rydra_wong (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rydra_wong) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
sun_salutation2012-01-17 10:57 am
rydra_wong) wrote in sun_salutation2012-01-17 10:57 am
Entry tags:
The Yoga Debate: An Existentially Challenged Desi Chimes In
Just wanted to link to this excellent, snarky and incisive piece in Hyphen Magazine on the "yoga debate" started by William Broad's NY Times article:
The Yoga Debate: An Existentially Challenged Desi Chimes In by Kirti Kamboj
On the pro-yoga side was expert Rebecca Greenfield. She held positions such as: "When done right, yoga is a sweaty work-out. And, no, we're not just talking the 'hot kind.'" And, "Admittedly, yoga attracts some of the worst people on the planet: The image obsessed girls mentioned above, super-hippies, and self-righteous spiritual types. But any human that's obsessed with a type of exercise is generally intolerable."
I found these points both illuminating and disturbing. Before, I was under the assumption that I'd been doing yoga all my life. Yet things I believed to be the core of yoga -- yama niyama ideals, body awareness, breath control, etcetera -- have no place in it at all. When done right, as Greenfield points out, yoga is a series of sweaty contortionist work-out poses.
So all this time, I've been inadvertently lying, saying that I do yoga, when weeks can pass without me striking even one sweaty contortionist pose.
(Mod, could we have an "articles" tag, please? And/or a "meta" tag?)
The Yoga Debate: An Existentially Challenged Desi Chimes In by Kirti Kamboj
On the pro-yoga side was expert Rebecca Greenfield. She held positions such as: "When done right, yoga is a sweaty work-out. And, no, we're not just talking the 'hot kind.'" And, "Admittedly, yoga attracts some of the worst people on the planet: The image obsessed girls mentioned above, super-hippies, and self-righteous spiritual types. But any human that's obsessed with a type of exercise is generally intolerable."
I found these points both illuminating and disturbing. Before, I was under the assumption that I'd been doing yoga all my life. Yet things I believed to be the core of yoga -- yama niyama ideals, body awareness, breath control, etcetera -- have no place in it at all. When done right, as Greenfield points out, yoga is a series of sweaty contortionist work-out poses.
So all this time, I've been inadvertently lying, saying that I do yoga, when weeks can pass without me striking even one sweaty contortionist pose.
(Mod, could we have an "articles" tag, please? And/or a "meta" tag?)