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sun_salutationJust 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?)
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Date: 2012-01-18 12:10 am (UTC)On the other hand, I'm so sick of seeing "Americans"/"whites" criticized as a whole group for appropriating from other cultures. It just makes me feel like I'm supposed to be ashamed/labelled an appropriating, stupid hippie that simply borrows things from the "Mystic East" because it's cool - but that's incredibly far from why I identify as Hindu and try to practice yoga in my life. =|
I agree with the author of that article though, that everyone needs to stop acting like it's a surprising revelation that unsafely doing yoga asanas can be...unsafe.