By Ljudmila Petrovic
Photos by Mark Burnham
It seems like no matter where you go in Vancouver, you cannot escape the fresh-faced, mat-carrying yogis that dot the city’s sidewalks and studios. In fact, Vancouver’s 2011 designation as one of the worst-dressed cities is mostly blamed on the excess of yoga pants. Sure, you can call me a hypocrite — my keychains are filled with yoga studio tags — but that’s never stopped me from ranting about something before. Nor can we deny that the practice has become so unlike the meditation yogis thousands of years ago were striving for that it is nearly unrecognizable. No matter how many namastes are exchanged in our over-priced swanky classes, the fact remains that simple spirituality has been replaced with the likes of Yogilates (a hybrid between yoga and pilates) and Power Yoga.
We now have yoga raves — a kundalini class with music and glow sticks — antigravity yoga and harmonica yoga (which is exactly what it sounds like). In April 2011, 21-year-old Jean Wharf was kicked off of a Vancouver Skytrain for refusing to take off her “Fuck Yoga” pin. Yeah, that was a big deal at the time because of freedom of speech, and organizations like the B.C. Civil Liberties Association got involved and so on. Whatever, that’s irrelevant in this context. What matters here is that there is clearly a movement to counter that of yoga’s rising popularity. There is a record label with the same name, and an entire website that sells merchandise emblazoned with the words.
Just as there is an entire army of downward-doggy-styling, wheatgrassdrinking, quinoa-munching individuals, so too is there a group that thinks they’re full of shit.
Not everyone takes such an angry approach. There are also those who feel that yoga has become grossly misrepresented by the styles of yoga that have developed in recent years. The “Not Yoga” group, for example, jokes about this on their light-hearted Facebook page. “[This] group is playfully devoted to the ways in which yoga is misrepresented,” reads their page. “Yoga is now so totally altered that we can cry, get angry, or laugh, and laughing might be the most positive.” Those that subscribe to these ideas are not of the belief that yoga is even being practiced wrong, so much as that its very essence has been misrepresented; its practitioners strive for the poses and have lost the spiritual aspect on the way. “Yoga is primarily a spiritual discipline. I don’t mean to belittle the Yoga postures,” writes Paramahansa Yogananda in The Essence of Self-Realization. “The body, moreover, is a part of our human nature, and must be kept fit lest it obstruct our spiritual efforts.”
Swami Chidananda Saraswati, head of the internationally known Sivananda Ashram, is another proponent of the idea that the familiar poses we view as making up a class are actually inconsequential — or at least minimal — in the grand scheme of an individual’s practice. “Physical posture serves at best as an auxiliary, or a minor form of Yoga,” he has explained.
In recent years, there has also been more media attention surrounding the “Take Back Yoga” approach, headed by the small, but significant, Hindu American Foundation (HAF). The group believes that those practicing yoga should become more aware of the Hindu traditions that lie at the core of the practice. At 2009’s Parliament of World Religions, Suhag Shukla of HAF brought to attention the rising commercialization of the yoga movement and the ways in which this was insulting to its Hindu roots. The following year, The New York Times drew more attention to the cause with the article “Hindu Group Stirs a Debate Over Yoga’s Soul.” Since then, there has been a rise in the discussions surrounding yoga’s roots and whether the West is honoring the traditions of yoga or bastardizing them.
A prime example is that of Bikram Choudhury, an Indian-born yoga instructor and founder of the Bikram stream of yoga. Based in Los Angeles, he is the self-proclaimed guru to the stars, he is filthy rich and unapologetic about it. His system consists of 90-minute long sessions, held in a 105-degree Fahrenheit room. The session involves a sequence of 26 poses and two breathing exercises, which Choudhury unsuccessfully tried to copyright in a recent lawsuit: in July 2011, he sued two yoga instructors that were using the same sequences without his permission; the case finished in December 2012. “The sequence — Choudhury’s compilation of exercises and yoga poses . . . is merely a procedure or system of exercises,” wrote U.S. District Otis Wright about the ruling.
Lawsuits? LA celebs? This doesn’t sound like the yoga that has spirituality at its roots, and yet this is one of the most popular and well-known streams of yoga. So, how can we describe the yoga craze in North America? “It’s a mess,” said Dr. Georg Feuerstein in a 2003 interview in LA Yoga Magazine. “Looking at the Yoga movement today, part of me feels very saddened by it, but then I also see that it contains the seeds of something better.” So, as much as I can bitch about what the practice has become, the fact remains that yoga is what we make of it. You can do it for the sake of Lululemon, you can do it for the physical benefits, you can do it because it’s all the rage, but you can also do it to acquire a calm introspection and become the most spiritual person you can be amongst the everyday bustle.
