Yoga American Style

Boy oh boy, is the world of American Yoga on fire these days. All in three months, we've read about a yoga teacher murder, New York Times coverage of celebrities practicing yoga, NYT coverage on a 'doughy' celebrity yoga teacher and his mega-yoga following, rebuttals by said doughy teacher claiming falseness in said Times coverage, the creative and fun Star Wars Yoga, the identity made known, also in the NYT, of humor yoga blogger Yoga Dork, and two new books on American Yoga hot off the press. Oh, and just the other day, one of the founding members of Yoga Journal gave a big thumbsasana down to the magazine for its use of nude, semi-nude, sex-selling advertisements.

Some of this news is serious, some is disturbing, some is funny, and some is about American business and how yoga fits into it.

There's so much about American Yoga to love, celebrate, and enjoy. And why not? Yoga is a terrifically diverse system of health and wellness with roots so far back and lineages so crossed over one another that their interstices are as historic as the actual facts behind yoga's purpose and true beginnings will likely be forever unknowable. American Yoga, true to America's obsession for ingenuity, is a constant effort of tweaking, creating, re-creating, and hybridizing/blending/fusing yoga with non-yoga things. This can all be seen as fun and exciting...if you tend to see things as fun and exciting. Like many out there, I've had a good laugh over yoga doings in our country lately. But, like many, I stand as a professional in the field, aghast at what's going on.

For lately the world of American Yoga seems off kilter. For starters, it appears still in the glory of its own extreme popularity nowadays to resemble no more than an exercise trend. (I know it's not; I know it's the real deal and will be around forever, morphed as required to sustain itself in our crazy fast Western culture.) Sometimes I think American Yoga as a business--franchiseable! all-rightable! for god's sake celebrity-endorsed!--resembles the 70s exercise craze Jazzercize, only with better clothing. Loud music, expensive accessories, airbrushed yoga models, and pop stars claiming yoga as the shiz serve up this notion with a side of nuts and whipped cream.

What dawned on me the other day though, most sadly, is this: The nutsiness that seems to be American Yoga in these very days we are living disturbs me precisely because its excesses, in-fighting, idol worshipping, and appearance (still) of being one huge big trend shines a bigger light on American capitalism: American Yoga is a horribly good example of what's wrong with our capitalistic structure. (It doesn't take one to watch and agree with Michael Moore to realize American capitalism is rife with enormous problems.) And that, my friends, is the rub. I feel like yoga's been sucked into the vortex of the 'grow or die', be too big to fail, mentality of American capitalism and the equally powerful vortex of our largely external-focused culture.

Let's hope yoga can make it out of the spin cycle alive. Really.