From the category archives:

Yoga News and Culture

Lululemon: Is Commercial Success Yoga Success?

September 17, 2010

Lululemon more than doubles profits. Does the success of lululemon spell ‘success’ for the yoga community and movement? Or is it merely a consumerist debasement of the tradition, an attempt to supplement practice with enough ‘gear’ to get us kali-yuga materialists good and excited about the yoga-image? So here’s the question: can cynical business enterprises [...]

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A Guru with an Empire of Products!

September 16, 2010

Kimberly Fowler aims to make yoga accessible for everyone – The Daily Breeze. this person is exactly what is wrong with yoga in america. if she has her way, the practice will become simply another exercise fad that fades out like the counterculture and the short-lived *new age* twenty years later. and she is a [...]

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Stripping the Gurus

September 15, 2010

Stripping the Gurus. Why do so many great *spiritual leaders* behave in such insanely foolish ways as Falk describes in great and fascinating detail? Are they all predators? Have they deceived themselves into believing their own snake-oil? Or are they just as confused as the rest of us regarding the nature of our strange world [...]

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Trading Gurus for Celebrities?

September 15, 2010

American Psychosis The American yoga community seems to have traded its old-style gurus for new-style celebrities. What with the extensive scandals of the past decade, it’s hardly surprising that guru-guidance has received some scrutiny. But I think we’ve re-imported that model, just substituted celebrities with a ‘body-beautiful’ mentality for highly trained, well-educated yoga teachers that [...]

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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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