whatever we as contemporary practitioners may do to build, destroy, or obscure them.

But how to help keep them strong, visible, and accessible? It seems to me that past denunciations of “fitness yoga” have done more to build walls than bridges.

So now, I’m looking for ways to communicate about the deeper dimensions of yoga that feel more like invitations. Like opportunities. Like sightings of bridges to rich and exciting, if mysterious and often challenging places.

I know that passions run deep on questions of what yoga is, and what it could or should be. And I’m not naïve enough to think that there’s not always going to be a danger that if we discuss them, the fires they create may run out of control.

But I’m also hopeful that it’s possible to harness our passions in a way that creates a fire of collective inquiry that illuminates and maybe even warms us.

Either way though, as yoga practitioners, I don’t think that we should be afraid of playing with fire.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Writing Yoga: The Blogosphere as Collective Practice


I’m quite new to the world of yoga blogging, having overcome what in retrospect seems like a ridiculous amount of fear and trepidation to make my first post only last spring. Once online, however, I quickly discovered a fascinating new world of information, ideas, personalities, debate, and discussion. I was thrilled to find people talking about issues that I’ve been interested in for years, but hadn’t previously had a forum to discuss them in: that is, how yoga is changing, and being changed by its evolving relationship with North American culture.

Lately, however, I’ve been disturbed by my sense that this forum that I’ve only so recently discovered has been spiraling in some negative directions. Particularly in the ongoing “commercialization of yoga” debate, I’ve noticed more and more comments indicating a sense of division and even animosity. Private conversations have confirmed my sense that feelings have been hurt and relationships damaged.


I don’t think that this is where anyone wants to be. But collective dynamics can take on a life of their own. There may be a group energy that many individuals contribute to, but that no one controls or even necessarily wants.

So I wanted to step back and assess what’s been going on. I wonder:
  • If you’ve been involved in the yoga blogosphere – whether actively or simply as a reader – have you sensed negative dynamics building?
  •  If so, then what do you think are the root causes of this – and how can they best be addressed?
Since I’ve already answered my first question “yes,” what follows is my take on the second, offered simply as food for thought.

It’s Not a Blame Game

First, however, I want to emphasize that by wondering, “what are the roots of this problem?,” I’m NOT asking “who’s to blame?”

Trying to pin blame on individuals will only generate MORE division and bad feeling. So, if we can’t talk about this other terms other, then it’s best not to talk about it (at least publicly) at all.

I think, however, that it’s possible to talk about negative dynamics in the yoga blogosphere without playing the “blame game.” This may be naïve on my part – but I’m going to give it a shot and see what happens . . .

Working with Fire

My best guess is that the recent sense of division and bad feeling stems from the confluence of two very new developments: 1) the growth of the yoga blogosphere, and 2) the emergence of a new generation of celebrity yoga teachers. Together, this has proven to be a combustible mix. And, when you stop to think about it, it makes complete sense that this would be the case.

I’ll explain why in a minute. But first, let me just note that this sort of fiery mix is not necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, it can be very good – provided that it’s handled skillfully.


Fire in Yellowstone National Park

Think of our forests: a raging, out of control fire may be a tragedy, hurting or even destroying a precious natural resource and habitat. At the same time, however, our greatest national parks, like Yellowstone in Wyoming, use controlled burns for revitalization and renewal. Allowing the forest to burn periodically is nature’s way of clearing old growth, releasing new seeds, creating richer soil, and regenerating the cycle of life. Suppressing all fires completely would paradoxically produce only stagnation, disease, and decay.

In other words, those of us who want to continue discussing yoga and culture shouldn’t seek to avoid controversy and debate. Instead, we should practice working with it skillfully, both for our own benefit and that of the larger community.

In Search of the Cyber Sangha

The blogosphere is a peculiar beast. As my former mentor Cass Sunstein argues in Republic 2.0, while the Internet provides unprecedented opportunities to connect with different people, it also tends to propel us into more and more polarized camps, where we only talk to those who share our views. Perversely, then, what might ideally be a means of encountering a wide variety of perspectives in order to learn something new all-too-often becomes a means of reinforcing our pre-existing beliefs and prejudices.


Now, the yoga blogosphere is a bit different from the political discussion forums that Sunstein had in mind. People who are interested enough in yoga to read and possibly write about it online already belong to a sizable and diverse, but still niche community. And certainly, in the "real-life" yoga world, it’s easy to find strong connections despite our differences: if I practice Forrest and you’re dedicated to Iyengar, for example, we still feel that we're part of the same community (at least in my experience).

The blogosphere, however, has a very different dynamic than face-to-face interaction. Whatever we say online may be read by many, many others, each of whom may have very, very different views about yoga’s real and ideal connection to our larger society and culture.

We can’t immediately see how our interlocutors are reacting to what we’re saying and respond accordingly, the way can in “real life.” We may spout off and hit the “send” button, saying things that we’d never say face-to-face.

Online, we’re limited to the written word, which is a powerful tool that can cut in unanticipated ways.



This means that once controversial topics get introduced, working through them in cyberspace is inherently tricky. The medium itself has polarizing tendencies. While the real-world commonalities of the yoga community counteract that to some degree, a general commitment to ahimsa (or whatever) is not necessarily sufficient to allow skillful handling of a heated argument if the fire starts raging out of control.

Plus, the yoga blogosphere is relatively new: I’ve only been at it a few months, and even the most prominent bloggers haven’t been at it more than a few years. So there’s no tradition to fall back on. We’re all making this up as we go along.

American Yoga: The Next Generation

Until quite recently, the most influential American-born yoga teachers (e.g., Patrica Walden, Lilias Folan, Richard Freeman, Beryl Bender Birch, and many others) were students of the great 20th century Indian yoga masters (e.g., B.K.S. Iyengar, Pattahbi Jois), either permanently or for some extended period of time.



These teachers also committed to yoga during a time when it wasn’t popular. During the aerobics-crazed 1980s, when most were honing their practice, there was extremely little, if any money or glamor associated with yoga. For quite awhile, in fact, yoga seemed like a quaint, if not embarrassing relic of the now passé hippies-in-search-of-natural-highs or housewives-looking-for-a-little-stretching scenes of the 1960s-70s.

But they preserved. And eventually, a number of them became our well known “celebrity yogis”: Shiva, Baron, Seane, etc. (While these references may be baffling to newbies, believe me, they’re household names if you’ve spent much time in the yoga world.)

Now, however, a new generation of “celebrity” teachers is emerging. Most are quite young, highly attractive, and super-athletic – as well as media-savvy, brand conscious, and corporate-friendly. (Here, I’m thinking of teachers like Tara Stiles, Rainbeau Mars, and Kathryn Budig, all of whom have prominently figured in the recent “commercialization of yoga” debates.) This new generation of teachers is coming into its own in a very different time in the evolution of American yoga – as well as a very different time in American society more broadly.


Today, yoga is much less connected to India, completely disconnected from any sort of counter-culture, and infinitely more popular, glamorous and potentially profitable. Consequently, it’s not surprising that some (although of course, not all) of the leading teachers of this generation have a very different sensibility regarding the how best to negotiate the relationship between yoga and American culture.

The Nissan endorsements, , corporate alliances, , and weight-loss ads that have generated so much controversy are, I think, all bound up with this generational shift. By pointing out that it’s occurring, I’m not (at least in this post) trying to assess its pros and cons. (And please, let's try to avoid jumping into another "us" versus "them" dynamic, at least for the moment.) Instead, I'm simply noting that it’s happening, and that it’s an important development in the North American yoga community.

“Conflict is Inevitable, Violence is Not”

Put together a new online discussion forum that’s prone to polarization, and a new generation of celebrity yoga teachers representing a different cultural sensibility, and what do you get? Well, for one, fertile ground for conflict.

However, as the Third Side method of non-violent communication teaches us, “conflict, in itself, is not a bad thing”:
Conflict is a natural and healthy process, necessary for making progress . . . The world may actually need more conflict, not less, if the appropriate skills are known and conflict can be managed productively.


Constructive ways of dealing with conflict involve “debate, dialogue, negotiation, and democracy.” Channeling the energy of controversy and conflict into a productive force requires “a strong container for creative contention”: that is, a collective space that supports “a peaceful, nonviolent process for engaging deep differences, (and) an inclusive outcome that addresses the essential needs of all.”

In the case of the yoga blogosphere, I believe that the outcome that we need is NOT resolution of our substantive differences: I don’t think that we can or will come to agreement about the core issues at stake in the “commercialization of yoga” debates. Rather, we need to turn the yoga blogosphere into a resource that can support everyone in their practice by providing a space to connect with different people and viewpoints – some of which we won't agree with or may even find upsetting – and grow, both individually and collectively, in the process.
Older Posts Home