Healthism, Yoga and the Body as Machine

As some of you may know if you follow me on social media, I’ve been dealing with a minor shoulder injury. When I was around ten, I fell through a metal jungle gym, fractured my left wrist during the ten foot drop, and landed on my left side while at school. After going to the nurse and then having my parents take me to the ER, my wrist was treated and healed. But I didn’t realize until much later after I had became a more dedicated yoga practitioner that my shoulder had also experienced impact trauma and hadn’t healed properly, leading to over a decade of compensatory movement patterns. This is actually very common with impact trauma, as the instinctual reaction is to protect the area of the injury, often leading to postural habits that imbalance the body; for me, my instinct was to protect my left side even if I didn’t realize I was doing so.

Part of the lingering problem included an ability to slightly dislocate my shoulder, allowing my clasped arms to wrap around, up, and over my shoulders all the way to the back (yes, crazy I know). Yet for years, not understanding why I could do this and its connection to my lingering shoulder injury, I would dislocate my shoulders. It often felt like a great stretch through my upper back (even while I wasn’t learning to utilize my muscles to stretch the back). Admittedly, there was also some part of me that enjoyed the novel identity it brought, being able to do something so many people couldn’t do, especially considering I was never very athletic (book worm much?). Obviously, I have since stopped doing this.

As I have been going through my teacher training, I found that my practice was beginning to aggravate my shoulder. I’ve been practicing asana more than I ever have, and between the activity, weight bearing, long holds, and adjustments I’ve had to back off my asana practice for a bit and seek some medical and therapeutic help to let it heal properly, finally, after nearly twenty years. I am getting a variety of bodywork done to realign my left shoulder to proper placement, and am now trying to relearn proper postural habits to overcome over a decade of compensatory movement patterns. For me, this minor injury has actually been a profound learning experience in my own personal practice and has helped me think more deeply about my research, about what we are doing in asana, and about how we learn and think about yoga and the body in the Western yoga world.

Why do we think of yoga as only asana? In what ways have Western modalities of thinking influenced our understanding of the body as machine, and prevented us from a holistic connection and proprioceptive understanding of the body? What does it mean to have a deep yoga practice? How do certification programs reproduce and perpetuate limited views of yoga and the yoga body? And ultimately, how can we teach yoga as more than asana?

In sociology, we talk about how our ideas of health are socially constructed. What a healthy body looks like and the practices it engages in are socially determined through culture, socialization experiences, and medical practices. In the last century, western medicine has become a primary driver in our determination of “health,” often in ways that moralize the division between healthy/unhealthy, normal/pathological, pure/impure, such that marginalized populations are typically ascribed the status of “unhealthy.” In sociology, we call this approach healthism, and it is equally common in the yoga world where ideas of health, asana, and the body as machine mix in often dangerous and unanticipated ways.

Let’s look at an example of healthism in action. Women’s natural health systems, including pregnancy, menstruation, and menopause have been medicalized and pathologized for centuries. This is what I like to call (pseudo-)scientific sexism, and in the past included ideas that a woman’s uterus could travel through the body disrupting normal functioning (a “pathology” called female hysteria among Western psychology that wasn’t removed from their list of diseases until 1959), that a women who was menstruating was impure and dangerous, and (during the height of eugenics) that mental or physical exertion could actually damage future unborn children, an idea that was used to restrict access to higher education for women as it might “tax the brain” and damage our capacity for reproduction. And it’s important to note that these type of myths are not dead and gone! They survive in popular culture ideas that women are more emotional, that we experience PMS that interferes with our judgement (for which there is NO sound medical evidence), and misnomers like the popular “women shouldn’t lift weights” adage. In yoga, we often hear outdated ideas about not practicing certain poses while during our periods, despite the complete lack of scientific evidence as to why this might be necessary.

We could take this further to discuss (pseudo-)scientific racism, as well as popular ideas of size as a determinant of health that are similarly problematic and rooted in cultural and social myth rather than fact, but I think you get the idea. The point I’m trying to make here is that, especially in the Western world, we often like to think we understand what “health” means and how to practice it. But sociology teaches us that these ideas, like all knowledge, are socially constructed, historically situated, constantly changing, and can often lead to flawed understandings about the body, especially bodies of marginalized groups like women, people of color, larger bodies, queer bodies, and so on.

And if you are feeling reactive in light of this information, and want to proclaim, “Amara, how can you say that health is constructed? That PMS is a myth? WHAT?! *mind blown*,” know you are not alone. When I teach medicalization in my classes, my students often have similar reactions. This is because we are taught from infanthood to accept these ideas as absolute, indisputable “natural,” “truth.” It’s very uncomfortable to challenge something we have internalized and believed in for most of our lives. In fact, a great deal of social psychological research shows that people who are confronted with their own biases become defensive and reactive. But ultimately, confronting deeply ingrained misperceptions is the art and practice of yoga: to acknowledge the biases that we have internalized that drive our actions, and to overcome these illusions to get at a more accurate and pure understanding of our Selves and the world around us so that we can act from a place of knowledge and intention, with mindful awareness (which we can think of as a practice of vinyasa krama).

In yoga philosophy, we refer to the biases of the mind as maya, illusion, or avidya, incorrect comprehension or ignorance that clouds our perception, that is the “accumulated result of our many unconscious actions, the actions and ways of perceiving that we have been mechanically carrying out for years” (Desikachar’s Heart of Yoga). Such habitual bias colors the mind, obscuring our clarity of perception and preventing us from achieving true understanding of our Selves and world. The art of yoga is about overcoming this ignorance and illusion to foster a deeper understanding, so that we can avoid and alleviate suffering in our lives and others.

Healthism, Yoga, and the Body as Machine

During the past century our understandings and ideas about the body within yoga have been heavily influenced by Western medical practices and healthism. Historically, the incorporation of anatomy into yoga was driven by an interest in eugenics in the early 1900s (a topic thoroughly researched by Joseph Alter) and by the cross-cultural transmission by yoga gurus like B.K.S. Iyengar, who often utilized medical science to appeal to a Western audience and to legitimize yoga in the modern world. In this process of transformation yoga increasingly became defined as asana, which was more accessible and easier for Westerners to understand as it corresponded to already existing ideas of fitness practices and provided a tangible path of progress to follow. It was also easier to teach in group class settings than the more classical understanding of yoga as a philosophical practice.

What this meant is that yoga became synonymous with asana, disconnected from philosophical practices, and tied to medical science, particularly the use of anatomy, predicated on dividing the body into separate parts and systems rather than viewing the body as a holistic physical, emotive, and mental being. So we now take classes, solely teaching yoga as asana, that “focus” on specific parts of the body: a class to work your hamstrings, a class to open the hips, a class to work the core abdominal muscles, a class to work the butt muscles, and so on. We learn that this pose is good for this ailment, this muscle, this system. And in teacher training systems we teach the body as consisting of seemingly separate parts: poses that work the legs, poses that twist the spine, the separation of the muscular, skeletal, and nervous systems, a division between structural and functional movement patterns. We divide the body up into parts of a machine, that work together but are presented as separable. And “health” becomes constructed as purely physical and as something that we achieve by isolating and maximizing the utility of seemingly disparate parts of the physical body without a clear end point (something illustrated clearly by the creation of numerous sequences in the Ashtanga method beyond the primary series; there used to be just one until the practice was Westernized and the later series were added on to meet the demand and expectations of students).

This view of the body and of health in yoga is flawed; the body is not divisible, and all the parts of our body are interconnected. The organs are not separate from the muscular and skeletal systems, but are intimately tied together into a functioning whole. The muscular and skeletal systems are interconnected, and alive; habitual functional movement patterns can actually change our skeletal structures over time. We cannot isolate the core muscles from other parts of the body, or target particular body areas to work on in isolation and when we try to do so we disconnect from the sense of the body as whole, the body as holistic, the body as flesh and blood rather than the body as machine. We also potentially increase the risk of injury. Not to mention that the body is not simply physical but also a mental and emotive being. Emotional and mental states can change the physical body, which, for example, is at the heart of current research on the psychology of eating. In asana, ideally, every pose is a entire body practice, not just of the entire physical body, but also of the mental and emotive body.

And these aspects of the body are not separate from the world around us, either. We are not contained in an isolated bag of flesh; as Stacy Alaimo argues in Bodily Natures, the body is transcorporeal and interconnected to the world around us. What we put on the body, like body products, enters into us through the pores of our skin. The toxins we are exposed to become a part of us as we breathe, and the social, cultural, and institutional influences on our lives have a profound effect on the physical, emotive, and mental practices of the flesh. For example, research has shown that poverty affects our mental behaviors and attitudes, as well as the physical being as those who are poor are more likely to suffer from a variety of health concerns like obesity, mental illness, or toxic exposure. Gendered socialization can actually change the way the brain works. The body is ultimately permeable and porous, and as yoga philosophy teaches us all of these things are constantly in change, constantly in flux (even our bones).

This holistic, transcorporeal approach to health is gaining ground in Western science, and is being corroborated with recent biomechanical research on movement and stretching, on the new science of pain, on the psychology of eating and weight loss, on the existence of the microbiome, and in bodywork circles on the way emotional and physical trauma is held in the body across time. But most of the Western yoga world is woefully behind the times, as the regulations for teacher training systems have not been updated in decades and most certification programs primarily teach yoga as asana according to the body as machine approach to “health.”

In this “yoga as asana” approach, yoga becomes constructed as the achievement of various positions of the body, rather than a way or method of moving the body to prepare for the deeper, more meditative practice. Rather than think about how we practice asana, as a methodology of moving meditation and philosophical application practiced through the physical body, where the physical is joined with the emotive and mental and whose movement takes place in the world, we focus on disjointed poses or positions of the body and rarely pay attention to the transitions between postures. We focus on staying bounded on a mat, restricted in space, stuck in a box, rather than recognizing the movement in every moment, in every transition and position, as an extension and engagement with the world around us, wherever we are.

I like the term “chasing asana” to describe how we have become focused on chasing the sensation or achievement of individual postures, without a clear reflection or understanding (self-study, anyone?) of why and how we seek to attain these positions. What is the purpose of posture? In the Western yoga world, we teach students, and train teachers to teach, that the focus is on achieving the 2-d pose we see rather than feel, typically on social media and through popular culture (produced by the yoga industrial complex that profits often of this consumption-focus). And don’t be fooled! We are taught yoga is something to consume. To buy. To sell. To practice in small quantities in ritualistic and disparate spaces (studios), to keep on the mat, or to take asana off the mat, rather than as a way of living life throughout every moment, for a lifetime. And as a form of consumption, we can also think of this interpretation of yoga practice as a type of indulgence, because chasing asana is ultimately a practice of stroking the ego rather than non-attachment. Frustration that may come through injury demonstrates this, as we are attached to chasing asana, to yoga as asana, so that when we are unable to practice this interpretation of yoga we lose sight of the path, we lose sight of the practice entirely (although personally I haven’t been frustrated with my injury, I know many many yogis who have been with their own, and I have experienced this myself in the past when I was younger and did not understand yoga as deeply.)

We chase a construction of asana as individual positions, regardless of whether we have to force the body beyond its ability to get there, regardless of whether we are capable of muscular stability to prevent injury and ensure proper alignment. We don’t develop proprioception through deep self-reflection, mindfulness, and meditation on what we are doing, in every second, in every transition, as well as in every “end-point.” We are told to “listen to the body,” but never how to do so, or why. We are encouraged to “feel” but never taught how to interpret what we sense within the context of the lifetime, in the context of sustainability in our practice across time. We are encouraged to chase poses that biomechanically speaking often require us to go beyond a safe range of movement in the joints. We are encouraged to seek ego and pleasure through asana instead of practicing vairagya, non-attachment, in order to understand what is best for us and avoid being clouded by bias, illusion, avidya. We are encouraged to want to practice, rather than utilize practice to achieve what we need and encourage functionality.

We don’t teach asana within the context of yama and niyama, within the context of yoga philosophy. We don’t learn the classical purpose of asana as a means of learning to sense, understand, and master the body in conjunction with pranayama for the purpose of self-realization and elimination of suffering. Traditionally speaking, asana was one part of a larger practice of yama, niyama, pranayama and meditation, all of which allowed the yogi to, in a simplified sense, control the instinctual flight or fight response that leads to reactivity, instead developing a constant practice of acting with intentionality, knowledge, and purpose. The path of yoga is the path of learning how to act with intention through the development of self-realization, so that we may be a stable balance point in the sea of constant change, enabling us act from this anchor.

The construction of yoga as asana is exacerbated by the Westernized, militarized format of classes, which have changed from the individualized, one-on-one instruction between a student and teacher to drill-style group classes geared towards the average individual. This is based on the factory-style educational program that began after industrialization in the West which was also incorporated into the military, and subsequently spread to the rest of the world, including India.

In one-on-one instruction the teacher would create and gear lessons to the students’ individual needs and level of understanding. Lecture and discussion of philosophy and readings were common, and asana was taught according the individual student’s ability in conjunction with other yogic practices. But in the drill-style, group class setting there are time restrictions, we can’t assign homework or reading, there isn’t the degree of student-teacher contact, discussion of philosophy is limited to the brief moments of stillness in the midst of chasing asana. And even if teachers want to break free from this mold it can be extremely difficult, as many make a living teaching and in order to earn their income must meet the expectations of paying, student consumers who learn about yoga through popular culture and come to class with prior expectations of what they are paying for that put pressure on teachers to present yoga as only asana. While there are some ways around this, such as offering teacher trainings where trainers can teach yoga as more than asana (to a very limited degree), private classes, reading groups, and the like, these are more difficult to achieve and to find strong student support for.

So I’d like to leave this post with a few questions for myself and everyone out there to think deeply on. What is the purpose of asana, and why do we chase it? What are we really gaining by achieving more complex postures, or practicing 108 sun salutations (which, really, no one should do if they want to avoid repetitive stress injuries)? At what point do these practices become a practice of ego, and devoid of the deeper aspects of yoga? To what extent do we consume yoga, rather than practice or study it, because of industry expectations and encouragement? If the body is transcorporeal and holistic, rather than a machine, then how can we transform our asana practices to reflect this? How can we utilize asana as a tool to gain self-knowledge and self-realization, a tool to practice the deeper philosophy of yoga? (Because a tool is only as useful as how it is wielded; a hammer can just as easily injury you as build a roof to sleep under.) What are we teaching about the body and self if we are not reflecting on the bodily habits (physical, emotional, and mental) in our everyday lives, both on and off the mat? In what ways do we compensate physically, emotionally, and mentally in our practice, why do we do so, and how is this written in flesh?

Love, light, and… yoga ❤

Ottawa, Yoga, and Cultural Appropriation

Response to: No, Westerners Practicing Yoga Are Not Guilty of “Cultural Appropriation”

Today I want to write about the recent viral news story regarding the cancellation of a free yoga classes offered in Ottawa. The story has been met by a great deal of debate and discussion on the nature of cultural appropriation, how cultural appropriation relates to yoga, and concerns of “reverse racism” and “over-sensitivity” by marginalized populations. I feel many responses I’ve seen on the story have ignored some very important points about cultural appropriation and yoga that are relevant to the conversation.

The Ottawa Incident: What Happened?

The incident involved a free yoga class offered at the University of Ottawa through the Centre for Students with Disabilities that was cancelled because of administrative concerns regarding inclusivity and cultural sensitivity, namely that the class was culturally appropriating yoga from a historically oppressed population (India under colonialism and imperialism). Center staff originally explained the decision to cancel the class was a response to complaints from several students and volunteers about issues of cultural sensitivity and appropriation, as well as the fact that the center were short on staff and didn’t have the capacity to continue the programming.

The yoga teacher attempted to bargain with the university to continue the classes, including discussing the removal of references to yoga philosophy (which were already sparse to begin with),  focusing on “stretching” and “fitness”, and refraining from using Sanskrit (which she hadn’t really been using much anyway), all strategies that have been used successfully to integrate yoga into schools in California, for example. However, the center ultimately admitted there were no direct complaints about the class, and that they decided to drop the courses because the university was concerned about issues of cultural sensitivity and because “they couldn’t get a French name and nobody wants to do it.” The student federation president also added that “they suspended the class as part of a review of all their programs to make them more interesting, accessible, inclusive and responsive to the needs of students.”

A recent post by the disabilities center clarifying the situation is worth sharing, as I think draws attention to some of the miscommunication that has developed around the details of the events:

Never did the Student Federation at the University of Ottawa, or the Centre for Students with Disabilities, release the statements around cultural appropriation to the Ottawa Sun in the interview that we had with them on November 19th. The Ottawa Sun received emails exchanged between the Centre for Students with Disabilities and yoga Instructor. These emails, we would like to highlight, are outdated and have led to a lot of miscommunication about our program. [In other words, the quotes regarding concerns about cultural appropriation are from email exchanges between the center and teacher that were given to the news agencies, and were from several months ago during the review process.]…

The consultation process has been going on since the beginning of summer 2015 and because of that, the CSD has had a lot a feedback on how to improve the program to better accommodate their members. The statements quoted by the Ottawa Sun were a small-misrepresented message out of a larger conversation around the program. For example, the following concerns needed to be addressed.

First, the attendance of the Yoga classes was declining, this program has been running for the past 8 years without any re-evaluation and we wanted to ensure that students’ money and resources was being used in a responsible and efficient way to better promote the centre. There were some real concerns about how yoga was not meeting the mandate of the centre, and serving the needs of students with disabilities namely, students with physical disabilities and mobility issues. As the primary goal in the mandate of the CSD is to ensure that activities put on for the service users are accessible, it is our responsibility to address the issues and act upon them.

It is important to stress that the Student Federation at the University of Ottawa is very disheartened by the rhetoric being used around our due process to evaluate our service centres as we all take our jobs very seriously and work tirelessly to represent and support our students.

We do not condone and are very disappointed by the harassment and violence some of our staff experienced, due to the misrepresentation of our process. Acknowledging that many students are not given access to safe spaces in and around their campuses, the CSD in no way thought that suspending this program for the semester with the intention of improving it for a January return would cause this much uproar. Let us please revaluate this conversation and have a more conducive dialogue around how to make our campuses more accessible to those who do not feel safe.

So clearly there is a lot going on here in this case. Before I talk about whether or not this was actually cultural appropriation, I want to clarify some problematic arguments that have arisen regarding what cultural appropriation is, whether or not it’s possible to culturally appropriate yoga, and ultimately come back to this particular Ottawa case to demonstrate why it is not a case of cultural appropriation (but why we should still care about the possibility of appropriation in yoga).

Defining Cultural Appropriation

Appropriation is defined as a process where one group takes intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from another group’s culture without permission or understanding of the original history, meaning, or use of the appropriated good (adapted from Ziff and Rao 1997). The process is characterized by a power difference, where members of a dominant group have more power, taking from a culture that has often been systematically oppressed. Cultural appropriation is always a transaction that goes on between two groups, and as such is a process that always should acknowledge the agency of both groups, including that of the group being appropriated.

For example, Buyukokutan (2011) notes that particular outcomes, such as exploitation or equitable exchange, are more likely depending on the “whether the would-be appropriators and legitimate owners of the appropriated resource can strike a mutually beneficial bargain” (620). In this way, he draws attention to the way appropriation is not simply a one-way process, but often serves to benefit both groups (if unequally). As such, appropriation is best understood as reciprocal “exchange,” if an unequal one. Appropriation is a transaction where the dominant group has substantially more power to control that process and ultimately benefits much more as a result. As a consequence of the power differential involved in appropriation, the process can be harmful, whether that damage is cultural, emotional, economic, or intellectual, and is a cause for concern for this reason, since (regardless of the intentions of the taker) it may negatively impact the culture, identity, or life course of those experiencing appropriation.

Typically only members of the dominant group profit from appropriation, often through commodification of the appropriated cultural good that simplifies the meaning or history, utilizes stereotypical representations, or results in the symbolic annihilation of the original culture—when the original culture is marginalized, misrepresented, or ignored entirely, including when the origins of the appropriated cultural object are erased or when historical oppression experienced by the non-dominant group is trivialized (see Gerbner 1972; Gerbner and Gross 1976; Coleman and Yochim 2008). It is thus by culturally appropriating “that one asserts power and privilege” because the act of appropriation is largely driven and controlled by the more powerful, dominant group (Hooks 1992: 36). Thus, the terms of “exchange” take place according to the needs and desires of the taker in ways that benefit the dominant group. Often, the taker is also able to engage in the politics of self-serving distinction, utilizing the appropriated culture to garner higher prestige or status unavailable to members of the nondominant group.

Can Westerners Culturally Appropriate Yoga? (Hint: Yes, and so can Indians)

Michelle Goldberg has responded to this event with an article that claims Westerners practicing yoga are not guilty of cultural appropriation. She argues the Ottawa case is part of a larger trend where certain groups who she claims “know very little of the cultures they purport to protect” are overly-sensitive about appropriation, and fail to understand the historical case of cultural diffusion of yoga to the West. (She cites the website Decolonizing Yoga as a example of such groups, which is incredibly problematic considering she claims such people know “little” about yoga or cultural appropriation, and this is definitely not the case for those involved with this site.) In general, her article argues westerners practicing yoga are somehow incapable of engaging in cultural appropriation because claims of appropriation “completely ignore the agency of Indians themselves who have been making a concerted effort to export yoga to the West since the late 19^th century.” Thus, it’s somehow impossible for westerners to culturally appropriate yoga because Indian gurus have been engaged in exporting yoga for centuries, with the implication being that the Ottawa case is an overreaction and misapplication of the term cultural appropriation and is, in fact, people just being “overly sensitive.”

First, there are some serious problems with her brief vignette of the history of diffusion of yoga to the West by Indian gurus, and her argument that Indians have been exporting yoga to the West willingly over the last century and as a unified group. Goldberg rightly identifies that “Indians saw getting Westerners interested in yoga as a way of undermining British colonialism.” But what is left out of this discussion is how practices of hatha yoga, in particular, were actually reconceptualized (cough, appropriated) by educated, middle-class Indian intellectuals like Vivekananda in order to create a new formulation of “yoga” that was more acceptable to Westerns, Indian elites, and Indian nationalists. This newly formulated “modern” yoga was aligned with nationalistic projects to distance the developing independent Indian state from Orientalist stereotypes that portrayed India as “superstitious” and “traditional,” and instead sought to portray India, through a reconceptualization of yoga, as “modern” in order to gain support for India’s independence. Sri Yogendra and Swami Kuvalayananda, for example, started the Kaivalyadhama Health and Yoga Research Center in 1928 to study yoga as a modern science (based in Western practices of medicine).

So we have to understand that yoga, even in India, was a fractured, multiple, and diverse practice historically, and did not reflect a unified group of individuals or a unified ideology (which Goldberg implies). We also have to acknowledge that certain styles of yoga (such as hatha yoga) were themselves appropriated by wealthier Indian intellectuals from subordinated, oppressed, and poor Indian populations. In this appropriation process, practices and conceptualizations of yoga changed. For example, Singleton notes yoga became more focused on physical postures as gurus like Krishnamacharya incorporated Western practices like bodybuilding (physical culture), gymnastics, and military-style drill systems into their teachings as part of nationalistic projects that promoted yoga as a “traditional” way to build stronger Indian men (to counteract Orientalist portrayals of Indian men as effeminate) and to build a stronger nation state (ideas based in eugenics, which was popular at the time but lost credibility after the horrors of WWII and the Nazi regime).

Goldberg also argues that “nationalists sent the Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda as a sort of missionary to America, where he introduced yoga philosophy in the 1890s.” But we have to problematize this, too, because at the time Vivekananda’s travels to the West were seen by many Indians as blasphemous, attention-seeking, and potentially damaging. That’s not to say all Indians felt this way and in general Vivekananda did have a great deal of support from those back in India, but again, this points out how we cannot assume any one Indian guru (like Vivekananda) spoke for all yogis or Indians.

Academic research shows that one of the main motivations for Vivekananda’s trip to the West was actually to raise money. He was broke, unable to find stable employment, and it was his financial struggles and difficulty dealing with the new responsibilities he faced upon the death of his father that initially drove him to connect with his guru, Ramakrishna (who Vivekananda had actually disliked when he initially met him prior to his father’s passing). In fact, the entire “official” narrative of how Vivekananda was petitioned by Ramakrishna to continue his spiritual transmission after his death by starting the Ramakrishna order is likely over-exaggerated, as evidence actually shows Ramakrishna did not wish Vivekananda to become a sannyasi, a form of religious ascetic, while his mother lived (most likely because, with the death of his father, Ramakrishna felt Vivekananda was needed to help support his family, meaning he could not renounce material desires and completely detach himself from material life; he did so regardless of Ramakrishna’s concerns, a decision that ended up changing India, Hinduism, and yoga forever). Similarly, evidence indicates that “Ramakrishna never formally initiated the future Vivekananda and the other young devotees,” as the renunciation undergone by Vivekananda took place several months after Ramakrishna died in a very unorthodox initiation that featured strong Christian content and was likely self-administered by Vivekananda and his followers (De Michelis: 105-107).

It was only after traveling for several years in India spreading his teachings and struggling with poverty that Vivekananda “hit upon a plan” to “raise the masses,” but recognized that he needed two things to do so, men and money. Because he had a difficult time raising funds in India (in part because there were so many sanyassins, or religious aesthetics, “wandering about teaching the people metaphysics”), he went to America to “earn money myself, and then return to my country and devote the rest of my days to the realization of this one aim in my life… I give them [Americans] spirituality and they give me money” (Vivekananda, quoted in De Michelis: 109). So Vivekananda traveled to America of his own accord, primarily as a means of earning funds for his religious projects, and contrary to Goldberg’s claims he was not sent as a spiritual emissary representing all Indians or all yogis.

In fact, Vivekananda ran out of money soon after arriving in New York but was “adopted” by prominent members of the occult religious organizations in the USA, including the recently formed Theosophical Society in New York and other new age religious groups such as metaphysics, harmonial religions, and mesmerism, whose members were “impressed by the handsome monk in the orange robe” and his “perfect English.” It’s worth noting that Vivekananda only started wearing orange robes during his time with Ramakrishna, who actually found the attire worrisome. Regardless, this apparel lent Vivekananda credibility in his new role as spiritual guru both back in India and especially in the West; he was able to start earning money almost immediately by giving talks and classes to wealthy white American occultists and by receiving donations.

De Michelis notes that “he acted as a wise counselor and teacher, as a friend and as a ‘soiree ornament… entertaining the wealthy and curious'” and that his popularity was partly due to “the fascination exercised in cultic milieus by Oriental teachers” who were romanticized by Westerners as “providers of genuine teachings, whatever their credentials” (111). Vivekananda applied to present at the Chicago Parliament of Religions as a “representative of the Hindu monastic order,” but this was a self-ascribed title and didn’t reflect any actual diplomatic representative status he possessed. So we have to understand that Vivekananda’s trips to the USA were self-motivated, even if it was for a good cause that he believed in, and that the formulations of yoga he disseminated to the West did not represent all Indians or all yogis (in fact, De Michelis recounts how his formulations of yoga were modified as a result of his interactions with new age spirituality in the West, which he adopted into his own understandings of the practice and then brought back to India). So Goldberg’s claim that it’s impossible to appropriate yoga is based on a misunderstanding of Vivekananda’s “mission” that ignores the ways his travels to the West were self-induced as a means of raising money for his spiritual projects, and not a reflection of some common approval of Western transmission by all Indians or all yogis.

Goldberg also claims that appropriation by Westerners is impossible because another prominent Indian guru, Krishnamacharya, gave teachers like Indra Devi “permission” to share yogic teachings with the West as some sort of “go forth and teach” missionary venture. But again, this is problematic as it ignores concerns Krishnamacharya actually had regarding Western appropriation of yoga, and is based on claims by Devi that such an interaction and conversation occurred. In fact, evidence actually indicates Krishnamacharya didn’t want to teach Westerners originally, especially women. Devi was a Russian noblewoman who adopted the stage name of Indra Devi to sound more Hindi during her involvement in several Indian films, and it was only after the Maharaja of Mysore, who funded Krishnamacharya’s yoga school, spoke on her behalf in 1938 that he even accepted her as a student of yoga. In fact, this revealing and prophetic quote from Krishnamacharya indicates that he was concerned about Western appropriation of yoga, contrary to Goldberg’s claims (thanks, Sri, for drawing my attention to this in your latest blog post):

The foreigners have stolen all the skills and knowledge and treasure of mother India, either right in front of us of in a hidden way. They pretend that they have discovered all this by themselves, bundle it together, and then bring it back here as though doing us a favor and in exchange take all the money and things we have saved up for our family’s welfare. After some time passes, they will try and do the same thing with Yogavidya. We can clearly state that the blame for this is that while we have read books required for the knowledge of yoga to shine, we have not understood or studied the concepts or brought them into our experience. If we still sleep and keep our eyes close, then the foreigners will become our gurus in Yogavidya.

In fact, while Krishnamacharya did teach Westerners this mostly occurred later in his life, and was related to changes in funding as his school stopped being funded by wealthy donors like the Maharaja in the decades following Devi’s study with him and instead became funded privately through fees charged to students. This meant that Westerners, who often were more able/willing to pay to learn yoga from such a renowned teacher, became a prime target market for Krishnamacharya even in India. It’s also worth noting that many Westerners actually trained with Krishnamacharya’s Indian students who then went on to teach, such as Pattabhi Jois, not with Krishnamacharya himself, and it’s likely he had little control of who his students taught even if he was concerned about Western appropriation of yoga.

I realize all of this history can be a bit overwhelming, but what I’m trying to point out is that cultural appropriation by Westerners was in fact a concern of many Indian gurus, even those who did end up teaching non-Indian students. Ultimately, we can’t argue (as Goldberg does) that cultural appropriation is impossible because “confident, outward-looking men who established modern yoga were eager to bring their system to the wider world” and as such charges of cultural appropriation are “invalid” because they “completely ignore the agency of Indians themselves, who have been making a concerted effort to export yoga to the West since the late 19^th century.” Goldberg’s argument is flawed because she doesn’t understand that cultural appropriation is always a process characterized by an unequal power relationship between two parties, and as such always takes into account (or should) the agency of the party being appropriated from. Also, her argument lumps all Indians into one group, although it is clear that no Indian yoga guru spoke for all Indians, or all yogis, and as such no guru could “give permission” for yoga to be disseminated to the West, since there is no group that has this authority. Just because a few Indian gurus actively worked to export yoga does not mean they wanted that export to be appropriated by the Westerners they taught. It also does not mean that Westerners can do whatever they want with the practice because cultural appropriation is somehow “impossible” or “doesn’t exist.”

Ultimately, anyone can appropriate a cultural object like yoga, including Westerners but also Indians. The idea that because a handful of Indian yoga gurus actively worked to export yoga to the West somehow it is impossible for any Westerner (or anyone) to appropriate yoga is incredibly problematic and potentially damaging, and ignores research on what cultural appropriation is and how it works. While I would argue on the whole most applications, adoptions, and variations of yoga in the West are not culturally appropriative, just because most of the time it’s not appropriation doesn’t rule out the possibility that it could be cultural appropriation. We should still discuss the possibility of appropriation on a case by case basis to ensure our actions do not inadvertently, adversely harm others. We need to better understand what cultural appropriation entails, something Goldberg does not adequately address in her article.

Bringing it Back to Yoga: Was the Ottawa Case Culturally Appropriative?

Now, in applying this definition of cultural appropriation to yoga, I think it’s clear that some extremely commodified versions of Western yoga that ignore yoga’s roots, do not acknowledge the practice’s rich history, use stereotypical and simplified versions of the practice, profit off a romanticized and orientalist image of yoga, and transform yoga into a power fitness activity reminiscent of Jane Fonda aerobics set to the soundtracks of pop music and featuring scantily clad thin white women can be culturally appropriative. Such formulations profit only wealthy Westerners who own such corporations, and do marginalize, misrepresent, or ignore entirely the origins of the practice. With that said, these culturally appropriative representations of yoga are actually few and far between if we look at the everyday practices of yogis in the West and the great diversity of yoga classes and studio systems. They are more common in the media, sure, but that’s often because the media gives a skewed representation of yoga in the West.

Most of the time, the variation we see in yoga in the West is a natural product of cultural diffusion as cultural objects, like yoga, change and evolve slightly with each iteration of diffusion as each teacher or student puts their own interpretation of meaning and use on the cultural good in order to make the cultural object more relevant for their lives and needs. For example, even power yoga classes can and do train teachers on yoga philosophy and history and acknowledge the practice is more than just physical fitness, implying that it is not cultural appropriation that is happening. Many studios, even those that seem the most “Westernized,” can and do provide workshops for students that go deeper than more surface-level (but still yogic) asana classes.

Sure, yoga has changed in ways that are sometimes hard to reconcile. And yes, there are obviously some aspects of yoga culture (like industries producing fashion “yoga” clothes) that are highly problematic, as such industries can often support unsustainable, exploitative systems of inequality. The fact that yoga is often used as a form of self-distinction to signal high-class status is similarly troublesome. But what I’m trying to get at is that most yogis do not use yoga in this way, or passively absorb and reproduced this culture. These problems (when they do exist in yoga) are often part of larger problems of corporate power, consumerism, and capitalist global exploitation that are not just present in yoga in the West today but in the Western world more generally. We should continue to talk about them, but it doesn’t mean we need to stop practicing yoga. For example, this interesting article from Vice on the Ottawa case discusses some of the ways we can still practice without culturally appropriating yoga.

While it can be hard to disseminate the more philosophical or meditative aspects of the practice in group classes, this doesn’t mean teachers aren’t aware of the deeper aspects of yoga. In fact, the lack of these type of yoga teachings in Western yoga has more to do with the corporate nature of mainstream yoga publications (which, again, present a skewed picture of yoga in the West removed from the everyday practices of yogis) as well as limitations in the standardized format for teaching group asana classes (which have become the staple cash flow for studios) than because teachers are culturally appropriating yoga. In fact, I would argue that most yoga as it is practiced in the West is not culturally appropriative in the sociological sense of the word. In general the evolution of yoga in the West is a complex phenomenon that has many factors, and reflects a more general cultural diffusion as yoga was adapted to meet the needs of a different audience (both geographically, but also temporally as modern society evolved and changed over time).

As for the Ottawa case, I think it’s clear that this, similarly, was not a case of cultural appropriation. First, there were many other reasons the classes were cancelled, such as low enrollment and concerns about accessibility for differently abled students. The teacher obviously did have a deeper understanding of yoga practice and the history and origins of the practice, but was seeking to create an entry level class for students of all levels that focused on overall health and well-being, a goal that is not contradictory to a broader understanding of the practice of yoga but rather reflects a particular type and level of class given the interests of students and constraints of the university system.

With all this said, I want to reiterate that just because not all Western adaptations of yoga are culturally appropriative does not rule out the possibility that it could be cultural appropriation. We should still discuss the possibility of appropriation on a case by case basis to ensure our actions do not inadvertently, adversely harm others. To do so, we have to understand what cultural appropriation entails, have a dialogue with all members involved, look closely at issues of power, and remain mindful about the nature and consequences of the process.

I also think it’s worth seriously considering whether or not, in attempting to make yoga more available within school or university systems, the practice has been so de-contextualized as to make it unrecognizable. I understand the benefits of integrating yoga into schools, but institutional constraints in these sites often mean that the spiritual nature of the practice becomes impossible to even acknowledge. At this point, I think we have to ask whether or not it is even yoga anymore, or if it has been so appropriated to fit within school systems that we have symbolically annihilated the roots of the practice in this process in ways that are in fact culturally appropriative.

The Ottawa case is, I think, an example of this process, as yoga is changed dramatically to try and fit into institutions that demand a lack of spirituality. Can we still retain the essence of the practice, and can the practice still benefit students if the spiritual roots are removed to fit into school systems? Are there alternative ways to incorporate yoga into schools (say, after school programs) or make it more accessible to populations that might benefit (like children) that would still allow the roots and history of the practice to be acknowledged and taught? This is a complex topic. There is no easy answer for those interested in increasing the reach of yoga and spreading the benefits of the practice. However, in sacrificing the complexity of the practice in attempts to gain a wider audience we risk falling into McYoga and McMindfulness traps, where yoga and mindfulness practices are yoked to unsustainable systems of productivity, individualism, and consumerism in ways that ultimately culturally appropriate the practice.

Love, light, and… yoga ❤

Oneness, Seva, and the White Savior Complex

“The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.” – Teju Cole

I recently saw two articles posted on Yoganonymous, and immediately something felt off. What I read was so troublesome that I want to clarify some things about the Western perspective of “oneness” in yoga that not only romanticizes the idea based on orientalism, but also appropriates it to adhere to ideas of individualism popular in the West (neoliberalism, anyone?). Often, these ideas of “oneness” are tied to the idea of seva, or selfless service, a practice that has become increasingly popular in the yoga world during the last decade but that is often inadequately understood, becoming a form of white savior complex for many privileged yogis. Frankly, this is also regularly tied up in some essentializing and problematic gendered expectations of what “service” means; in other words, in the West we often have very gendered ideas of service practices that equate service to caring for others, when these two things are not always the same.

The two articles I saw were “Why Oneness is the Key to Happiness and Ethics in Yoga” and part III of a series titled “Seva: Healing through Giving.” The first article was about the idea of oneness, what the author claimed was an idea of common origin, nature, or being that unites everything (not just people, but all the universe). She claims, “oneness can improve our social, political, and professional environments, helping create a more enlightened society. A society where we recognize that, as human beings, we are all cells of a larger organism.” In a similar vein, the article on seva is about how seva can lead us to love, and therefore connection with those around us: “the more you connect with your sense of love and devotion the more you will see those around you as part of your very Self.” What bothered me most about both these articles is that other than some of these fancy feel-good let’s-connect love-everyone sentiments expressed at the beginning of each article, these were largely written in ways that were, frankly, egoistic, and ultimately about feeling better about your self rather than about connecting with others or with something larger than “you.”

This can be seen by a simple discourse analysis of these articles. Both are meant to be about oneness, connecting with those around us, about becoming part of the “we”, so how many times to they actually use the words “we,” “us,” or refer to something other than “you,” the individual? Turns out, not that much. For the oneness article, “we” appears 10 times, “us” twice, and “you” or “your” a whopping 34 times. For the seva article it’s even more obvious: “we” appears 4 times, “us” never, and “you” or “your” 33 times. And these aren’t long articles, people. Seriously! What the heck is going on here? And it gets even more ridiculous when we look at some of the things these authors are actually saying with all those “you”‘s and “your”‘s. Take this quote from the oneness article: “When you live and act with the awareness of being part of a larger role, of being bigger than your small body-mind-life, than you are really contributing to this whole, and your actions matter tenfold more.” They are talking about connecting with something larger, yet ultimately what they are talking about is the individual, about “you,” the whole time. It’s about you connecting with the bigger force, about your actions, not about others or about what is happening in our world, or what our world needs to survive and improve. The entire matter of “oneness” has become, literally, isolated in one person and their individual quest for feeling something more universal, largely driven by their own individual desires and needs to feel fulfilled rather than developing a deeper connection through empathy that allows us to genuinely care about others, and to desire to build a better world for all of us because we all need it.

Let’s take some points from the seva article to demonstrate this same trend. One quote from the author explains: “When you engage seva it quiets the egoistic part of you. You shift away from the “me focus” to the “we focus.” This “we focus” is the place where you experience, through your thoughts and actions, that we are all interconnected. It is the space where you decide consciously to live in and through this interconnectedness… When you choose to engage it, you choose to stay connected with your heart, the most sacred part of you.  Seva means, you choose to live from the place of awareness of what is real, that we are all interconnected. When you work with seva you get to feel the depth of your own love and compassion by finding a way to serve another. Through seva, you experience the great value of sacrifice and the reality that one can make an enormous difference.” Holy crap! Talk about connectedness–connected to what? A whole bunch of you, apparently. I mean, this author starts out by saying seva should quiet the egoistic part of you, but then what do they do? They go off on an egoistic rant about how seva is good for, well, you. Talk about ego and being disconnected. Sure, seva is driven by our ability to love, or more accurately feel empathy, but it shouldn’t be defined as getting in touch with yourself. Seva is selfless service–key word being selfless. Yet these authors turn oneness and seva into something that is ultimately all about your self, and about feeling good about your self, which is ultimately a practice of ego.

Look, I get that what these authors are writing about is lovely and romantic and sounds great on the surface. It sounds nice to “connect to love,” have “your actions matter tenfold more,” and “find a way to serve another;” but you know what the best way to serve others is? By asking them what they need, and listening to them rather than yourself. Sure, for many people who are privileged I guess this a nice way to ease them into thinking about something other than themselves, since drawing on egoistic, individualistic, and self-centered ideas of seva and oneness (with oneself, apparently) come easier for people who are constantly encouraged to think this way. But seriously, there has to be a better way to discuss oneness and seva rather than directing these ideas back onto the benefit and experience of these practices for, well, you. Connectedness, oneness, whatever you want to call it, is about us. It’s about what we can do, and how we can mobilize to make a difference, together, not as isolated individuals trying to make our own selves feel better or as part of a personal quest to achieve what you think is the best solution. Seva should be about serving others, instead of yourself, and ultimately that requires asking others what they need from us, rather than assuming that we already know what they need. You want to make a difference? Try getting yourself out of the way.

Too often in dominant yoga culture seva is taken as an excuse to mitigate personal feelings of guilt for those with privilege, as a way of easing our own self-doubt and insecurities, and as a way of healing ourselves rather than a means of truly serving other people. This is largely because yoga, and yoga philosophy, is interpreted by Westerners through our capitalist, individualist, and neoliberal ideologies in ways that appropriate the original meanings out of context of an ethically guided spiritual practice. Since popular culture yoga has become largely devoid of spiritual traditions and disconnected from a deeper understanding of the ethical guidelines of yoga, instead taught in commodified ways that don’t provide a sound historical or, frankly, spiritual background for the practice, Westerners rarely get enough time to study these ideas in depth or to even deeply think about them (especially if they have other jobs outside of yoga). Cover them for a few hours in a teacher training, and hey, you are suddenly qualified to teach these ideas to others as a certified “expert”! (That was sarcasm, by the way.) But what often happens is that, because of the surface level study most people receive on these matters, many yogis, especially those who come from privileged locations (meaning white, middle class individuals, who are over-represented in yoga as a whole) end up using romanticized, orientalist ideas of these concepts as a means to justify their disconnection. This is exacerbated by the fact that teacher trainings often don’t provide any training on diversity awareness.

The adoption of seva and this idea of oneness by Western yogis often takes the form of a white savior complex, part of what’s been called the white savior industrial complex. The white savior complex is a trend where whites increasingly use service work (and charitable giving) as a means to justify and validate their own unwarranted privilege, thereby reinforcing it, rather than actually performing service in the interests and according to the needs of the ones they serve. Thus, the white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening. As Cole says, “there is much more to doing good work than ‘making a difference.’ There is the principle of first do no harm [ahimsa!]. There is the idea that those who are being helped ought to be consulted over the matters that concern them.” The white savior complex is all too common in yoga, where privileged yogis often utilize these practices as a means of self-service, rather than selfless service.

In popular culture yoga, oneness and seva become signals for status, a sign of an “authentic” yogi, even if they are practiced in a way that reflects more about Western ideas of individualism and capitalism than a deeper connection to others. Seva becomes commodified, interpreted as “gifting” free yoga classes to at risk populations, often on a limited one-time basis in ways that don’t actually help the community served and ultimately are done as a marketing ploy for new teachers to gain a student “following” and thereby increase their own incomes. Which means most seva in the yoga world isn’t actually selfless, but is often all about the self, about you and not about others. It’s used as a means of personal gain, or personal appeasement (making you feel better), or personal healing, or really anything except a way to remove the egoistic self. Instead of taking our yoga off the mat, we use a few hours of self-motivated volunteering on our mats to justify our status as “authentic” yogis and as “good” people, all while consistently ignoring larger systemic inequalities relating to class, race, gender, sexuality, and so on and our own roles in sustaining these systems. Instead of listening to what the populations we serve actually need, we listen to and serve ourselves. We volunteer in prisons, rather than fighting and advocating for a better system that won’t imprison so many people in the first place. We provide asana classes to poor urban youth (often of color), rather than addressing the issues of poverty, segregation, and crime they have to deal with. We help our own sense of self-worth by alleviating our personal guilt in the short term, rather than using our yogic practice to listen to others, understand their struggles, and fight against, larger inequities, which would ultimately be a better, more selfless, and more yogic service.

A great deal of our ideas on how to serve stem from gendered notions of “service” in the West, where service work has historically been tied to the work of women, especially care work (meaning, caring for others). Sure, this type of service is lovely, but it’s flawed, because the myth of the selfless mother is a social construction and frankly an unhealthy and unequal one. All genders are equally capable of love and empathy. And love and empathy, while these are the root of what allows us to serve, are not always the best way to serve. Can we frame service in a different way? Can we flip this gender script and instead think of service in the sense of serving in, say, the military? While obviously there are some serious problems with this analogy as the military is not an institution reflecting the paragon of virtue, I think it’s important we recognize that service isn’t just about love and caring and holding hands and all these other essentialized and outdated gendered notions. These are great, but they aren’t enough, and they aren’t the whole story. Selfless service is about digging into some uncomfortable truths about our selves so that we can abandon our self-bias and self-orientation and truly listen to others’ needs. Selfless service is about fighting for justice and equity for others in ways driven by empathy and love, but that won’t always take the form of hand holding and care work; sometimes it will be oppositional.

Love, light, and… yoga ❤

Yoga, Magical Thinking, and Satya: What it Means to Be Truthful

An interesting article was just published on the agricultural minister of India’s nonsensical reaction to extreme drought, climate change, and decades of industry abuse of natural resources (which is not just happening in India, but everywhere; for example, the World Bank has predicted that two thirds of the world will be without access to clean, fresh drinking water by 2025). Apparently, according to the agricultural minister the solution to solve the drought is to engage in “yogic” farming:

“In several recent public appearances, Singh trumpeted a government plan to promote ‘yogic’ farming, a technique he says will ’empower seeds with the help of positive thinking.’ At meeting of farmers and agricultural scientists in Delhi last weekend Singh said that ‘farmers should give vibrations of peace, love and divinity to seeds to boost growth and make plants resistant to pests.” Mind you, farmers have been committing suicide over a crisis that is increasingly out of their control to solve. And the solution he’s proposing is good vibes and positive thinking.

I think the fact that this article and the minister cited is proposing “yoga” as a solution to serious material problems speaks to a common trend in the practice to focus on romantic, imaginary solutions of “vibes,” “energy,” and “manifesting” that usually completely ignore industrial practices and other structural causes that contribute to the numerous social problems we have to deal with in our daily lives (including, in this case, the changing climate and extreme drought facing Indian agriculture that farmers are trying to deal with the best they can on their own). Remski has discussed this trend as “magical thinking” in yoga, but I think it’s worth discussing more deeply since it’s still widespread among yoga culture. For those who don’t realize, it’s not necessarily inherent to the practice. In fact, much of what we think of today as “magical thinking” in yoga (vibes, energy, manifesting, yoga intuition, call it what you will) doesn’t actually stem from the classical yoga tradition at all, and entered into the practice in the early twentieth century through cross-fertilization when many prominent gurus were influenced by American new age spiritual traditions like mesmerism, whose adherents were the primary target market for their talks and workshops (for more information, see De Michelis’s book).

For those who think it’s inherently “yogic” to engage in this type of thinking, I challenge you to really consider what it really means to have a practice of satya, or truthfulness, which is one of yamas, or guiding ethical principles of yoga philosophy. How can we be truthful to ourselves, and about ourselves? I think that’s an easier question for us to address, because we are often encouraged to think egotistically about ourselves–focusing on ourselves–in Western societies where individualism is a foundational ideology of our society. But perhaps the harder, and I would argue more important question is this: how can we be truthful to our societies, and about our societies? Do such romantic “solutions” actually fit with the practice of yoga?

I understand that such ideas can be empowering (in the short term) and are often more comfortable than other approaches, but in general trends to rely on “mythical” solutions rarely encourage people to engage in concrete action to change things. (Just manifest! Put out good energy and all will come! …But really?) If, on the rare occasion such suggestions do encourage actual action, these type of solutions often don’t think critically about how our ability to engage in particular actions is structured by the social systems we inhabit and are embedded within, in other words, how our actions are constrained by forces that are often largely out of our control (for example, poverty; research has indicated social mobility is at an all-time low in America, so good luck “manifesting” a substantial change in your financial circumstances today, especially if you are poor; chances are, it won’t help much). Many of the issues we are facing today as a global society (increasing inequality, poverty, climate change, drought, food and water shortages, and so on) are related to social structures we have built that are no longer serving us effectively, largely because our systems have been increasingly subject to corporate influence in ways that put profit over the rights and well-being of actual people. As yogis, what is our responsibility to speak truthfully about these issues, and to seek to uncover the truth about these issues however uncomfortable it might make us? What is our responsibility to acknowledge privilege, and speak openly, candidly, and truthfully about oppression? Because the truth is this: meditation and asana, as lovely as these practices are, will not solve the problems we are facing today. What we need is a deeper practice of yoga that goes beyond magical thinking and mythical solutions to consider what it will really take us, all of us, as individuals and citizens to change our selves, our societies, and our world for the better.

Rather than face the difficult task of changing dysfunctional systems in order to effectively combat things like climate change, we are encouraged to “manifest” solutions on an individual level (individualism, much?). Meditate! Pray for rain! But got forbid we hold big industries accountable for the unsustainable and harmful ways they engage in business. We shy away from these bigger issues, and from holding ourselves accountable to the ways we perpetuate these industries and systems in our own daily lives. We are only encouraged to address these problems on a personal level, because frankly it means that industries and governments never have to be held accountable (read: engage in costly changes that would actually solve these problems). Industries profit off of individualizing larger problems; for example (one of many I could have chosen), food industries profit off the individualization of obesity, because it gets them off the hook from changing the products they make or the ways they advertise. Instead, it’s up to us to get healthy (even though we live in systems that actively discourage us from doing us), to love our bodies (even though we experience thousands of messages telling us our bodies are never enough), to earn a living (even though real wages have been stagnating in America since the 1970s and income inequality is only growing), and so on. But don’t worry! According to magical thinking, just do some stretches, meditate, and the solution to all our problems will magically manifest itself! Sure, you may have more confidence to navigate an inherently broken and unsupportive system, but ultimately you’ll never really solve those problems, because you can’t address underlying structural causes with individual solutions of “manifesting” and “vibe.”

Look, don’t get me wrong here. I’m all about the idea of energy and the power of manifesting. In fact, there is some support to the power of magical thinking. But the key word there is some, and some is not nearly enough. When we break things down, according to physics (and yes, I have a B.S. in physics from my undergraduate education, so I do know what I’m talking about) everything is energy. That’s true. Einstein’s famous theory, E = mc^2 isn’t a joke or meaningless symbols; at the core of us, as matter, we are energy, we are energetic fields, and we are affected by such fields daily. But what is critical to realize is that those energy fields are typically much weaker than other, more relevant physical, social, economic, cultural, or historical forces in our lives. So just trying to “manifest” something without actively working here, in our social, economic, and cultural worlds, to actively produce the result we desire or need is usually not going to be very effective. It’s only when we combine our intentions of manifestation with actual action (and a firm understanding of the worlds we are moving within) that we are able to achieve effective results. Ultimately, I would argue the practice of yoga (as more than asana) requires us to be truthful with ourselves about what will actually solve the problems we are facing, and the truth is that’s unlikely “magical thinking.” The practice of yoga requires that we think deeply about what actions will work given the social, economic, and cultural factors at work around us. It requires us to think about what actions are the best in terms of other ethical principles, like ahimsa (compassion, or non-harming). The only way we can guide our actions effectively (to manifest what we need or desire) is if we understand the world we live in, and ourselves, deeply. The only way we can be sure our actions will not cause unintentional harm and will actually be effective in reaching our goals is if we seek truth, however uncomfortable or difficult it might be. And that is where magical thinking fails. It’s the comfortable, but inherently flawed solution to the majority of problems we deal with in our lives and in our world.

Love, light, and… yoga ❤

Social Media / Social Justice: Yoga, Weed, and #BlackLivesMatter

What Yoga, Weed, and #BlackLivesMatter Can Teach Us About Creating Change

I imagine some people are going to be scratching their heads at the combination in this title. I get it; on the surface yoga, weed legalization, and the #blacklivesmatter movement don’t seem to have much in common. But bear with me, because I’m here to talk to you today about how, with the use of social media, individuals and groups can influence our culture to drive social change. And while this may not seem immediately relevant to yoga, if we use our yogic discernment to improve ourselves it’s equally important to think about how we can utilize our yogic discernment to take a long and hard look at our practice in order to make it (and our world) more inclusive, equitable, and welcoming to all. In other words, we should not just use our practice to better ourselves (which is great, but perhaps a reflection of ego?) but should also use the practice of yoga to better the lives of others and our society as a whole. But how can we do this? Read on, my friends, as I begin to discuss one aspect of my dissertation work on the intersection of digital technology, social movements, and cultural and organizational change.

Media Influence

One of the most hotly debated topics in social science is the question: how much influence does culture have on our lives? We know media has an effect, because there are some hilarious studies like this one looking at the influence of movies on our choices of pets. They found “the effect of movies featuring dogs on the popularity of dog breeds can last up to ten years.” For example, when Lassie came out in 1943 there was a 40% increase in collie registrations during the following two years. Similarly, a great deal of research on gender has indicated that ideas we have of “femininity” have been strongly influenced by cultural factors as well as various industries like the cosmetic industry (for those who are curious, I highly recommend the books The Feminine Mystique and The Beauty Myth). For example, pink actually used to be a boys color, but when clothing manufacturers in the early 20th century were trying to figure out ways to sell more products they decided to push different colors for different genders, creating the idea that blue was for boys and pink was for girls. This caused parents to buy two different sets of clothing for differently gendered children, rather than just dressing their children in the same clothing (typically white dresses until they were entering school). Cha-ching! Instantly doubled profits, all from promoting the idea that pink and blue are meant for different genders. And this idea has stuck with Americans and become so ingrained in our culture it’s now almost impossible to find any kid-product that isn’t color-coded to indicate gender affiliation.

Further research has shown that gendered toys (another brilliantly fiendish invention of the toy industry to maximize profits) often push girls into caring careers that pay less. Because girls are often encouraged to play with toys focusing on beauty, caring for others, and non-leadership roles they are given implicit messages throughout their young lives that they are not capable or do not belong in male dominated fields more focused on building, science, or leadership positions. Girls get to be nurses, boys get to be doctors; girls get to be stewardesses, boys get to be pilots. This is also clearly seen in Halloween costumes that differ by gender, where boys get to be super heroes and girls just get to be princesses. The popular documentary Miss Representation outlines these disparities as they play out over our lifetimes: “Women make up 51% of the population and only 17% of Congress. When they’re seven years old, an equal number of boys and girls want to be President of the United States, but by the time they’re fifteen, the number of girls who say they would like to be President drops off dramatically compared to the boys. Women are only 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs, 37% of lower-level and middle managers, and 26% of vice presidents and other senior managers. Men occupy 80-95% of the top decision-making positions in American politics, business, the military, religion, media, culture, and entertainment.” So culture clearly does matter, and clearly does affect our decisions in small ways that add up to big changes in our lives over time.

Given this reality, then, the question becomes: is it possible for individuals to change culture? How can we fight back against larger systems using the limited agency that we have? In the past, the ability of individual people to affect broader cultural change was severely limited because everyday people, even when mobilized into social movements, rarely had access to the media and culture industries or forces of production. Before the age of the internet, they weren’t able to write their own news stories or produce their own content in ways that reached a large audience. However, all of this is changing with the advent of social media. Social media has democratized media (to a degree), giving individual people never-before-seen power to not only mobilize and connect with others who are like-minded but also engage in cultural production of their own. With a wide platform and the ability to create our own content, it is suddenly possible for individuals or groups to have a much greater impact on the broader culture of society. This means that we are able to influence the larger social structures, particularly our cultural ones, much easier and with much more impact than ever before. And this, my friends, brings us back to yoga. Because the yoga world is undergoing exactly this type of change right now, as I write this blog. Within yoga, we are beginning to see a social media movement, body positivity, being tied to the heart of the practice. This movement is trying to take back cultural control in order to promote a more equitable and just practice and society. While the body positivity movement has it’s origins in the feminist movement of the 1960s, it’s only recently gained ground and prominence and this is in large part due to activists’ uses of social media. These same tactics (whether or not they are intentional to begin with) have been seen in what I will call other social media movements, such as the weed legalization movement and the black lives matter movement.

#YogaForAll

The body positivity movement in yoga is aimed at changing stereotypical ideas of who is a yogi and what qualifies as yoga. The movement draws attention to the ways mainstream media, including the yoga industry, has overrepresented an “ideal yogi body” as one that is thin, white, able, female, cisgender, heterosexual, and affluent. I’d also add that this same industry has largely represented only one narrow idea of what yoga is, predicated on advanced physical postures, or asanas, that are often used to sell either products or services. Body positivity activists argue these images have contributed to issues of inequality, access, and exclusion within yoga (and broader society) since they often deny the experience of non-stereotypical yogis and make it much more difficult for these types of yogis to make a living in the industry. Similarly, they point out that such unrealistic images contribute to the formation of negative body image, body hate, and self-doubt that many women and men experience in our society at large, and the experience of body-isms like racism, sexism, sizeism, and so on. This movement, while still in the beginning stages of development, has been gaining ground and received increasing industry attention from corporations like Yoga Journal and the controversial Lululemon.

#LegalizeWeed

What I will call the legalize weed movement has been brewing for some time, and gaining slow ground through initiatives like state’s legalization of medical marijuana. However, in the last several years the movement has taken off, gaining monumental support. PEW Research has indicated that support for marijuana legalization is “rapidly outpacing opposition” to the point that most experts agree the trend is “that cannabis, as an industry, is headed toward commoditization, regulation and standardization.” For the first time in the history of polling about marijuana attitudes, more people favor legalization in America than those who oppose.

#BlackLivesMatter

And of course, there is the black lives matter movement sweeping the nation. Utilizing the hashtag #blacklivesmatter, the movement has drawn attention to systemic racism and continued discrimination in America today. Obviously, with the numerous cases of police brutality the focus has been on discriminatory police practices and inequality in the criminal justice system. However, the movement is ultimately about America’s history of racial inequality and the intersection of race with other forms of oppression. It draws explicit attention to discriminatory media practices that create a culture where whites are valued more than blacks, hence the hashtag #blacklivesmatter that seeks to overcome this cultural bias. They hope to illuminate the role of cultural stereotypes that are the root of implicit racism plaguing our country today.

Activism, Social Media, and Social Justice: Creating Effective Cultural Change

But how have these movements been so successful, and how can those still in the growing stages utilize social media to create more effective forms of activism? I’m going to outline here some common strategies and tactics used by these movements, to widespread success:

(1) Busting Stereotypes (utilizing social media): This tactic typically takes two forms. The first is commonly used in the #yogaforall and #legalizeweed movements, and has been incredibly successful. It involves changing our ideas of stereotypical consumers (of yoga, or weed) and also changing ideas of how or why those individuals consume. For yoga, this means showing more diverse yoga bodies, practicing not just advanced asana but all types of yoga including meditation or more foundational postures done with the support of props. Utilizing instagram and selfies, numerous curvy, non-white, queer, male, or in other ways non-stereotypical yogis have gathered huge followings, a sign that the narrow representations in mainstream media are lacking and that most people have a hard time relating to the stereotypical yogi and how they may practice. Sure, such narrow representations can be aspirational, but when that’s all that is shown it’s problematic because there aren’t any adequate images of how to get there, just the end point. So body positivity has been able to successfully fill this gap, providing a more accurate and real representation of yogis and yoga via social media that has very successful in reaching out to a broader network of supporters to promote their cause.

For weed, this tactic has typically involved changing our idea of a weed consumer from “the typical pot smoker as a college-age guy inhaling a joint and gorging on pizza” to other bodies associated with positive stereotypes. They have been particularly successful in tying marijuana use to women, especially women associated with the “mother” or “grandmother” stereotypes (indeed, they have been “aggressively courting female consumers“). For example, in WA (after legalization) they filmed this viral video featuring three (white) grandma’s who smoke weed for the first time:

It’s pretty hilarious, and I think illustrates this strategy very well. Activists have also been successful in tying marijuana use to middle-class, white America (and white-collar jobs), a big shift from associations of marijuana use to the counterculture of the 1960s or poor minority races/ethnicities. The second way activists have been busting stereotypes is…

(2) Sharing powerful (and brief) facts: Movements that have been successful in using this tactic have primarily been #legalizeweed and #blacklivesmatter. This tactic typically entails utilizing short and easily digested statistics that make telling comparisons, drawing attention to inequality, inconsistencies, or myths that are widely (but falsely) believed by broader society. These statistics are often accompanied by visualizations, which lends itself well to memes and short videos that can be shared easily on social media. For example, in the case of weed PEW Research uncovered that nearly 70% of all Americans now believe that alcohol is more dangerous to a person’s health than weed, and “if marijuana became as widely available as alcohol, 63% still believe alcohol would be more harmful to society.” That’s a huge cultural shift! HUGE! And it’s largely driven by easily digestible social media content that has widely spread this fact, such that it is now common knowledge that weed is safer than alcohol (yet remains a schedule I narcotic according to the federal government). Here are some examples of these type of memes:

For #blacklivesmatter, this has taken two main forms. First, they do use visualizations that portray facts about racial inequality in America today. But the movement also uses more disturbing content that has been the focus of this tactic, namely real-life video evidence of racial discrimination by police, such as the video of police murdering Eric Garner that caused the adoption of the phrase “I Can’t Breathe” into the movement. These videos are horrible, powerful, disturbing testimonies of the life and death consequences of being black in America, and speak to why #blacklivesmatter.

(3) Getting Expert Support (especially in ways that break stereotypes): Getting outspoken support from industry or government officials, or high-profile celebrities, lends legitimacy to the campaign and can help bust stereotypes. For example, the weed legalization movement has gotten numerous high-ranking police officers and celebrities to come out in support of ending the war on drugs and legalizing cannabis. It’s important to note these experts are in support of not speaking for these movements, and as such are not co-opting or appropriating movement discourse, a key distinction for effective change. Getting expert support also contributes to the next point…

(4) Regular creation of new content: Being able to supply new, easily digestible content on a regular basis keeps the conversation going. This is actually a strategy taken from mainstream industry practices regarding social media that seek to utilize a free, unpaid labor pool of “fans” to create controlled firestorms by having these fans “like” and “share” content for them, and sometimes even create it themselves. But in social media movement cases, this content is not trying to sell a product but instead sell an idea. (I’d recommend the documentary Generation Like, which talks about this phenomena in big business and personal branding.)

(5) Utilizing multiple media types: While this one is probably obvious, the regular creation of new content should utilize multiple media forms to engage audiences in multiple ways, allowing for a wider audience appeal. Common forms utilized on social media are memes, visualizations, videos, podcasts, blogs, news articles, or interviews. Ultimately, the most successful movements have been able to bring the social media support to the real world through concentrated advocacy or activism efforts that move beyond the internet into actual policy reform.

(6) Encouraging community involvement: Finally, movements that are most successful use a familiar industry tactic of encouraging community involvement. By having supporters share content on their social media pages, this creates a web-like network where the use of hashtags or shared posts by friends puts pressure on others to change their views. When it comes to cultural change this tactic can be more effective than we may realize, since most of this peer pressure happens at an unconscious level. In fact, many social psychological experiments have shown that we underestimate the degree of influence our peers have on us (as the famous Asch experiments show). A recent study by none other than Facebook has shown that we conform even within social media worlds. Looking at whether people were more likely to change their profiles to rainbow colors in support of marriage equality, they found people tend to change their profile pictures in response to their friends’ picture changes. In fact, “users were more likely to adopt the equal-sign icon if they saw multiple friends doing so. The more friends they saw, up to a point, the more likely they were to change. That social influence was more of a factor, in fact, than even religion, politics or age.” So if we want to change people’s minds, we need to apply concerted social pressure by engaging an online community that is able to create a new normal, new cultural norms.

While there is more that can be said here, I’ll leave it at this for now. Go forth and engage in cultural change my fellow yogis! We can utilize our networks, including online networks, to create more effective social justice work. We can do together what we cannot do alone.

Love, light, and… yoga ❤

Taking Yoga Off the Mat: Sustainability and the Yogic Path

“Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

Within yoga culture there is a great deal of discussion about the need to take yoga off the mat. Part of this is driven by the increasingly popular practice of seva, or selfless service, that is usually interpreted by the yoga community to mean some form of community service, often involving teaching asana classes to populations considered at risk or in need. Social justice activists have been drawn to this idea of taking yoga off the mat because it implies a moral imperative inherent in the practice of yoga for yogis to get involved in advocacy around and involvement in social justice causes. While I wholeheartedly agree with both these interpretations of taking  yoga off the mat (although seva should arguably entail a bit more than offering “karma” yoga classes…), I’m going to talk today about an additional viewpoint that discusses the popular trend of yogis being involved with a more general cultural ethos of organic eating and green living.

It’s very common for yogis to be interested in other cultural trends relating to healthy, organic eating (including the popular, if somewhat troubling, trends of green juice cleanses). Eating whole foods, lots of vegetables, and supporting local producers are common elements, as are a number of green consumption practices like reusable water bottles and buying products made in green ways (like the popular–and awesome–green yoga legging company Teeki that makes their products from recycled water bottles). And while there are less sustainable consumption practices orientated with the yoga lifestyles (like high end athletic or boho fashion industries) I think the interconnections between yoga culture and other green and sustainable living practices indicate there is an inherent attraction and similarity between these cultural elements. In fact, I would argue that if we are really going to adopt the yoga identity and live a yogic lifestyle we must take our yoga off the mat, not just through seva or social justice, but also through the practice of sustainability in all areas of our lives.

Yoga is more than simply asana. As a process and way of knowing, yoga can be used to achieve any goal or end, including ones that are less than just. This is why we have seen the yoking of yoga and mindfulness practices to consumer capitalism and industry in recent years with the McMindfulness phenomenon. However, yoga, as a process and way of knowing guided by ethical principles, has the power and potential to do great good and help us build better selves, better societies, and better futures. I think it’s always important to be skeptical of “tradition,” because traditions by definition rarely change and not all past traditions are appropriate to the times we live in and the needs and desires of people living now (rather than then). I have to admit I’m not a yogi who blindly believes in the philosophical traditions of yoga, and honestly I think blindly following anything is a recipe for some form of damage. Critical awareness is necessary in all areas of life, including yoga, in order to lead healthy and balanced lives as our practice encourages. But I do believe that the ethical guidelines in yoga are key to taking yoga off the mat in a way that is beneficial to our lives and the lives of others.

According to Patanjali’s eight-fold path, these ethical principles are called the yamas and comprise the first limb of yoga, dealing with our behavior in connection to others. The yamas include: ahimsa, roughly translated to nonviolence; satya, or truthfulness; asteya, or non-stealing; brahmacharya, often interpreted as a virtuous form of self-control involving a voluntary restraint of power (usually associated with being celibate or faithful to your chosen partner); and aparigraha, or non-covetousness or non-possessiveness. If we want to live our lives true to these ethical principles, taking our yoga off our mats, it’s imperative that a yogic path also be a sustainable path. Sustainability doesn’t necessarily mean some of the trends we see in the consumption of alternative green and organic lifestyles popular with yogis today. It can, but not necessarily. In fact, a lot of popular green/organic living trends reflect attempts to practice sustainability without a critical reflection on what sustainable means, and what it means to truly be sustainable (I am guilty of this too).

So let’s break it down. Sustainability… sustain… ability… Sustainability is the ability to sustain, keep up, or keep going, toward a particular goal, maximizing the use of our limited resources in a way that conserves those resources. Sustainability means living in symbiosis with our ecosystems so that we minimize our negative impact, instead building positive relationships that replenish the environments (including social ones) around us. It involves the cultivation of a contained, mutually beneficial web of interconnection with the world around us that I would argue is one of the best applications of these ethical principles of yoga we can see in the real world.

Do no harm? Sustainable systems, if they are truly sustainable, seek to minimize harm and maximize the positive impacts of their processes. Truthfulness? Sustainable methods can only work if we deeply understand the nuances of our world, including ourselves and the environments we live in. To do so, we have to seek truth, and deep truth, not just truth when it suits us. Non-stealing? Requires an understanding and recognition of the needs of the systems we are embedded within and the social worlds we are connected to. Sustainable paths support the needs of the worlds around them in ways that help them thrive (the very essence of non-stealing). Self-control? Sustainable systems demand the practice of self-control, of limiting our desires to practice forms of self-restraint to only use what we need and not live beyond those means. Non-possessiveness? Living sustainably means living with as little impact on the surrounding environments, so it naturally involves minimizing our possessions and recognizing (and supporting) the needs of others through a non-covetousness nature.

Getting behind the idea of sustainability is easy enough, but in practice it’s much harder to do. This is largely because our social systems (as they are now) make it very difficult for people to live sustainably. It’s often expensive to disconnect from unsustainable systems (like, for example, trying to live on green energy solutions, which are largely only available to the wealthy, or attempting to live off the land which is only available to those who, unsurprisingly, can afford to buy property and have the start up capital to make such living feasible from the outset). Our economic system, and our workplaces, require us to live in unsustainable ways in order to simply live. It’s also difficult because we are socialized into cultural systems that don’t value sustainability, so we often internalize cultural values that encourage us to engage in lifestyles that are at their very root unsustainable–for example, consumerism. So I understand that living sustainably is a challenge, and a huge one, and one that I myself am still very far from achieving because of the very reasons I just mentioned.

But if we truly want to live a yogic path, adhering to the yamas of yoga in our practice both on and off the mat, we have to do so sustainably. And this must go beyond the cultural ethos popular in yoga today that encourages yogis to achieve sustainability primarily through consumption. It’s not enough to practice sustainability by consuming green products, we have to question the need for those products in the first place. We have to think about the art and practice of consumption itself, and begin to deeply question why we consume, not just how we consume. If we are going to be truly sustainable we must change how we orient our actions, including consumption, in ways that fundamentally alter the game itself.

We have to change our orientation to consumption, orienting toward different goals. This means cutting back on the stuff we buy in the first place (reduce). We have to acknowledge the insidious nature of stuff, and orient our approach to long-term use, potentially life-time use of the products we buy. For those things we do get rid of, we need to do so responsibly and encourage reuse and recycling as much as we can. And this ultimately means we need to be more careful in our product choice, doing more product research before purchasing to be sure we are meeting sustainable needs. (And yes, I realize this is difficult for some populations who might not have the means to do so, like the poor, uneducated, or elderly. So we also have to help make these types of lifestyle choices more accessible.)

When applied to yoga on the mat, this means we need to orient our practice towards sustainable health and well-being of the body and mind, and practice asana devoid of ego with long-term, lifelong goals in mind. What type of practice will, in the long term, support your body and your long-term needs? How can we practice asana in sustainable ways, ways that sustain our body and allow it to maintain strength and health over time? How do we deepen our practice in a way that don’t simply pursue “growth” as more advanced postures, more intensity, or more time on the mat, but that are instead is aligned with a broader mindset of growth in sustainable ways? We have to orient our practice not towards “bigger-ing” our practice (recall the Lorax by Dr. Suess), towards constantly “growing” for the sake of growth itself, and instead focus on growth towards the goal of sustaining a quality of practice across the long-term.

We cannot force our practice, or force growth in our practice if we are to be sustainable. Sustainable systems do change, and grow, and evolve, but if you try and force that evolution too quickly bad things happen (really, just watch the Jurassic Park film series). The thing about growth is that it must happen organically. Forced growth leads to complications, because all living beings have natural limits that can be stretched, but if stretched too far break. Healthy growth demands time, patience, and prolonged favorable conditions like proper nutrition so plants can develop a proper root system to thrive. Sustainable systems give back, benefiting the environment around them in symbiotic ways, the plant returning nutrients into the ecosystem as it grows and eventually dies. Forced growth is not only potentially dangerous, it takes more energy, leaving us with less to give back into the systems surrounding us in supportive and sustainable ways.

When we take our yoga off the mat, or practice it on the mat, we need to try and do so sustainably. And understand, too, that we live in a world that makes sustainability a difficult thing to achieve even for people with the best of intentions. I hope you enjoyed these thoughts of mine and that they struck a chord within you; sometimes I am led down strange roads. Love, light, and… yoga ❤

Yoga teacher training, here I come!

I realize it’s been a while since I’ve posted a blog, and I’m sorry to all my readers that I haven’t been as active in the social media/blogging world lately. I’ve had a very busy last few months, which included finishing up the school year (and two classes I was teaching at Woodland Community College), getting married (yay! It was great, for those who are curious), and teaching two summer session classes over the past 8 weeks (and considering I lost my grader for my larger class, this was a lot more work than I anticipated). With all that said, I have now entered my summer “break” and will be continuing more active work on my dissertation and yoga research, which means more blog posts to share with you and more updates about my yoga journey. In fact, I’m working on my next blog post about intersections of social change strategies and activism in the body positivity movement in yoga, the weed legalization movement, and the #blacklivesmatter movement and should have that out soon. More to come!

Today I want to share with you all a special announcement: I am officially enrolled in a 200 hour yoga teacher training! As many of you know, I’ve been practicing yoga for over ten years and have had a dedicated practice for nearly six. I’ve been wanting to get my certification for quite some time, but with graduate school and life it was simply too difficult to schedule and too pricey for me to afford until recently. However, I’m happy to share that I was able to get a work-trade scholarship with Yoga Works, and will be starting my teacher training in January 2016. Yoga Works is a well-respected yoga teacher training system that comes out of the Ashtanga and Iyengar disciplines, and fits very well with the style of yoga I mostly practice and want to teach. I’m very excited to share this next step in my yoga journey and my yoga research with you! Thanks to everyone who has supported me through this process, and I can’t wait to share more of my experiences and updates in my yoga path with my readers.

That’s all for now! And just for fun, here are some photos from my wedding (because, why not?).

Love, light, and… yoga ❤

Yoga is the Ultimate 2015 Entrepreneurial Venture? Think Again HuffPost

I have a love-hate relationship with the fact that yoga has become a part of popular culture. On the one hand, I love that yoga is more widely known. More people getting to enjoy the benefits of yoga is always a plus. On the other hand, the fact that yoga is part of popular culture today means that we get a variety of completely unrealistic articles about the practice, including the recent (hilarious) claim by CNN that yogis make over $60,000 a year and the argument from Forbes that yoga and meditation could save us millions of dollars, which I’ve written about before.

The most recent article in this trend is a post by the Huffington Post and claims yoga is the “ultimate 2015 entrepreneurial venture.” The article gives four reasons to support this argument, including (1) “It’s relatively quick to qualify” as an instructor. So hey, if you are short on time, not sure what to do with your life, or have a few weeks off and some trust-fund money to throw down for an overpriced teacher training, don’t worry! “You can spread [the minimum hours for certification] out over a year, or you can opt for a ‘boot camp’ style certification course in just three weeks.” That’s just three weeks people! Trust the HuffPost; I’m sure you’ll be an expert yogi in no time, making it big as the new yoga-celebrity with just that minimal commitment. I mean, it’s a reputable institution, they must know what they are talking about, right? And once you go through that training, it’s on, baby! Think of what you could do with that newly achieved teacher certification! Apparently, “Yoga is a fantastic niche within the health industry because it focuses on relaxation, stress management, and is complementary to every other type of activity or sport out there. Yoga’s health benefits are legendary, as it has proven to help those with brain injury victims, PTSD, depression and eating disorders. Beyond this, people are desperate to carve out ‘me time’ and want to look better while also working on their spiritual, mental and emotional health.” So take that three-week crash course and go treat trauma victims! I’m sure that will end well for everyone involved…

The article goes on, giving three other reasons why it’s the best-kept entrepreneurial secret for 2015. Reason (2) argues that rural areas are in “desperate need” for yoga. Sure, you might encounter some “initial cultural resistance,” but don’t let that stop you! (Even if you are broke and just trying to survive; why don’t you have that trust fund to rely on? Don’t you know yogis make $62,400 a year according to CNN? If you aren’t that successful, it must be your fault; don’t you know it’s the hottest entrepreneurial trend? Just three weeks to get certified, people!) If the hypothetical yogi discussed in the article can eventually “grow her first, 15-person class into more popular lessons through the regional community college” in a small town in North Carolina, you should be able to as well, right? Reason (3) is that “karmic yoga makes giving back easy,” so you can offer “free yoga classes or yogic knowledge” (because that’s all karma yoga is, right?) and “perhaps lure in more paying customers, and test out new teachers” while you are doing quality service work. Reason (4) claims you set the fees, rules, pace, and everything else. These arguments seem pretty great, right? Right? Actually, no. But it’s important to get at why this is such a ridiculous article. Sure, some of these reasons are positives for teachers and yogis within the yoga industry. But there are some serious problems with these claims, including the fact that often these facts are excellent for the yoga industry, but often at the expense of individual teachers and yogis everywhere. Let’s take a deeper (dare I say more yogic?) look.

Problem #1: Certification programs don’t make expert teachers!

Joking aside, this is one of the most problematic assumptions this article makes. First, the assumption that it’s a good thing that getting a teacher certification program is easy and quick is a huge issue. The idea that a 200 hour teacher training actually qualifies people to teach yoga (especially yoga for trauma victims) has always disturbed me. This article completely misunderstands that a 200 hour teacher training course is barely enough to qualify anyone to teach yoga, especially for those who haven’t been practicing for years prior to receiving a certification, let alone qualify someone to teach to at-risk populations, including trauma survivors. Sure, I think it’s great people share their practice after only a 200 hour teacher training, and it can be done in positive ways if you teach only what you know and don’t assume you know everything because you are now certified. Everyone has something valuable to bring to the practice, and that’s awesome. But to assume a 200 hour certification program gives someone expert knowledge in yoga is, frankly, laughable.

Arguing that it’s “quick to qualify” to teach hardly makes yoga or yogis look great. It reflects the utter lack of oversight within the credential system for yoga and common misconceptions that “yoga is easy” or “yoga is simple;” in other words, that yoga is just asana, and a fitness fad at that. In fact, teachers who aren’t adequately trained are often a recipe for student injuries or the propagation of many (incorrect) myths about yoga to their students, some of which I’ve discussed before in my series on popular myths about the origins of yoga. But this includes more dangerous myths about, for example, the physical “benefits” of poses, or how best to cue alignment, or even what proper alignment is. Many times these myths are passed down from un-knowledgable teacher to un-knowledgable teacher, based on new age dogma, and never get questioned since the ideal of authenticity in yoga is often held up as law within yoga culture. Many times actual science of the body is ignored or misunderstood within yoga, overpowered by claims to “listen to the body” or that the “body is the ultimate teacher.” Listening to the body is important to prevent injury, but let’s face it folks: listening to your body won’t teach you the intricacies of the health sciences, including knowledge about nutrition, exercise science, biomechanics, or anatomy. Period. This is one reason why teachers who aren’t adequately trained can unintentionally cue students in ways that result in injury, a controversial topic being explored by Matthew Remski in his thesis research on What Are We Actually Doing In Yoga? (WAWADIA).

Teacher trainings have become the popular cash cow of yoga studios trying to make ends meet as well as a career goal of romantic (to the point of unrealistic idealism) young adults and yogis everywhere. That isn’t necessarily a good thing, and the overflow of barely qualified teachers into the yoga industry has resulted in many problems, including worker exploitation, low pay for teachers across the board, and lack of job security for many yogis trying to earn a living solely through their practice and teaching.

Problem #2: Regulation of certification programs is practically nonexistent!

Oversight of certification programs is pretty much nonexistent in the USA. The article mistakenly assumes Yoga Alliance “certification” is legitimate, as if the accreditation “RYT” (Registered Yoga Teacher) or “RYS” (Registered Yoga School) actually came from a valid governing body. Just a heads up for those who don’t know, YA is a nonprofit organization (a classification that is, I would argue, debatable) that took it on themselves in the 1990s to monitor and register yoga teachers/programs that meet basic guidelines as laid out by YA. The goal was a good one; teacher training programs were beginning to crop up all over the place, often as a way for studios to meet their bottom line, and there was no regulatory system in place at the time. But YA has largely failed to meet this goal. Not many people know about the history of YA or of yoga teacher training programs, and it’s a history rooted in Westernization, Colonialization, and appropriation of yoga. I’m writing about the history of teacher trainings in my dissertation, and I guess now is as good a time as any to share some of what I’ve been working on.

Those who started YA were predominately (white, middle-class) actors from the (once upon a time) California Yoga Teacher Association and it’s satellite magazine, the well-known Yoga Journal. These were people who were often partly self-taught and/or yogis who were “certified” during the 1970s, primarily in Iyengar traditions (I’m using quotes here because certification was largely non-existent at this point in history, so claims to being a teacher were largely based on years of practice or teaching lineage, and were as a result a bit haphazard). The curriculum that ended up being required in teacher training programs was institutionalized during this time period, the 1970s, and is based on a knowledge of yoga dating back to that time that reflects romanticized, Colonial understandings of the practice. Teacher training guidelines were coming out of Westernized teaching practices, namely classroom format for learning, drill-style instruction, and “scientific” understandings of yoga popularized by BKS Iyengar and only minimally grounded in fact at this point in history. So program guidelines were in many ways arbitrarily assigned based on CYTA’s and YJ’s perspectives of yoga (read: white, western, appropriated, and colonial) and what these particular people felt should be required learning to “qualify” someone as an expert in yoga.

For example, the reason Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras are the iconic and required text for every yoga teacher training in existence today is because it was one of the few classical yogic texts translated into English by the 1970s, which was in large part due to Colonial British academics who had considered it important and translated, studied, and interpreted it to excess, rather than because it actually was pivotal to classical yoga traditions in India. There’s a bunch of research and writing on this already, so if you’re curious about it, check out this great article or this book by David Gordon White on the appropriation of yoga by British Colonialism (which was subsequently disseminated to the West, including America, as part of modern postural yoga traditions). Basically, “the Yoga Sutra has been elevated to its present iconic status—and translated into more than forty languages—only in the course of the past forty years.” Western yogis involved in the counterculture movement in the 1960s and 1970s took the Yoga Sutras out of historical context and put it on a pedestal, sacralizing it within Western yoga, and when these same actors left CYTA and the YJ in the late 1990s to create the Yoga Alliance, they institutionalized and canonized such texts as “essential” yogic reading.

Sure there are some good things in those guidelines the YA has for yoga teacher certification programs. But the requirements are based on ideas of what teacher training should entail that date back to the 1970s and haven’t been updated since despite a great deal more research on the actual history of ancient and modern yoga, the science of yoga, and biomechanics since that time. Not to mention the fact that oversight by YA is pretty much non-existent because of lack of funds/employees to actually regulate those registered. There is widespread controversy on whether their accreditation system is valid, or if it’s simply accreditation for a fee (in other words, a way for organizations to pay for “legitimation”). As the last article I linked to explains, “Instead of telling trainings what should be taught, Yoga Alliance simply requires that a certain number of hours be spent covering each of five areas of study, with no specificity given on how to fill those hours. As listed on their website, registered 200-hour trainings (the level that 85% of their registered yoga teachers hold) must include 100 hours of practice, 25 hours of teaching methodology, 20 hours of anatomy, 30 hours of philosophy and ethics, and 10 hours of practice teaching. But, the content of each area of study is left up to the school.” In other words, the “accreditation” YA provides is based on literally no oversight of the actual content covered in the teacher training, and the content itself is based on outdated and in many ways arbitrary ideas of what it means to “know” yoga. You’ll notice there is no requirement to teach any biomechanics, despite this area of study being particularly relevant for yoga teachers; with that in mind, good luck understanding anything about anatomy in a 20 hour crash course, let alone how that anatomy relates to the actual asana practice. The fact that ethics is lumped into philosophy rather than being it’s own category addressing things like sexual harassment or diversity training is also a glaring problem given recent controversies about the prevalence of sexual assault in yoga and (accurate) claims that yoga is often exclusive and supportive of inequality.

YA has (not surprisingly) been vocally resisting attempts by state governments to provide more stringent guidelines on teacher trainings, claiming that most people don’t go on to teach full-time from such programs. While that’s true, recent efforts by state agencies to regulate teacher trainings are partly driven by increasing rates of injuries among yoga practitioners and concerns about student safety that are attributed to teachers not having adequate training. (I’m sure it is also that they want to begin cashing in on the multibillion yoga industry, as well, but the safety concerns are real.) The resistance of YA to these trends is in part because having states regulating yoga teacher trainings would severely cut into YA’s profits, which are made almost entirely through fees charged to teachers and studios to register with the organization as part of their “regulatory” system. This registration, no surprise, has to be renewed periodically, so it’s not just a one-time registration but a constant cash cow for YA. (YA’s profits, incidentally, have been skyrocketing in the last five years with the increasing popularity of yoga: “According to the IRS Form 990’s that they provide on their website, their total revenue increased over 500% from 2005 – 2012 while their net assets increased nearly 1000% in the same time frame.”) If state governments started regulating teacher trainings like other certification programs, YA would no longer have a monopoly on the accreditation process and would no longer be such an important and powerful institution in the yoga industry. (There is, in fact, and easy solution to this dilemma: yoga studios could separate trainings to “deepen ones practice” from those that are actual teacher trainings which qualify for state regulation, but this hasn’t caught on yet.)

Problem #3: Assuming karma yoga is only offering yoga!

Another big problem in this article is the idea that “karma yoga” is solely “offering free yoga classes or yogic knowledge” to others, particularly at-risk populations. The idea that this is all karma yoga entails is a very popular, but I think equally disturbing trend in the yoga world today. It’s been championed by numerous organizations like Off the Mat and Into the World or the Africa Yoga Project that do some awesome work, but ultimately do little to actually change the systemic variables causing inequality and trauma among the populations they serve. The idea that yoga service is only offering free yoga classes or disseminating yoga knowledge contributes to “yoga savior” projects that often serve to prop up the yoga teacher giving their time or teachings rather than actually helping the communities they serve in real, tangible ways.

Karma yoga is translated as “selfless, altruistic, service” not “let’s go teach some yoga for free to people in need.” It involves abandoning self-interest and utilizing reason to achieve perfection in action. I’m not an expert in Hinduism, so I’m not going to attempt to teach this concept. If you’re interested and want to learn more please find a qualified instructor who has studied these topics deeply. But I think it’s clear when we start to describe “karma yoga” in popular culture as (per the HuffPost article) a way to “perhaps lure in more paying customers, and test out new teachers” while you are doing quality service work, this isn’t really selfless service, and isn’t really karma yoga. This popular manifestation of “karma yoga” is ultimately about building a personal brand; it’s about utilizing free classes to market yourself and create a (paying) following, a means to give the teacher greater exposure. This is what I’m talking about when I say such “service” is largely self-aggrandizing and narcissistic.

The real goal of this type of service work isn’t to actually serve people in need or help communities suffering from huge and growing inequality, or structural problems like the loss of the permanent employment model, mass inequality, or growing poverty. The goal is in many ways imperialistic, a “white woman’s burden” that portrays the yoga teacher as the “yoga savior” bringing yoga to the “uneducated, uncivilized, or heathen” masses, helping that teacher claim they are “authentic” because look, they are doing service work! They are a “real” yogi! And such interpretations of karma yoga ultimately fail to actually solve the real problems those populations are dealing with, which are structural. Yoga (as it is practiced in the West today) can be a great way to treat the symptoms of larger problems like poverty, but it can’t ever solve them. Real selfless service, real karma yoga, is about taking our yoga off the mat (literally off the mat, so Off the Mat and Into the World, it’s not just bringing your mat with you to other parts of the world and then staying on it). It’s about doing truly selfless service work to end larger social problems, to use our privileges to help those who are disadvantaged, all of which won’t happen just by teaching some karma postural yoga classes on a donation basis at a local studio as a way to gain more (dare I say selfish?) exposure. Those types of classes can be great but it’s not karma yoga unless there isn’t a self-serving component, and either way it does little to actually help the populations we are teaching asana to.

Problem #4: Yoga Teachers Don’t Exist in a Social Vaccuum!

The last reason the article gives for why yoga is the ultimate 2015 entrepreneurial venture is one that actually does benefit yoga teachers: the ability to set the fees, rules, pace, and everything else (though arguably this benefit comes with any self-employment model, not necessarily yoga). This ability allows teachers to create a flexible schedule around other commitments and to have control over their own employment, which can be a plus. But the article fails to consider how yoga teaching doesn’t take place in a vacuum; teachers can’t just set fees artificially high to make ends meet because they live in social worlds and are constrained in particular ways. If you are teaching at local studios, you could be constrained to when they have available classes for you to teach. If you want to charge for private classes, you’ll have to consider what is a reasonable amount given the area you live in and what others are charging, all of which involves marketing research and a sound business strategy. You’ll have to stay on top of everything for your private business, including things many teachers don’t usually consider when they first think of getting into the industry: things like insurance or liability, managing time, marketing yourself on top of your other responsibilities, creating boundaries with your students, and so on, and so on. So to say the ability to control your own work is a positive to the business is true, but it is simultaneously a negative because it takes a ton of constant, daily work to be successful (and many, many yoga teachers aren’t successful even if they do put in the epic amount of work required, meaning they are still unable to make a decent living on just their yoga business).

I think to conclude, it’s important to be realistic about our yoga practice(s), and be especially critical of popular culture claims about yoga. Part of the practice of yoga is developing our ability of discernment, to accurately, truthfully, and deeply understand our world and our selves so that we can take reasonable and effective actions for meeting our goals. Yoga, science, and business can be a powerful combination, but unless we remain true to the heart of yoga and connect yoga with accurate scientific knowledge (both STEM and also social) we can lose sight of the important parts of the practice and inadvertently yoke yoga to capitalist business enterprises, rather than use yoga to make systems like the capitalistic business enterprise better.

With love, light, and… yoga ❤

Why Practice? Yoga, the Apocalypse, and Dynamic Love

“If you really love something, you never try to keep it the way it is forever. You have to let it be free to change.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Ashes

I’ve been meaning to write blog posts about my personal insights on yoga and my practice, but it’s been a difficult process to get started. First, because there are so many things I want to write about so it’s hard to decide which to start with. Second, I’ve been putting off writing about my personal experiences with yoga in part because like many yogis I’m an introvert in a yoga world that rewards extroverts, and am not usually one to share my personal beliefs. (While I would argue yoga is a process, I also recognize that just because something is a process doesn’t rule out that it also reflects a belief system—for example about which process is best.) Third, because many of the things yoga has taught me are personal or reflect my personal experience and worldview, I recognize that many of the insights I have about my practice might not be relevant to others. Yoga is many things to many people, and each person comes to yoga for different reasons and takes from yoga different lessons and uses. It is polyvocal and multivalent, and whether we like it or not it has become part of popular culture in America and throughout the world. So I don’t want to deny another person’s various and unique experiences of yoga in the process of sharing my own.

With that said, here goes. This post will explore the idea of yoga as dynamic love, as well as one reason I practice yoga that has resonated deeply with me in the last year or two (particularly since I began regularly teaching the introductory sociology course Social Problems). I argue that one of the reasons yoga has become so physically-focused and oriented towards acrobatic self-mastery of the body has to do with increasing feelings of a loss of control within the broader social and economic worlds we move within. Similarly, one of the main reasons we’ve been seeing the obsession with other “apocalyptic,” extreme exercise regimes in the Western world, including extreme contortionist, aerobic yoga forms, is the increasing powerlessness we feel in broader social systems.

Why Practice? Yoga as Dynamic Love

As I said, people come to yoga for many reasons, and though we can identify clusters of common reasons there is really no way to completely capture the various and multiple causes why people turn to the practice. For example, the most recent data commissioned by Yoga Journal indicates that as of 2012 the top five commonly cited reasons people give for starting yoga are “flexibility (78.3 percent), general conditioning (62.2 percent), stress relief (59.6 percent), improve overall health (58.5 percent) and physical fitness (55.1 percent).” Some also come to yoga to treat specific health conditions, such as back pain, neck pain, arthritis, and anxiety. But there are important limitations to these studies of common motivations that should discourage anyone from reading too much into the statistics–first, because people have multiple, concurrent motivations for coming to yoga (as those percents show, the question must have been a “check all that apply” not “check one”). Second, because our motivations for starting yoga are often very different than motivations for continuing it. Inevitably, the nature of the practice (and the culture) means that there is a self-selection process where only certain types of yogis continue, becoming dedicated, lifelong practitioners, while people with other motivations for doing yoga eventually leave the practice entirely or diversify their physical fitness repertoires to only do yoga “on occasion,” often for the common reasons listed above. As a result, we often find that those who become lifelong yogis tend to use the practice to access deeper (dare I say more spiritual?) meaning than just the physical/mental health reasons cited by those starting yoga.

The reason that we practice yoga changes over time, at least for those who stay with it for years (or a lifetime). It has to. This is because we have a relationship to our practice, and to commit in our yoga practice is similar to commitment in a relationship. A while ago I read a random article as I was sifting through my facebook feed. The piece was about love and relationships, and things you have to realize and learn when you are with someone for life (in order to remain with someone for life). Contrary to popular epitaphs that “love is forever,” “love never changes,” or “love stays the same” this article dropped some hard truths in opposition to those popular, romanticized Disney versions of “love.” The fact is, in any long, loving, and lasting relationship you have to learn to love the person you are with over and over again. Love isn’t static, but dynamic, and it has to change over time as both of the people in the partnership evolve and learn and grow and age. So we have to learn to love not just the person we met at “that place,” at “that time,” and “in that moment,” but also the person they become the next day, the next month, the next year, or two, or ten. We have to learn to fall in love with the people they become, and do so as the people we become (because we change in the same ways too, and similarly are not the same person the next day, next month, next year, or two, or ten). So if love is to last it must never stay the same; the only way love can survive is through evolution, through adaptation, through the conscious and deliberate development of dynamic love rather than an (inaccurate) ideal of static love. We have to learn to love the process of growth just as much as the moment of stasis.

Any relationship we have with something we love needs to change over time as a result, so in lasting relationships we must fall in love over and over and over again, every day. It’s like the movie 50 First Dates, but less comedic and without the Hollywood ending or inappropriate jokes. The practice of dynamic love takes courage, dedication, and deep self-reflection to accomplish, and is something we have to actively do with the mind, body, and heart. But it is also incredibly rewarding. As Lao Tzu said, “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” I think those who initially come to the practice fall in love with it at “that place” at “that time” and for “that reason,” whatever that might have been. But for those who stay with the practice, who become lifelong, devoted, and dedicated practitioners we have to fall in love with it continuously, and the way in which we love it changes depending on who we are and what our practice is at that time. This act of dynamic love is itself part of the practice, because learning to cultivate our ability to love in dynamic ways is part of what yoga teaches us. Yoga is a process, and an art, and ultimately about cultivating stability and commitment in dynamic, changing worlds and bodies. And I would argue it makes us better people in all areas of our lives as a result. Movement is life; when we stop moving, we stagnate, become brittle, and die.

Why Practice? Apocalypse and Work on the Body as a Strategy of Control

Like many people, I came to yoga haphazardly and without really knowing much about it. The first yoga class I attended was a hot yoga class. My mom took me on a weekend while I was still in high school, I think because she thought it would be a fun mother-daughter bonding experience (she was right, and it was) but probably also because at that time in my life I wasn’t as active and she wanted to encourage me to be physically healthier. I didn’t know what to expect, but I recall I loved sweating a ridiculous amount and the jello-limbed feeling following the class. At the time we lived in Humboldt county, a place of constant fog and 50 degree damp ocean weather, so it was a marvelous experience being hot and warm and sweaty for a whole hour. The reasons why I practice yoga have shifted since then and multiplied. It was a mutual shift; I changed, my needs and desires changed, so why I did yoga had to change too, and my practice evolved alongside my own evolution.

People practice yoga for many reasons, and all of them are valid. However, I think people who tend to stick with yoga for a lifetime come to develop very deep and meaningful reasons for their practice, beyond just basic health and wellness. It takes deep motivation to commit to practicing yoga for years, or decades, or life. So while I do still practice yoga as a means to stay physically healthy and strong, I also practice for other reasons, including those that are more spiritual, mental, and emotional. With that said, I think one reason that has been particularly relevant to me lately (and that also makes yoga such a powerful vehicle for healing addiction or trauma) is that yoga enables me to feel a sense of power and control in my own life. By yoking the mind and body, yoga enables a degree of self-mastery that we often lack in our social, economic, and political worlds. So yoga for me has become a means of finding peace and a small, unmovable, unshakable sense of stability in a world that is increasingly out of balance and beyond our control.

The sense of control I gain through yogic work on the body (and mind) is a way for me (and I expect many others) to regain a sense of self-efficacy, or what social psychologists refer to as perceptions and assessments of the self with regard to competence, effectiveness, and causal agency. In other words, self-efficacy is how much we feel we control our own destiny and have the ability to complete tasks and achieve our goals in life. And research has shown that having greater self-efficacy and an internal locus of control matters. Those who see themselves as internally controlled (a skill yoga definitely teaches us on and off our mats) do better in school systems, are more successful in stopping unhealthy habits like smoking, are more likely to wear seat belts, often deal with relationship problems directly, earn greater incomes, and are better able to delay instant gratification to achieve long-term goals which makes them more successful and happy. This is one of the reasons that yoga and mindfulness movements have been co-opted by capitalist systems through McMindfulness programs; yoga can make us more effective and productive workers, in large part because yoga helps us develop greater self-efficacy and self-mastery. (However, that doesn’t mean that’s what yoga should be used for, and as I’ve discussed before this type of application of yoga and mindfulness practices can actually serve to prop up unsustainable capitalist systems rather than solving larger social problems.)

As a sociologist, I study society and our broader social world using scientific research methods. Sociology teaches us to understand our world in deeper ways than the average person does, because as a sociologist we are trained to uncover the true nature of complex social interactions between individuals and larger social structures, see the interconnections of all areas of our society, as well as the ways our society influences and constrains our actions as individuals (often without our conscious awareness). So on the one hand, learning sociology can be incredibly freeing because it helps us understand how to be ourselves in a world with numerous outside pressures trying to force us to conform; in other words, it teaches us how to resist outside social pressures.

On the other hand, sociology is also incredibly depressing because it teaches us about the various, overwhelming, and interconnected problems there are in our world and how horribly difficult it is to solve any of them. Sociology teaches us how futile our efforts to make a difference can be, and this is often an unpleasant and, in some ways, traumatic realization. This is especially true for those who are romantics (as sociologists and yogis tend to be) or those who experience a great deal of privilege in other areas of their lives (for example, those with higher education or those who are white, like myself). Those who come from privileged positions often like to imagine anything is possible if they just put their mind to it, and that subsequently all the awesome things that happen to them are a result of effort rather than circumstance. Thinking that we earned what we get in life gives the illusion that we deserve what we get, which is appealing. However, social psychology research has shown that we often overestimate our strengths, abilities, and skills. This is called the “above average effect” or illusory superiority. For example, when comparing our driving skills to other people, 93% of people put themselves in the top 50%, something that obviously doesn’t add up. So sociology gives us a disturbing reality check: it’s likely those awesome accomplishments are mostly due to circumstances beyond our immediate control (combined with some individual effort to take advantage of privileged opportunities).

In the past several decades sociologists (along with many others) have been drawing attention to numerous social problems within our modern (postmodern?) global society. We currently live in a world in turmoil, a world in crisis. The problems facing us today are on a scale and level beyond those facing us throughout most of human history. Increasingly, we have very little personal power or control over our own lives and the course of our civilization and planet. Corporations have gained immense power in the last century, particularly during the last decade and even more so since the controversial Citizens United ruling in 2010; they now have immense influence over our culture, politics, and economy. We’ve been seeing the negative effects of an unsustainable capitalist consumer society both in terms of our own lives (decreased job satisfaction, decreased job security in a world where the permanent employment model has weakened in favor of temporary employment, increased stress and anxiety, stagnating wages, and the middle-class squeeze, just to name a few) but also in our world more broadly (such as global wars like the never-ending War on Terror or apocalyptic predictions of climate change and it’s contributing causes, including widespread global overpopulation, desertification of fertile lands, deforestation, extreme drought, sea level rise, and ongoing and widespread pollution). And hey, if all this isn’t overwhelming enough just think about this terrifying statistic: “By 2025, an estimated 1.8 billion people will live in areas plagued by water scarcity, with two-thirds of the world’s population living in water-stressed regions as a result of use, growth, and climate change.” In other words, within 10 years nearly two-thirds of the world will be without clean, drinking water.

As Ulrich Beck noted, we increasingly live in a high-risk society where we can never be sure if we are really safe, and where the technological advances that would enable us to gauge the risks we face are not widely available or widely understood. (What’s really in your shampoo? What’s really in your food? How do you ever really know?) Many of these risks are felt worldwide and require global solutions and global coalition building, a project that will likely not be realized in time to prevent widespread social changes (e.g., climate change). Or the risks we face are complex and interconnected with other social problems (e.g., income inequality is deeply interconnected with our cultural, political, and economic systems), or risks are invisible (e.g., chemicals or toxins), or risks are dispersed so much across our lifetimes (e.g., multiple chemical sensitivity caused by ingesting small, “safe” amounts of numerous chemicals regularly over decades) that it can be hard to avoid risks or fully understand them (e.g., regulations on chemicals are nearly non-existent in the USA).

Despite the increasing danger and instability of the worlds we live in, we have very little power to change things or control the conditions of our society and world. As a recent study by Princeton notes, the United States is no longer a democracy, but an oligarchy where the wealthy have increasing power and influence and our single voices are drowned in the vast sea of elite money. Even collectively, our powers are limited. Social movements often struggle to create larger social changes, as the recent demise of the Occupy movement demonstrates. Many times research on methods of resistance and collective action becomes used by those in power to further control and manage possible rebellion, so attempts to band together to make a difference are often thwarted as methods of control only become more insidious and powerful (e.g., recent trends to ban the filming of police in response to the #blacklivesmatter movement).

Besides being horribly depressing and at times terrifying (how could it not be?), what all of this means is that as individuals, we live in a world where we have very little power over the larger social conditions that structure our choices, attitudes, beliefs, and actions. There is very little we can do to influence our work environments or work opportunities, to influence our economy, to influence our politics, or to influence mainstream media culture (which, by the way, is controlled by only six megacorporations). So of course we are left feeling powerless in a world that is indeed largely beyond our control. And this feeling of powerlessness is often exacerbated for those who are on the front lines of this type of research, especially sociologists but also groups like climate change scientists. For example, a recent article by Dahr Jamail (one of my all time favorite reporters, do yourself a favor and check out his work) discussed how climate scientists have been experiencing depression, anger, and fear; in other words, the five stages of grief and/or symptoms of PTSD. Personally, I know many sociologists (including myself) that have experienced similar effects from the work that we do. Our mental and physical health is not independent of the systems we are embedded within.

Which brings it all back to yoga. Because for me (and I think for other yogis who are on the front lines of these social battles, or really anyone who is living in this world and dealing with these social trends in their personal lives) yoga is a means to regain a sense of control. While our ability to affect larger structures and social systems is extremely limited (though I do think there still may be hope, a topic I am exploring in my dissertation), we can at least cultivate control of our bodies, minds, and emotions. Through yoga, we can regain a sense of self-efficacy and power, largely by work on the body to regain strength, confidence, and self-mastery which we can then take off our mats and into the social worlds we move within.

Many extreme exercise forms use work on the body as a way to regain control of ones life in a life increasingly out of control world. Some recent research suggests, and I would completely agree, that the increasing loss of control in our lives is actually the reason why we are seeing the rise in popularity of forms of extreme fitness in America, including the trend within modern postural yoga towards the more flashy, acrobatic, and intense asana practices like Ashtanga, hot yoga, power yoga, or power vinyasa styles (a trend that has ultimately resulted in, no surprise, higher rates of injuries). In these extreme fitness trends, work on the body becomes a metaphor, symbolic of anxieties about the social body, or the body politic, and through work on the body we are able to alleviate some of the anxiety and stress we are unable to solve in other, macro-level arenas in our lives. So work on our bodies takes on a ritual symbolism of larger social issues in our social structures. In her book Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas investigates how “the body is a model which can stand for any bounded system” (114). The body, how we ascribe meaning to bodies, and what we do with bodies all become symbolic of larger social structures, and our own anxieties, attitudes, and beliefs about those systems. So “the ‘microcosm’–the physical body–may symbolically reproduce vulnerabilities and anxieties of the ‘macrocosm’–the social body” (Bordo in Unbearable Weight: 186). And as Douglas notes, body rituals like those practiced in yoga or extreme exercise regimes “enact the form of social relations and in giving these relations visible expression they enable people to know their own society. The rituals work upon the body politic through the symbolic medium of the physical body” (129). Our fears of impeding social, cultural, economic, and/or political crises of potentially apocalyptic proportions become manifested through the turn towards intense fitness activities, which also serve as a means to manage the embodied effects of such crises (like stress, anxiety, or trauma held in the body that is ultimately caused by larger social insecurities, dangers, or risks).

And while I’d love to offer some positive, hopeful, or upbeat ending to all of this I don’t really have one, and that’s the whole point. In a world falling apart at the seams, yoga has become a stopgap measure to hold ourselves together, a symbolic representation of the desire we feel for more control over our lives and a reflection of anxieties about our lack of influence in broader social systems. (I do realize yoga is more than just this, though, but that’s another blog post.) There is no easy solution.

Love, light, and… yoga ❤

Speaking Event: Berkeley on Friday 4/10!

Hi everyone! I’ll be presenting some of my research from my dissertation on yoga this Friday, April 10th in Berkeley, CA at the second annual conference held by the Race and Yoga Working Group. The theme this year is Yoga (R?)evolution and Dianne Bondy is going to be one of the keynote speakers. (Can’t wait! I have huge respect for her.) For my presentation I’ll be talking about the feminization of yoga in the 1980s. And good news! If you are in the area and want to attend the event is free to the public. Last year I was lucky enough to be a speaker at the first annual conference, and it was a great event. I’d highly recommend checking it out if you can!

The title of my talk is “The Great Gender Transformation: Feminization of the ‘Authentic’ Yoga Body.” I’ll be touching on the following:

The twenty-first century yoga body is often portrayed as lithe, young, white, affluent, female, and bent into seemingly effortless advanced physical yoga postures with grace and poise. But how did this body and its particular type of movement patterns become representative of yoga in America and, increasingly, throughout the world? Traditionally, yoga was exclusively practiced by men, and up until the 1980s remained a male-dominated field even in the United States. However, by the late 1980s a marked shift began in the gender composition of yogis as well as the gender dominance in the field. Yoga became feminized and increasingly stereotyped as a feminine activity and movement pattern. This paper traces the gender transformation of yoga in the USA from a male-dominated practice to a feminizing and feminine activity. Some background information on the historical precedent of men in yoga is provided followed by a discussion of the feminization of yoga that occurred during the 1980s and into the 1990s. I explain the causes for the dual process of why men increasingly opted out of yoga while at the same time women increasingly opted in, eventually producing a highly polarized demographic group of female yoga practitioners and a dominant cultural understanding of the “authentic” yoga body as female-identified. Finally, I discuss the implications this has on recent efforts by the yoga community to bring men back into yoga.

Love, light, and… yoga ❤