First of all, I've said it before and I'll keep saying it, I think it's kind of hilarious that everyone is always talking about what yoga is and isn't. I try to stay above the fray, and rather disdain many of the upper-middle-class americans who've been doing yoga a few years who are certain that they kinow what real yoga is. But in the end, if you're going to do yoga, and especially if you're going to teach it, you have to have a pretty good inkling of just what 'it' is that you're doing.
I'm not going to go into in too much detail here. I think I'm saving it. So let's start with where the author of this article comes down. Which, by the way, is pretty close to my thinking.
She starts off right away noting her immediate aversion to partnering exercises. Why do you want to be touching a sweaty stranger? She asks one of her teachers, who says: "It's almost a foolproof way of getting people to lighten up, because it gets people out of their minds. It makes them interact."
But, she says, this is exactly what she hates about partner yoga -- the interaction. "Was having my face in dangerous proximity to a stranger's crotch helpful for my meditative state?"
She talks to the guru of one of her teachers, a genuine indian yogi named Dharmanidhi Sarasvati Tantracarya, who founded Mandala yoga, a yoga center that is also a functioning hindu temple. To him, yoga is a part of Hinduism, and most american yoga is a "bastardization of a spiritual practice", as the author puts it.
But the money quote comes from the guru:
"Imagine you go into a Catholic Church and there's something called genuflection, where you go down on one knee," he said. "What if a person comes out of the ceremony -- which is supposed to be about their relationship with God -- and they say, wow, my legs feel a little sore! And they go home and open up a shop and have people do genuflection for an hour to disco music. And partner genuflection, at that! It's completely taking it out of context."
Whoa, this makes you think.
First of all, for years, people have been telling me that yoga is related to hinduism, but independent of it. You can be a hindu without doing yoga, you can do yoga without being a hindu, or perhaps you are a hindu who does yoga.
And I have also heard from many sources that yoga just isn't all that popular in India, the home of hinduism. It may be apocryphal, but I have heard said and seen written several times that more people do yoga in the state of California than in the whole country of India.
But is what people are doing in California (and in New York, and right here in my friend Piper's apartment in Buenos Aires) really yoga?
Fuck, I don't know.
Seems to me, when you have this many reasonable, dedicated, experienced, and generally well-intentioned people who can't agree on something, well, there just isn't really an answer to the question being asked.
It's funny, because I lean more towards the guru's point-of-view than the point of view of most people practicing and teaching yoga in the US these days. I think the emphasis on movement, the flowing vinyasa style that everyone likes so much (and that I've been practicing myself for over a decade, three or four times a week), is mostly a to what you're really trying to do in yoga. It's just something to make yoga palatable.
Likewise, I think partner yoga is a major, major distraction. But, it's also sometimes kind of nice in its own way. The real work of yoga is kind of hard, and not necessarily much fun. So the flowing vinyasa classes (which I previously compared to dancing in a group, not at all a bad thing), and the partnering, and some of the wacky stuff that teachers throw in, they do it just to make yoga palatable. And that's fine. But as you get more experienced and more serious, then you have to start spending more and more of your yoga time of the Serious Business of yoga. Whatever it is you think the Serious Business of yoga is.
I will pretty soon start talking about what I think the serious business of yoga is. Let me just say here that I think you can get more out of spending five minutes in downward facing dog than you can get out of ninety minutes of complicated flowing vinyasa practice. Vinyasa practice is great, it's interesting and requires a lot of focus, but I don't think it allows time for mental subtleties of the practice to take place. On the other hand, if all you're after is some great physical work and the type of mental focus that vinyasa practice requires, than, bingo, that's the perfect yoga for you.
If in fact it's yoga. More later, of course. Meanwhile, read that article in Salon if you have the time.
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