Yoga Rant: Come ON!

I am a yogi: practitioner, teacher, and business owner currently on sabbatical/break from the world of all-things-yoga except my own practice. This month, thanks to my 'exile', as one of my students calls it, I have had some time to check out the yoga scene in and around our fair city.

It's pretty much business as usual around here, yoga-wise. The big studios are mostly power and vinyasa-oriented, which makes sense since such yoga is trendy and caters to the buff and yoga-as-physical-exercise-mainly crowd. There are many, many (and counting)yoga teacher training programs sprouting up, which could mean there will someday be a tipping point of more teachers than students (unlikely, but funny to imagine!). There's a little more hot yoga (thank GOD, so therapeutic), very little easy-to-find prenatal, children's, and family yoga, a lot of high-quality yoga teachers instructing in small, unsuspecting non-studio places (churches, their homes, the Y, senior centers), and studios offering meditation, Nidra, and restorative (which power and vinyasa around here largely disregard). There is the never-ending push by studio boutique owners (typical of national trends) to encourage the consumption of yoga crap: You can buy outrageously overpriced (and embarrassingly so) $120 'yoga jeans', $65 yoga shirts, and $95 mats. On the other end of the spectrum, there are a few new studios opening up around here, some of them struggling hard, as can be expected in this recession, to stay open.

Nothing earth-shattering. Then there's this:

A nearby yoga studio has begun offering lap dance, strip tease (without the disrobing, I think), and pole dancing in addition to their usual yoga classes.

Far from being prudish and conservative, I am nonetheless stunned by this development on the yoga scene. I get it but don't want to.

I want to think that the yogis offering this blend of the ancient sublime with the burlesque visceral are merely confusing the 'freedom' yoga brings one--losing one's encumbrances, one's samskaras ('little scars')and the dropping of one's ego--with the 'freedom' to turn-on whoever we want to using our groins, booties, and pole-sliding thigh power. I want to think those yogis who decided to bring the lap dance strip tease pole dance (LDSTPD) into their spaces are offering a sound and healthful system for exercising the mind, body, and spirit. I really don't want to think they are offering, but possibly they could be, job training.

This issue makes me sigh. Yes, it's none of my friggin' business how people choose to express themselves sexually and all that. And it's none of my business how other yoga business owners want to run their businesses. But I have a voice that is somewhat immersed in the beauty and integrity of yoga, and that voice says: LDSTPD does not belong in a yoga studio.

Sexuality and yoga ARE intertwinable and unavoidable. Witness the several yoga celebs having affairs with one another, with their students, etc. That is bad yogic AND life practice, but that is not about what I speak. I'm speaking about the big come-on coming to a yoga studio near you.

I read in one blog that LDSTPD provides a "great cardiovascular workout!!!" And I read that it gives practitioners a sense of empowerment, helping them to "raise self-esteem!" Mere excuses: I can name dozens of other activities that bring similar results.

Does our exercise and self-esteem boosting need to be combined with movements that are nothing but movements that suggest foreplay? with our images of ourselves as real hotsy-totsies? with our sense of allure and the naughty? No. LDSTPD is so much less than yoga. It's even so much less than SEX.

But this is American Yoga: Take a pitcher of yoga. Add your choice of free weights, extraordinarily loud music, dogs, bicycles, seductive dancers, human nudity, kick boxing, food, and booze. Stir well. Serve in studios wherever there's a buck to be made.

Welcome to the Yoga Circus.