From the category archives:

Yoga News and Culture

Yoga and Nature: Good, Bad and Ugly

August 26, 2010

Class brings yoga into nature zone | mydesert.com | The Desert Sun. Yoga and nature immersion are parallel practices. There is a mysterious term in the first chapter of the Yoga Sutra – the term is prakrti-laya, or ‘absorbed in nature.’ I have been fascinated by this term for many years, since it seemed to [...]

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Silva Mind Control – hmmm…

August 26, 2010

Learn Meditation with The Silva Centering Exercise. Why do all e-z zen pages look the same? Check out anything by any “the Secret” followers – or perhaps the notorious “Quantum Jumping” sales program – you’ll see they use exactly the same kind of hard-sell “squeeze page” technique to sell their water by the river. That’s [...]

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Fox (!) Cites Yoga Health Benefits

August 26, 2010

Yoga Shows Potential to Ward Off Certain Diseases Physiologists have detected lower levels of stress hormones in *expert* (check the definition in the article – it’s pretty darn loose!) yoga practitioners. It will be interesting to see how these findings dovetail news-wise with Fox’s well-known bias in terms of what we might call ‘culture’ and [...]

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Lindsay Lohan, Bikram and Malcolm X

August 25, 2010

Bikram Yoga Conversion for Lindsay Lohan Want to know what the real ‘religion’ is in Hollywood? I smell watered-down yoga mixed surreptitiously with the sodium of Protestant conversionism. Eeegh. Future historians will say that Yoga has become the de facto religion of West Coast celebrity culture – the question: will the celebrities actually practice that [...]

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Kim Kardashian Does Yoga (?)(!)

August 25, 2010

Kim Kardashian Bares Her Yoga for the Camera. YogaDork does it again with this superb send-up of pop icon Kim Kardashian doing something that looks sorta like yoga. Is it because, as YogaDork says, “yoga is sexy”?  eegghh…

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Tai Chi Eases Fibromyalgia

August 24, 2010

Tai Chi Eases Symptoms of Fibromyalgia, Study Finds – NYTimes.com. The complex mind-body condition ‘chronic fatigue’ requires an equally mind-body oriented solution. Tai Chi gently moves the physical body and breath in even patterns that distribute attention throughout the organism, thus releasing deeply-held tensions and toxins. It is likely that yoga carries with it many [...]

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Yoga Wars! NPR

August 24, 2010

Yoga Wars! India Blocks Patents On Poses Metaphorical *patents* on spiritual material are well-known historically – every lineage in India has its own private, proprietary set of yoga methods. This becomes a strange brew in the modern world where these techniques can potentially become money-makers if they are understood as publicly proprietary.

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Brain Chemicals and Yoga

August 23, 2010

Yoga Increases GABA, decreases depression Yes, perhaps yoga affects brain chemicals – but how does the causality work? Does yoga directly increase brain chemicals? Or does GABA increase with psychological well-being induced by yoga? This is the old brain-mind problem, something that scientists studying yoga will have to grapple with very soon.

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Demographics of Yoga and Race

August 23, 2010

Namaste: Yoga in the Black Community Is yoga in America a “predominantly white and elitist practice?” I am often stunned less by the predominance of caucasians than by the strange absence of Indians and the even stranger dearth of males – especially younger males.

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Eat, Pray, Love – Yoga in Hollywood

August 17, 2010

Flicked Off: In Which Two Ladies Do Yoga Then See ‘Eat Pray Love’ – The Awl. Eat, Pray, Love is a perfect example of American yoga narcissism – or am I missing something?

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