Tag: Max Strom

yoga whores* for the corporate dollar

by Linda (Valdez) Karl

Oh my.

“Yoga” and “whore” in the same sentence. That’s a jolt to the manomayi kosha.

Sometimes strong language is needed to get people to sit up and take notice. What can I say? When I was a young hippie chick I looked up to strong-talking women like Angela Davis and Germaine Greer.

No, I’m not dissing any working girls. In fact, I have a lot more respect for a woman who has to make her living on the street than I do for some of the *corporate* yoga antics out there right now. I’m using this definition of “whore”: A *person* considered as having compromised principles for personal gain.

To clarify, be advised (and that language comes from my working for lawyers for 20 years) that I am writing about CORPORATIONS, NOT about any specific yoga person who is a spokesperson/model for a yoga mat company, yoga clothes, etc. I would not mind being in an ad for the eco-mat that I use because I love the brand (and no, it is not Manduka.) For your ** reference, see the U.S. Supreme Court’s “corporate personhood” debate.

My phrasing is comparable to the way one of my city representatives used it when she said that my town was whoring itself for the local sales tax revenue if the powers that be allowed Walmart (one of the 10 worst companies on the planet according to betterworldshopper.org) to build next to a marsh/bird sanctuary. Long story short: they didn’t. A citizens’ group that I started stopped them from doing that.

A grass roots group. I made my own flyers and walked door to door. No corporate sponsors. Power to the people.

Roseanne is on fire with her post on the rained out “yoga gathering” in New York City. She says:

“I wonder, do we have to do this dance? We all know it’s a dance. You really can’t convince me that, other then sponsoring an event with a guaranteed captive audience of 10,000, do these companies embody yogic values? JetBlue would like to co-opt the openness and transparency associated with yoga by guaranteeing “no blackout dates, no seat restrictions” on its frequent-flier program. It’s nice of adidas to sponsor a high-profile yoga teacher, offer free yoga classes around the world and develop a line of sustainable yoga wear ~ but its other business practices include endorsing the slaughter of kangaroos (an endangered species) in Australia and sweatshops in Asia. Can we separate these actions from its endorsement of yoga?”

Max Strom posted this response on his Facebook page about it:

“…exciting that 9000 people gathered in Central Park to practice yoga and I have been waiting for an event like this for some time. But it my opinion the event was sadly squandered. All the media was there, CNN, the NY Times, everybody – the cameras were pointing. For the first time in history the world put the …microphone at the mouth of the larger yoga community in America. But what was the message given? We are celebrating the Solstice. We want more people to practice yoga. That’s it? We have nothing more to say to the world but that in 2010? With the oil gusher reminding us all that solar power is desperately needed, 9000 people doing salutations to the sun could have brought the world an unforgettable visual and call to invest in a nonpolluting technology. And with hurricane season kicking up in the Gulf, we could have bought attention back to the people of Haiti. Let us come together again in mass. Soon. But next time let’s show what we stand for. And yes we can do it without corporate sponsors. Martin Luther King did.”

Instead, everyone walked away with swag bags.

I loved Max’s last two sentences, especially since I watched Martin Luther King march through my Chicago neighborhood in the late ’60s. I also saw a crazy throw a brick at Dr. King’s head and saw him stumble and then march on. I became politicized, radically, at an early age.

YogaDork asks whether we want to smell like Eat Pray Love….

““Pray” journeys to India’s sultry incense and spice history with jasmine, pink pepper, patchouli, amber, juniper berry, cardamom, and musk for a woodsy scent laced in exoticism.”

…and alerting the advertisers’ new dream, the yoga moms, that they should get ready to take out their wallets for the Home Shopping Network:

“Well, thank goodness for the candle set. What if you want smell like exotic praying patchouli, but want the room to emit love and mangoes??”

Funny.

I kinda remember India smelling a bit differently….

Yeah, something stinks. And it’s not the new Eat Pray Love perfume.

Of course corporate sponsorship is the way of the modern world. Sports teams started it a long time ago. People even get corporate names tattooed on their foreheads (hey, I like tats but you couldn’t pay me enough) and name their kid after their favorite soda or car.

Just because it’s the way it is nowadays, does that make it “good”? Really?

Have we really become that numb that no one asks the question anymore, “when is enough, enough?”

 

wild women

by Linda (Valdez) Karl


WILD WOMEN CREED

Girls at any age
seeking to live life with volume & verve,
to be outrageous & offkey,
mismatched & mischievous,
breathless & bold,
cosmic & clever,
brazen & boundless,
with a passion for the possible.
Wild Women make it happen,
gathering to celebrate
the secrets of a sisterspirit.
Are you a Wild One?

Pam Reinke, 2004

I’ve always been a Wild Woman, “contrary to ordinary, even as a child” as Jerry Jeff Walker sings in his song of the same name. As my astrolger told me, I came out of the womb wanting to get out of the box. I’ve had many nicknames over the years (including “Kozmic” when I was a young hippie chick), and “Loba” is one of them. A friend gave it to me because he said “wild women and wolves have always been misunderstood.” Ain’t it the truth? “Loba” is the Spanish feminine for wolf. Maybe that is why I am drawn to the Hindu goddess Kali because she is misunderstood by people who don’t know her full story, they only see the demonic side of her.

When I found the Wild Women Creed in a hip little boutique, I knew I had to have it, and it’s displayed where you can see it immediately when you walk into my house. So when I read the Daily Om today and clicked on the Daily Om Library, I knew that I have to get this book…check out the excerpts…

The Daily Om

Wise Talk, Wild Women
From “Wise Talk, Wild Women” by Gwen Mazer, with portaits by Christine Alicino.
Posted by: DailyOM
“…In the community where I grew up, I experienced older people who were not encumbered by age. One such person I was especially fond of was a…woman (who) must have been “old” when I was a little girl, but she practiced yoga, meditated, traveled, and told tales of fascinating places…

So much emphasis, especially in advertising, seemed focused on the value of youth and the need to appear young by any means possible. Young women worried about being old at thirty, just when they were gaining the tools to create meaningful lives. I looked into the cultural mirrors held up to women my age in television, advertising, and cartoons, and I saw elders, crones, fearful seniors, women fading invisibly on the edges of life. I did not see myself in those mirrors. On the contrary, I felt excited, vibrant, sexual, and curious, with rising energy for the quests of this new phase of my life….

(In this book)…Each was her own individual. Each danced to her own drum. Even if she had tried to force herself into a cultural mold, her individuality and need to create kept popping out. Each one needed to create a life and an identity, an expression in the world, and each one seemed to find her own purpose, her own center. They could not be damped down. They were wild women in the truest sense.

One of the most crucial things the women shared was the ability to operate from intuition, and many believed this to be more and more important as they grew older. Many felt their spirituality and their intuition to be entwined. There is a difference between the inner voice, which I like to describe as a quiet whisper, and the loud voice of the mind or ego that is chattering away with opinions and ideas, what we did and what we didn’t do, what we said and what we didn’t say. When we begin to discern between the two, our minds can clear. The sediment settles to the bottom, and we start to see the wisdom we’ve gleaned from our life experience. Inner listening-and trusting and following what we hear-is the most important skill we can cultivate. The wise woman within will never lead us astray…” (Emphasis added.)

I’ve been getting lots of messages from the Universe lately. Due to the nature of these messages I feel like the Universe is kicking me squarely in my yoga butt (the one I’m supposed to get in ONLY 20 MINUTES A DAY!) to indeed listen to my intuition and to act on certain things, like my own line of yoga clothes. I am also hearing whispers about starting my own yoga teacher training program, but that won’t be a few years yet, all things manifest when they are ready. My intuition is telling me to take it to a new direction, that is must somehow be connected to social action. Time will tell.

I attended a workshop by Max Strom yesterday. He was awesome and I highly recommend taking a workshop if he is in your area. The title of the workshop was “Yoga: An Act of Remembrance” and he started out talking about memory. He asked us to remember when we heard a song that we deeply connected with, or a place that when we arrived it seemed so familiar to us even though we had never been there before (like India instantly was for me), or a book that when we read it we said to ourselves “these are my words, I could have written this.” He said that these experiences are coming from deep within our cellular memory, that we have lived these things before, that these experiences were not learned in this lifetime. He said that is the reason why some of us connect so deeply and passionately with the totality of yoga, not just the physical part of it, but the total package of asana-pranayama-spirituality.

When Max talked about memory, it hit me that whatever I am feeling now, whatever I have been intuiting at this stage in my crone life, I have been here before. For whatever reason, the seeds could not sprout earlier, or else they sprouted too early and then died, as a baby plant sometimes does for no apparent reason. The feeling in my bones is that the seeds are being watered now for manifestation in this lifetime.

I also had an aura photograph taken over the weekend, which turned out to be a little freaky, in a good way. When she first saw it, the aura photographer (who is also an energy worker) let out a little gasp and told me that I have some “biggies” guiding me right now. My aura was mainly blue and violet with a large splash of green on the right side, but it also had five white “globes” surrounding me. My guides? Angels? Who knows, but she said that they’re guiding me to follow my own path. She told me to enlarge the photo to 11X17 to it’s highest resolution because then I might be able to discern faces in these white globes.

“Inner listening – and trusting and following what we hear – is the most important skill we can cultivate. The wise woman within will never lead us astray…”