Yoga-centric Post

A pair of posts ago, I mentioned that there has been a bit of a hoo-ha in the yoga world around an article in the NY Times about a woman who open a yoga studio in Manhattan.Big news, right?I guess she gets a NY Times article because she is a late model and the soul behind "Slim, Calm, Sexy Yoga".And who doesn't need to say about former models who promote being slim, calm and sexy?

lso, she claims to learn "real" yoga, not that uptight, tradition-bound yoga that uses all those Sanskrit terms and everything.Further, she disses her yoga teacher training as being really inadequate and pointless.She open her studio in reaction against all that stuffy stuff, generally thumbing her nose at the yoga establishment, at least the New York City version.You can imagine how the established yoga world reacted to all that. It was like when Christine O'Donnell won the Republican primary in Delaware.Karl Rove was all over the place distancing himself from her while secretly watching to see if he should quickly embrace her (if she looked like she would win) or to completely trash her (if she looked like she would lose).She ain't one of us!Unless she is.no wait.she ain't!Definitely, ain't.As often as I admire people who presume to talk out against the constitution and go against the tide to make something new my sense is that this person, like Christine O'Donnell, has the fault of being wrong-headed at least in one significant way (and it is here that the metaphor ends because i think Christine O'Donnell is incorrect in far more ways than one).I guess it is a fault to adopt some minimal training, teach for a pair of years, and believe that you know better.Even if she is a splendid teacher, she is displaying a kind hubris that is indicative that she has seriously missed the dot in life a biography of yoga.I concur with her that a lot of teacher education programs are not adequate.I feel favorable to have participated in one that was pretty comprehensive and that had the punch to draw in some amazing scholars and yogis as guest lecturers.I learned an enormous amount.Yet, in nearly every year I teach, I see places where I could experience more, know better.I surmise that isn't a manifestation of my training but a manifestation of how yoga is a life-long way that is infinitely complex.How can 200-hours of training really prepare anyone for meeting the vast array of bodies and personalities that one meets even in one class?YTT offers a frame of ideas that the instructor has to figure out through their own experience and continued training.In my training, they were fairly clear about this.After teaching a bit for the preceding two years, I look like I mostly know how often I don't know.In other words, I feel damned humble about what it way to share data about yoga with people. This morn I say a position by Anusara yoga instructor, Christina Sell, where she had this to say, not in reaction to the NY Times piece but after teaching an immersion class in Copenhagen.I guess she gets to the core of it quite nicely.As an aside, I cleaned up a pair of typos.One of the recurring themes for me this week was the grandness of actually having an aim as a yogi. It seems more and more obvious to me that practices and lifestyle recommendations in yoga are NOT about a list of outer do's and don'ts designed to take us into some form of "ideal yogi". Really, how we chose to acquire our use and our studentship (I am not tallking here aout "yoga class pupilship" but the larger consideration of being a student of Life, discipleship to the flow, sadhana, etc. is actually all about what we desire from the yoga. If what we need is a health-based hobby, then the yoga is not going to ask that lots of us or take that we release a lot of our comforts, preferences, and so forth. But if we are looking for deeper outcomes from yoga than a hobby provides we might be asked to go up the warmth in our practices.Mind you, I am not criticizing the different aims. I am not somebody who has an event with "yoga for a cuter butt" despite what people might think. Nope, that's not my axe to grind. I could care less why people do yoga in a way and let no concern AT ALL in convincing people with an athletic orientation to be more "spiritual" about it, for instance. That, to me,is a very boring discussion. Who cares? I repeat - not me. What I am concerned in is that apiece of us love our personal reasons for practice and that we feel empowered by them and that we make healthy choices in our lives based on those reasons. And, I find no motivation to see the reasons- while all great reasons, in general- as the same. So things can be different and yet be valid. We get to be grown ups about that, you recognize? When I say that it makes me guess that she could be telling me to not be so judgmental about the person who was featured in the article and/or she could be saying that there is room for all of us to be living our yoga (or not).I think you can decide.Here is the connection to the Times article.Here is an interesting article that, perhaps, explains a bit about why we were yet reading about this person,And another one that touches on the "Slim, Calm, Sexy" part.