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When yoga people get a bit older, or preggers and their metabolisms slow down and gravity comes forward to claim its due, just watch. You'll see the trend change to looser fitting pants. People will start craving those and throw yet more money into the maw of Kama, the the God of Capitalist Craving.

corboy, does this mean I'm a trendsetter for going loose before everyone else?

Seriously, it's way more comfy and I never was much of a joiner. Why anyone has to show off their body during a class is beyond me. Then again, I never got why some women put on layers of war paint for a hot sweaty workout. We humans are very, very strange.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/06/2012 03:46AM by good enough.

Hah, I've been in baggy kurta pyjama for years, and never gave a darn for trends. The Central Asians and Persians came up with the concept centuries before Phat Pharm and FUBU.

Was just riffing about the fashion scene that yoga's turned into.

I'm tired and my brain cells are on strike, so when I read the following article I had to read it twice to make sure I wasn't imagining things.

According to the journalist who wrote the piece, a yoga studio director supposedly said that "as a hot yoga studio, Moksha Yoga offers the added benefit of skin exfoliation."

And this is happening whilst everyone is doing tree pose or downward dog??? I seriously hope people are bringing their own mats to class.

It's amazing all the miracles that yoga is supposed to achieve.

[www.thestar.com]

A summer body can be yours in just six weeks

Published On Fri Apr 06 2012

Jennifer Pagliaro Staff Reporter

With six weeks left until the May long weekend, there’s no need to dread trading your winter clothes for those fitted tops and shorts.

Toronto fitness experts say six weeks is plenty of time to tone your body and spirit into shape. Here are three ways to get fit before you light up the barbecue and fireworks.

FOR THE SPIRIT WARRIOR: YOGA

As you emerge from winter hibernation and jump into fun, running headstrong into physical activities can lead to unwanted injury.

Yoga will get your body limber in time for the long weekend, said Moksha Yoga Downtown studio director Tracey Dos Anjos.

“It teaches you proper motion. You gain flexibility, you gain strength,” she said. “So you can portage a canoe or do all of the things that you want to do without getting hurt.”

As a hot yoga studio, Moksha Yoga offers the added benefit of skin exfoliation and increased concentration on breathing and posture, she said.

And while high-impact exercise may not be for everyone, Dos Anjos said yoga is for all ages and skill levels. Classes allow people to find their own comfort level in a pose.

“You’re trying to find your place within a posture, where you’re challenged and you can bring calmness to that challenge.”

It’s time to downward dog your way outdoors.

Moksha Yoga at 577 Wellington St. West offers 10 days for $20 to try out their classes.

[downtown.mokshayoga.ca]

In hot humid weather, or in the heat and humidity typical of a 'hot' yoga class, you will not see canines doing downward dog pose.

The dogs will have more good sense than the humans do -- they will flop down in the coolest area they can find!

Ditto for cats.

Snakes (think of cobra pose) do not come out in hot daylight weather, either. They do their hunting at night.

So folks are still peddling Hot Yoga.

Bad idea for participants, but successful business model. Bikram's stuff is one size fits all, doesn't take into account people's tolerance for heat or body type for that matter. Then there is the question of instructor competence. Those who just went to his teacher class are woefully ill equipped to help people. It's those that are cross trained in bodywork and other disciplines and have not drank the Bikram kool-aid that are actually decent instructors. The problem is there are few of the later and many of the former.

Bikram doesn't care because he gets his pound of flesh one way or another.

People are better off served by Pilates or just doing a simple Yoga routine at home. Or ideally putting together their own workout routine and not have to be dependant on egomanical scumbags like Bikram, dangerous buffoons like Gwain or a host of othe fakes that populate the world of Yoga and convince people via marketing hype that their material is the best.

Be your own teacher.

When I used to have a regular yoga practise I always preferred doing it on my own with books and DVDs... in other words, doing it my way according to my own schedule and energy levels. I found this article interesting as I can't imagine ever putting anyone -- yoga instructor/guru included -- on a pedestal.

[www.theglobeandmail.com]

A shakeup in the yoga world prompts soul-searching
WENCY LEUNG

From Monday's Globe and Mail
Published Sunday, Apr. 15, 2012 4:00PM EDT

Breaking up hurts. But breaking up with your yoga teacher is a special kind of hurt, as Montrealer Adriana Palanca discovered when her relationship with her teacher of more than two years fell apart.

While she initially enjoyed training with her teacher, Ms. Palanca, a writer and a yoga teacher herself, began to discover that the way she wanted to practice yoga was at odds with her mentor’s style and methods.

“I realized that we didn’t share the same values and we weren’t speaking the same language,” she says. The realization that they weren’t compatible was devastating. “All of a sudden, what happened when she and I broke up, it was like, ‘Woah.’ It was a little bit like finding out that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.”

It’s a complex relationship between yoga teacher and student, one that involves not just instruction on physical postures, but often spiritual and philosophical guidance as well. So when students’ faith in their teachers falters, it can force them to do some serious soul-searching.

Over the past few months, several senior teachers of the popular Anusara school of yoga have split from its founder John Friend, while the Texas-based company he created, Anusara, Inc., undergoes restructuring. Anusara, which describes itself as one of the most highly respected and fastest growing yoga schools in North America, promotes a style of yoga that focuses on both physical poses and philosophy. Its trademarked name and guiding principles are taught around the world, including Canada, where it has roughly 100 teachers across the country. The shakeup, spurred by reports appearing on yoga websites and spreading to national media alleging that Mr. Friend had consensual sex with his female students, some of whom were married, has prompted some long-time Anusara practitioners to reflect on their feelings about the founder and his teachings.

Nora Maskey, an Anusara-certified teacher in Calgary, says she’s studied with Mr. Friend for the past eight years.

“I care for him as a person,” she says. But even though she still believes in the Anusara method and continues to teach it, she has taken steps to distance herself from the school and its creator, such as changing the text on her website to downplay her distinction as an Anusara teacher.

The process hasn’t been easy. “I’ve gone through all the stages of grief that one would go through in a situation like this,” she says.

Regardless of why a relationship may have unravelled, breaking away from a yoga teacher can be emotional, since a certain level of intimacy tends to develop between teacher and student, says Roseanne Harvey, Montreal-based editor of the blog itsallyogababy.com.

“You’re learning from this person, you’re studying with them,” she says, noting that in some cases, teachers become akin to counsellors, someone students can look up to, share personal issues with and seek advice from.

“Working with the body, and working with the subtle energy that you do in yoga ... that’s what makes the relationship different from a professional mentor or a coach,” she says.

But amid the turmoil and instability that comes with a yoga breakup, there is a bright side, she says: It can discourage students from putting their teachers on a pedestal.

“I hope that students will be empowered to ask more from [teachers] about their ethics, about what they’re doing outside of the yoga studio,” Ms. Harvey says. “Are they practising what they’re preaching?”

The uncertainty can also force students to figure out for themselves which of their teachers’ methods and techniques work for them and which to discard. In yoga parlance, they’re left to create their own paths.

Leena Miller, an Anusara-inspired teacher in Kitchener-Waterloo, who has studied with Mr. Friend, says she’s unsure whether to renew her Anusara licence this year. Lately, the school has started to feel more corporate and commercial than she’d like, she says, and the recent shakeup has contributed to her doubts. At any rate, as the company undergoes restructuring due to questions about Mr. Friend’s private life, it’s unclear whether Anusara’s licensing and certification system will continue to exist.

At the same time, Ms. Miller sees an opportunity. Until now, Anusara teachers have been expected to follow specific guidelines on how to instruct their classes. “Now, as many of us don’t know if there’s still going to be a clear system to be aligned with, it’s given me a chance to experiment a little bit,” she says.

For Ms. Palanca, her own yoga breakup has been strangely liberating. She hasn’t replaced her ex-mentor. Rather, she’s started to attend different yoga classes, picking up new techniques and methods along the way.

“There’s a sense of euphoria, in that, wow, I can do anything now,” Ms. Palanca says.

The Globe and Mail article describes exactly whats wrong with modern Yoga.

That it's mostly a physical exercise program, no different than any basic stretching course you can take at a community college or at the Y. The problem arises is that we are led to believe that the more physically adept one is at Hatha Yoga the more spiritually evolved they are. Then you get the cults of personality that surround all the big dogs of Yoga here in the West, and the people who excuse their monsterous behavior. Then come the sex and money scandals.

Google any well know Yoga teacher and you'll find plenty of people just praising the instructor to the heavens for thier spiritualness, etc. They don't get they are praising a two bit jock who couldn't even make it in college athletics.

Yep, jocks who stretch like Gumby.

That's what Friend is that is what Manouso Manos is, Iyengar, Shakti Gwain, Amrit Desai and his seniors, Rodney Yee - all jocks with a few sexual predators thrown in for good measure. There isn't one of them that has the wisdom and life experience of people I met in my life and I suspect this goes for anyone here at this forum as well.

Walter1963 wrote

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That it's (yoga) mostly a physical exercise program, no different than any basic stretching course you can take at a community college or at the Y. The problem arises is that we are led to believe that the more physically adept one is at Hatha Yoga the more spiritually evolved they are. Then you get the cults of personality that surround all the big dogs of Yoga here in the West, and the people who excuse their monsterous behavior. Then come the sex and money scandals.
Google any well know Yoga teacher and you'll find plenty of people just praising the instructor to the heavens for thier spiritualness, etc. They don't get they are praising a two bit jock who couldn't even make it in college athletics.

Yep, jocks who stretch like Gumby.

Here is my hunch on why so very many cannot allow yoga to just be what it is--one physical conditioning program among many.

Yoga has been presented as a respite and also as a place where one can idealize and mythologise both the teacher and the method itself. Thats its popularity--its a venue not just for getting physically healthy.

It provides a venue for idealization--something lots of us feel afraid to do elsewhere.

Problem is, not enough yoga teachers understand how intoxicating it is to be a focus for idealization and buy into it--then get swept into a riptide of temptation and ego inflation.

Yoga became wildly popular in the early to mid 1990s. Thats when you saw the yoga mat and bag becoming the public badge of identification that someone was a yogi/ini.

My suggestion is the 1990s were a time of crushed hopes and (via the internet boom) info overload and then, with the Dot.com crash, more crushed hopes.

During Watergate in the 1970s, they spoke of 'crediblity gaps'. The 1990s, I suggest were an idealization gap. And yoga offered a focus, a place where one could idealize and hope to be safe in doing so.

Thats why folks didnt want yoga and still dont want yoga to become just a method of body conditioning.

In the 1990s, I frequented a swank gym. At the time that gym opened, it and several other 'hip' gyms in our very cosmopolitan city were offering the most fashionable choices which were, Spinning (insert trademark here), boxing, kick boxing and yes, Pilates.

The Pilates classes were packed and wait lists were as long. Ditto for the Spinning classes.

In about he mid to late 1990s, yoga mats and yoga mat bags began to appear and yoga classes began sprouting up.

Then WHAMMMM!!! the yoga thing took off like the Space Shuttle.

And I can remember it being the late 1990s when this sudden shift to mega popularity happened and yoga became ubiquitous.

My guess is the 1990s were a period where there was a huge and aching hunger for someone and something to idealize. So many hopes had been smashed.

It may be worth recalling that the drugs associated with the early to mid 1990s were the anti depressants. Remember when Prozac was the cultural catchword?

Perhaps part of being human is that there is a hunger to idealize. And the early to mid 1990s were a period of hopes and idealizations being smashed. It may not be a coincidance that yoga became such a focus for idealization at that time.

Pilates kept itself as just a body conditioning program. Ditto for Spinning(TM) and the various forms of boxing.

Those were shoved to the side as yoga classes proliferated.



And, increasingly in public life, there has been a shortage of honorable persons and ideals to emulate. So many of our heroes have turned out to have shadow sides.

I can remember how yoga turned hugely popular in the 1990s. In the US, people who were in the demographic that had put high hopes on the Democrats being elected to the Presidency in 1992 and 1996 found that life remained a sad slog and the scandals in the Clinton administration were an utter humiliation.

In the UK, there was the painful public meltdown of the Prince and Princess of Wales' marriage.

The Berlin Wall came down. The old Soviet Union crumbled and we stopped being terrified of dying in a nuclear war with the Soviets.

Then, despite this burst of sunshine, all at once the horrible war in the former Yugoslavia broke out and we began reading terrible news about genocidal slaughter, as though humans had learned nothing since World War II.

And...the added horror of reading about 'rape camps.'

So, there was, in the 1990s, a burst of optimism followed by a wholesale crushing of hopes.

Humans have to have someone/something to honor and emulate. Its like marine creatures that must find something stable to hang onto, such as a wharf piling or ship's hull.

So perhaps that is why so very many made yoga and its teachers the focus of idealization, and literally did not want yoga to be what it was -- just a body conditoning program.

Yoga, safetly boundaried and set apart from the vagaries of politics and the outside world seemingly offered a respite, a safe space/bunker and a sole remaining nook where idealization of a leader and method could take place.

In yoga you could find someone to idealize and a method that promised ancient myteries. ---ancient, older than the modernism that was breaking down all around.

During the trials and tributions that followed 9 - 11, this need for a focus for intense idealization remained.

The problems begin when the persons who are the focus of such idealization have little or no training in how intoxicating they will feel when finding such idealization focused upon them. If you're male and have a good looking body and surrounded by scantily dressed good looking persons, eyes focused on you, the intoxication factor must skyrocket.

Leonard Nimoy, interviewed for the film, Trekkies, has told how stunned and even frighted he felt when he first experienced the potent blast of adoring energy directed at him by fans who related to him as though he were Mr Spock.

And yoga not only provided a focus for idealization, it, unlike boxing and Spinning(TM) and Pilates, lent itself to CONSUMERISM. You needed to keep buying more and more cutsy clothes and yoga accessories. This supplied revenue for gyms, and created a niche market in ways that the other body conditioning modalities did not--you didnt need to keep adding to your pile of accessories in order to do Pilates.

(Nimoy wrote a book entitled I am Not Spock. In that book he told how a lady brought her sick baby to him begging him to lay on his hands and heal her child.)

Unlike many a yoga teacher, Mr Nimoy has apparently managed to avoid identifying himself with the Spock character.

As long as you don't put your Yoga teacher on a pedestal and instead treat him/her like a coach you're fine. Provided of course that the class suits your needs.

Here's the rub.

We may be in a state where we are putting people on pedestals (shrinks call this the idealizing transferance) and not know we are even doing this.

The subconscious operates outside the realm of conscious awareness, no matter how intelligent, socially sophisticated and well educated we are.

Years ago, I was catastrophically ill from double pneumonia that had followed severe flu.

I had spent ten days in mental and physical pain due to high fevers, had been unable to sleep most of those days and nights due to non stop coughing, and high fevers had added to the mayhem.

I was in a state where I felt very much aware of things, so I thought, but without knowing it, I was cognitively fragile.

Bereavement, getting fired, worries about family and friends can also destabilize us in ways we are not aware of.

Well, when I at last ended my stoicism and made it to the clinic, I formed an idealizing transferance to the health care provider assigned to me.

Didnt even know this. At the time I was sure the guy was six feet tall, slender and muscular, with fine features and a full head of reddish hair.

A year later, after the crisis had passed, I consulted this same person again.

By this time I was back to my psychological baseline and was grounded again and healthy.

To my amazement the guy was not six feet tall. Instead he was 5 foot 9, pudgy, had heavy jowls and had a receding hairline because he was going bald.

It was as though in one short year, the 'pixie dust' of transferance had dissipated, and I at last could see what the guy really looked like.

He was off his pedestal.

And in one year he could not have changed so much.

I had changed. I had shifted from being sick, sleep deprived, scared, and fragile with a fragmenting self in need of stablization, to a being a healthy and relatively autonomous adult.

At the time when I was in health crisis and needed someone who would let me stabilize my fragile self (the way a tiny child will run and cling to Mom or Dad when scared by a nightmare), I had unconscously transformed the doctor into someone to idealize.

Thing is, the doctor had behaved appropriately this entire time.

Thats why persons in professions most likely to receive idealizing transferances are under a special legal obligation to avoid exploiting this.

At the time this went on, I had no way of knowing I was putting my treating physician on a pedestal.

Many are in this same state of mind without knowing it and will be unaware of putting their yoga teachers on pedestals.

And in many ways we seek to emulate yoga teachers, in ways we dont do with our physicians.

(Note: most MDs and nurse practitioners are fully dressed, vs buff yoga teachers in scanty clothes. If a doctor or nurse paraded into a consulting room displaying rippling muscles, clad only in shorts and a tank or showed off their asses and tummies and cleavage in tight yoga pants, they'd be taken aside and warned this wasnt appropriate)

Also humans have ways of picking up nonverbal vibes in a group. If just a few people in a yoga class are idealzing the teacher, there is a chance this could induce a sort of contagion effect and translate to others in group who otherwise might be unlikely to idealize the teacher.