linda's yoga journey

ramblings of a yoga subversive

Tag Archives: modern American yoga


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give me your misfits and outcasts and weirdos

I’ve always been the square peg in the round hole and that upsets people sometimes, even in the yoga world.  The yoga world can be as politically correct as the non-yoga world when the first thing out of someone’s mouth is “you’re not yogic” or “you’re a hater” when someone questions yoga’s current status quo.   Believe me; in my 7 years of writing this blog I’ve been called an unyogic hater more times than I can count.

So when I read Rachel Held Evans’ post, “Blessed Are the Uncool”, I said HALLELAJAH.  I am not Christian and I don’t go to any church but I I think her post is perfectly applicable to the current yoga scene:  “Jesus taught us that when we throw a banquet or a party, our invitation list should include ‘the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.’   So why do our church marketing teams target the young, the hip, the healthy, and the resourced?”

Look at any ad for any yoga class or any yoga product in any yoga magazine and you won’t see the likenesses of the women I taught tonight at the domestic violence shelter.  They wouldn’t be considered hip, they all have aches and pains and scars and they certainly aren’t resourced.  No one is marketing to them because they can’t afford the $100 yoga pants or the Swarovski crystal chakra pendants.

I’ve always loved Anne Cushman’s take on this in her Yoga Chic and the First Noble Truth written in 2003.  Yes, 2003 — ask yourself if things have changed much.  2003 is almost ancient history in modern American yoga commentary.

“So lately, I’m looking for a different kind of image to inspire my practice. The book I’m shopping for would show pictures of all sorts of people doing yoga and meditating. There would be old people, fat people, scarred people, profusely hairy people, people with bad skin and big noses, people with thighs riddled with cellulite, people with droopy breasts and flabby thighs and faces etched with lines from hard living. There would be people with cerebral palsy, people gone bald from chemotherapy, people paralyzed by drive-by shootings, people who’d lost limbs in wars. Some people would do the poses perfectly. Others would do them clumsily, propped up on sandbags and bolsters, unable even to touch their fingertips to the floor.”

Evans writes,  “…when the gospel story is accompanied by a fog machine and light show, I always get this creeped-out feeling like someone’s trying to sell me something.  It’s as though we’re all compensating for the fact that Christianity’s not good enough to stand on its own so we’re adding snacks.”

Substitute “yoga” for “Christianity” and “weights” or “Pilates” or “pole dancing” for “snacks” and you’ll get what I’m driving at.

It is true that there are now more and more yoga classes for underserved populations, but the face of modern American yoga isn’t just the young, the hip, the healthy, and the resourced.   Maybe if the marketing face wasn’t young, hip, healthy, and resourced, then yoga would truly finally become mainstream.   For real.

“And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said “All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them”
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.”

Suzanne.  Leonard Cohen


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I got dem old-school yoga blues again, mama (apologies to Janis Joplin)

There was an article in the Chicago Tribune over the weekend about how blues clubs in Chicago are struggling.  That is, not so much the blues clubs in the white, tourist areas of Chicago, but the clubs on the mostly black West and South sides:  “The official Chicago blues scene — a magnet for tourists from around the globe — prospers downtown and on the North Side, catering to a predominantly white audience in a homogenized, unabashedly commercial setting.  The unofficial scene — drawing mostly locals and a few foreign cognoscenti — barely flickers on the South and West sides, attracting a mostly black, older crowd to more homespun, decidedly less profitable locales.“  [emphasis supplied.]

The more I read this article I couldn’t help but think that what I was reading was analagous in certain respects to the modern yoga scene, especially when I read this:

  “So what happens when an indigenous music . . . gets repackaged for sale . . . ?  An art form starts to die.”

Much has been written about how yoga changed when it came West.  I was in a workshop with Paul Grilley when he said that in order for yoga to be palatable for Western tastes the spirituality had to be stripped out of it.   Sure there are many teachers who teach a classical or as I call it, an old-school style of yoga, but how filled are those classes compared to the ones where the teacher dazzles you with a one-armed handstand, kicks your ass, and sends you home with a two minute savasana and no meditation?  From my own experience when I taught at a studio my “modern” vinyasa flow class had a lot more students in it than my classical vinyasa krama class where I usually had three or four or none at all.

Naming themselves after a Muddy Waters song, the Rolling Stones visited the South side of Chicago, home of the urban blues, to pay homage to  Chess Records.   That was the rock and roll version of going to India to see where it all started, to experience the undiluted roots of their music.

Times and tastes naturally change in both music and  yoga.  Even vintage country music has faded away to the sanitized pop version of what it is now.  As the article points out the nature and purpose of the newer blues clubs is different from the old clubs.  At best, the newer clubs are filled; at worst, the bands serve up an endless repetition of songs like “Sweet Home Chicago” and “Hoochie Coochie Man.”  In those clubs where blues music is watered down and branded, no one expects the music to develop to the next level.

The newer clubs give the people what they want in order to fill the place whether it’s selling T shirts or having the bands play the same old tired songs.   Just like the clubs, yoga studios give their students what they think they want in order to keep drawing them in — yogalates, yoga with weights, whatever it takes.

In comparing yoga and art, one of my students said that art is always difficult to describe or explain, but you know it when you find it.  Great art, like yoga, has soul.  Yoga has morphed and changed since it has come to the West and while nothing can stay the same, I wonder, like the musicians wondered in the Tribune article, what is lost when the infrastructure of the yoga music is shattered.

As one of the musicians said in the article, there will always be the tourist clubs that sell the blues “brand” but “you can’t look to the clubs and the club owners to pursue blues as a culture.  It is to them purely a commodity, nothing more than a bottle of whiskey, and how much money you can make off of it.”

Not an ideal way for preserving an art form, whether it’s music or yoga.