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Yoga minus Contemplation
by Joshua Glenn| Boston, USA
Wednesday, 13 October 2010
tags: americas, consumer culture, contributions from, culture, disciplines, header navigation, lateral navigation, making sense
In US communications throughout the 2000s, images of women (mostly) and men striking yoga poses signified "wellness" — a recently mainstreamed New Age mode of existence, in which physical health can and must not be separated from psychological and spiritual health. A woman and her young daughter do yoga together in a McDonald's "mommyisms" ad; Ellen DeGeneres vamps in the lotus position for a vitaminwater ad; Christy Turlington exudes yoga wisdom in a (PRODUCT)Red PSA. The message, in each case, is: in addition to getting fit, you should practice concentration and contemplation.
Recently, however, the following ad appeared in the magazine Women's Health. Planters Nuts icon Mr. Peanut — complete with top hat and monocle — greets the new day with a Surya Namaskar (Sun Salutation). How absurd! What might this signify?
The ad copy doesn't mention psychological or spiritual health — it's strictly about the body. "Built for your healthy lifestyle. Mr. Peanut knows you strive to live a more active life and eat nutritious foods. That's why he created NUTrition — a line of nut mixes blended with select ingredients. Choose from Heart Healthy, Digestive Health, or Energy Mixes — all with the Planters taste you love."
If this ad is any indication, and I think it is, in the US yoga has now been 100% mainstreamed and secularized. Images of yoga no longer evoke associations with Hindu or Buddhist meditative practices. Forget abstention, austerity, withdrawal of the sense organs from external objects. Though Baudelaire claimed that dandyism is a form of askesis, the dandified Mr. Peanut isn't an ascetic: for him, as for most Americans today, yoga is simply about fitness. The New Age is over. (The new New Age is weirder; more about that some other time.)
Marketers: interested in communicating a message about concentration and contemplation? As noted, yoga imagery is starting to trend residual. Soul Cycling — intense full-body workout on a stationary bicycle, accompanied by motivational messages — is a fresher expression of the same code. What else? Hmmm. Sufism is emergent, in the US — because moderate, pluralistic Sufi imams are seen as a front line against the most violent forms of Islam. So perhaps marketers should insert fakirs into upcoming campaigns? Nothing says "concentration and contemplation" like a guy on a bed of nails.
21 October 2010 at 3:44 pm
Joshua Glenn says:
Thanks for the link to the Guardian story. If you ask me, yoga aficionados for whom yoga is about concentration and contemplation should be at least as upset (if not more) by the Planters ad [analyzed in the post above] as they are about Kathryn Budig doing yoga in nothing but toe socks!
21 October 2010 at 10:05 am
Louise says:
That’s funny – the opposite of the kind of open secret I had in mind – excessive promotion, total exclusion! This also brings to mind the idea that, the more some things are spoken of, the more they tend to disappear – which is why ‘mystical’ disciplines have so much trouble with representation.
Meanwhile the Yoga Journal debate made it into the UK press this week: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/18/naked-yoga-kathryn-budig-toesox
21 October 2010 at 3:17 am
Matthew Battles says:
Sufis are great—only nowhere near Ground Zero.
I think it’s interesting that the yoga practices we know today map British military calisthenics and Indian wrestling regimens onto the spiritual exercises of the yoga sutras—in the ancient scriptures, the asanas are all very subtle (to Western eyes, they’re variations on the Lotus position). It seems as though Western interest in yogic practice has gone through several up-and-down cycles, from rigorous seeking to esoteric dabble to mainstream fad. I bet that Mr. Peanut fits into a deeper historical graph of boom and bust.
18 October 2010 at 1:28 pm
Joshua Glenn says:
I like the idea of open secrets. Particularly as conceptualized in the great 1980 mockumentary The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, where Malcolm McLaren at one point facetiously claims that he heavily publicized Sex Pistols concerts but then didn’t actually allow anyone into the venues to see the shows.
17 October 2010 at 7:39 pm
Louise says:
Probably! And I agree that accessibility and the interminglings of the worldly with the unworldly are of great value (and interest). But the problems you write about in your piece can help us understand the reasons behind esoteric traditions: why secrecy has been valued so highly and traditions guarded so defensively, and what can happen when the cat gets out of the bag!
Maybe ‘open secrets’ are the way forward! No barriers or exclusions, but no promotion or commodification either.
15 October 2010 at 9:56 pm
Joshua Glenn says:
It’s impossible not to sympathize with your point, Louise, though Hamsini Shivakumar’s post today argues that even a fairly shallow, spirituality-lite “wellness” Indian newspaper supplement can open our eyes to something important about the Hindu ethos.
As a PK (preacher’s kid), I spent my youth disdaining “Easter Christians,” who only showed up at church on the big holy days or for marriages and baptisms. However, when I asked my father if these folks’ behavior didn’t irk him, he replied that — from a minister’s perspective — he was always delighted to see someone come to church, no matter what their motive. He regarded such moments as an opportunity to make a connection that might deepen over time.
So… though my instinctive mode is elitist and purist, I’m not unsympathetic with the Yoga Journal editor quoted in the newspaper story quoted in the comment above, who sees selling fancy yoga mats as an opportunity to make a connection that might deepen over time.
In a way, this sort of argument parallels the Hinayana (monastic)/Mahayana (lay) conflict in the early common era, doesn’t it? Mahayana Buddhists probably strutted around Pushkalavati with their fancy vinyasa mats, driving the ragged Hinayanas wild with scorn and rage.
15 October 2010 at 10:39 am
Louise says:
Thank you for saying all this – a big thank you! I think the doors to all this opened earlier in the 20th century, when Indian teachers repositioned yoga as a democratic form, suitable for householders and not just for ascetics, and started using the therapeutic language of Western science, medicine and psychology. And I think this has to be seen in context – that these were the colonial prestige languages of the time – so yoga needed to take on some kind of medical/scientifc value (cures asthma, does this and that) in order to become respectable.
For me this raises a really fundamental question. Once upon a time, disciplines like yoga were esoteric in the strict sense – kept secret, passed down from teacher to student within a very strict and guarded lineage. Since yoga’s democratisation in the 20th century, it’s become accessible to everyone, which is good – but what’s the result? Yoga Journal and Lululemon!
So does this justify esoteric elitism? Or do we just have to put up with all the YJ and Eat Pray Love nonsense knowing that it’s just the price we pay for the democratic dissemination of revolutionary knowledge?
14 October 2010 at 1:52 pm
Joshua Glenn says:
Coincidentally, an article ran in my hometown newspaper today on the subject of the mainstreaming and secularization of yoga.
Excerpt: “It’s recombined with dominant forms of the culture; it’s very malleable that way,” said [Stefanie Syman, author of a new yoga history called “The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America”]. There is yoga for every taste, energy level, and aspirant — hip-hop yoga, hot yoga, rock pop yoga, weight loss yoga, Christian yoga, even Yoga Booty Ballet, which bills itself as a dynamic fusion of yoga, booty sculpting, and cardio-dance. If there is any doubt that yoga has left the ashram and joined the mainstream, consider that yoga was part of this year’s Easter Egg Roll festivities on the White House lawn.
It’s also been monetized, Syman said. Practiced by celebrities, fitness buffs, and fashionistas, yoga is a $6 billion industry with some 16 million American followers. Many of those millions are pouring into the trendy lululemon yogawear stores — purveyor of $90 yoga mats, $25 yoga water bottles, $40 yoga towels, and other nonessential yoga accessories such as yoga thong underwear and an $88 “yoga mat carry system” with a “Helmet friendly design.” [So you won’t hit your head with your mat while riding your bike.]
Even the venerable magazine Yoga Journal, considered the bible for yoga practitioners, has evolved from a nonprofit publication founded in 1975 in a Berkeley basement to a glossy magazine with celebrities on the cover and sexy ads for pricey yoga gear, a trend that’s infuriated one of its founding editors.
“I feel sad because it seems that Yoga Journal has become just another voice for the status quo and not for elevating us to the higher values of yoga: spiritual integration, compassion and selfless service,” Judith Hanson Lasater wrote in a recent letter to the editor.
Yoga Journal’s editor in chief, Kaitlin Quistgaard, said she “completely respected” Lasater’s letter, “but we also need to run a commercial venture. . . . We are Americans and one thing Americans do is shop and like nice things. And one of the ways we identify ourselves is having a certain look. The yoga industry does support our desire to create self-identity through what we wear or what we purchase.”