Bait and Switch Yoga · 29 October 2007
Wow. Which yoga-consumer group sold my mailing address to “Yoga Pura” of Phoenix, Arizona?
They want me to come to their teacher training, a “journey of a lifetime,” after I have asked myself the following questions.
Am I fearlessly committed to living happy now?
Do I want to understand—really, really understand—the mysteries underlying yoga and all great spiritual traditions?
Oh yeah. Happiness, and real, real understanding. That’s my bag, allright. But Phoenix is some distance from LA. Could I do this training by correspondence? Probably, because it turns out that Yoga is ANYTHING I want it to be. Check this ad copy, you poor, unenlightened readers.
Yoga is not about stretching. Yoga is not about meditation. In fact, contrary to what you may have heard, yoga is not even about yoga. And while it may be true that yoga involves all of these, it’s [sic] real potency and value lies [sic] in its ability to create something much greater: the transformation of your life. Yoga is about living your life to the fullest…. It’s about joy in the workplace and love in the home. Yoga is about the fulfillment of your life’s purpose with a… fulfillment previously unimagined [sic]. At Yoga Pura we’re unlocking the real secrets of the ancient science of yoga to help people do just that. More than a simple course in yoga postures… the Teacher Training… will immerse you in your own personal voyage of self-discovery and awakening—transforming you into a mature spiritual guide able to help others do the very same thing.
Classic yoga bait-and-switch advertising here. Not just “happiness,” “fulfillment,” and “real understanding” but the wisdom and knowledge to be others’ “spiritual guide.” Right. Right up until you get about a month into some kind of practice and realize how clueless, monkey-minded, and how not qualified to be another’s authority, you really are.
To me, this Yoga Pura type of thing is more painful than blatant yoga materialism that promises fashionable pastimes and a nice ass. Because this is yoga as candy apple “happiness” that represents a quick escape from the life you presumably want to change. Since there’s nice enough intention here, these corny promises make it easier to forget that yoga is just a practice and not an express ticket to some other self.
Nothing in this ad is about establishing a personal practice and using that as the field for transformation and understanding. Rather it feels more like they’re selling me into yoga charm school where I will learn to think like Tony Robbins and walk like Christy Turlington and speak melodically like Rodney Yee so I can go out and reproduce more of this brand of self-help/actualization. My new consulting gig: Insideowl Lifecoaching!
Well, bother. If it is this simple, what am I doing taking the toll road?
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: astanga yoga
, evolution
, markets-networks-society
, self-deception
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hey, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? wait wait, i mean why buy the milk when you can OWN the cow?
Posted by: cranky housefrau · Oct 30, 02:45 AM · #
mature spiritual guide? hmm, why can’t I tell if I’m currently “spiritually immature” or not? Did I not “eat my spiritual veggies” when I was a “spiritual child”? Sure, assumptions galore…not far removed, as you point out in different language, from the dancing Ipod owner (freedom! granted by this single commodity! Joy!) or “Calgon take me away” (Liberation, escape! From simple suds and warm water!). Not that there also isn’t a spiritual something to everything, between all the minutes and so forth. I’d almost prefer (and did, actually) a yoga program that says, “We will teach you how to stand on your hands! Then you can teach other people how to do it!” and which almost sneaks the Sutras/spirituality/etc in on the side. Maybe it’s like that teacher’s advice to “keep your yoga quiet.” Rambling now…
Posted by: patrick · Oct 30, 05:32 AM · #
You know… this post brings something close to the tips of my typing fingers. That stuff about Asia’s blog supplied some juice too. I haven’t quite nailed it down though. Would you rail about stuff like this some more, here and there, so that this vaporous idea might materialize as a genuine inspiration? Much thanks!
Posted by: Carl · Oct 30, 08:57 AM · #
Hi (0v0)
I’m still shaking from the 5.6 earthquake. Unfortunately, earthquakes don’t come with instructions. Am I to put on my jeans and go outside when things are shaking and my feet are turning to jelly? At least my building was seismically retrofitted. So I relax by reading your post. Did you sign up on some yoga website sometime ago? That might be how you got on a list. I got an offer out of nowhere for the book on the key muscles of hatha yoga, but that was a blessing. I never found out how the person offering the book got my email, but I suspect it was from a yoga site I joined which may be more set up for culling emails. Something called yogaconnect.com. Maybe it had the right intent, but it is a pretty inactive website. Sorry, I’m rambling. What you describe sounds more like esoteric superficial offerings. However, a friend of mine in London posted on his blog a youtube video called, the yoga of happiness, and it’s got some good points. It makes the points that books such as Happiness, by Mattheu Riccard, make. I thought of putting it on my blog also, but if you want to check it out, here is the link
http://matts-cr.blogspot.com/2007/10/want-to-be-happy-stop-being-unhappy.html
It’s more spiritual oriented.
Cheers,
Arturo
Posted by: arturo · Oct 30, 07:32 PM · #
I got the same mailer – yoga pura shitta vritta nirodahah…I got quite a laugh as well. Who actually writes that crap? What kind of dolt believes it? I guess its a sign of the marketing times where such grandiosity is considered necessary to get responses. The only thing more nauseating than the hyperbole is the hypocrisy.
Perhaps they might borrow a advert slogan from a fast food hamburger joint around here: (Chanted into a sort of crescendo) “I want it all… I want it all… I want it all and I want it now”. Introducing the International Dukha School of Yo-gotta-be-kidding-me notYoga coming to a Wal-Mart near you.
Posted by: es&j · Oct 30, 08:54 PM · #
I went to their website, they have a pulldown section for “I want to become enlightened” where they promise you will live happy. That’s funny because in Buddhist circles they balk if you claim to have reached enlightment, where here it is given to you (along with a massage, I guess.)
Cheers
Arturo
Posted by: arturo · Oct 31, 03:46 AM · #
Owl-Woman why did you have to get me started? Its too early in the morning for this and oh so lovely and resplendent here in mighty Topanga. Now the Sioux warriors on paliminos are up and galloping thru my frontal lobes and simply beyond my control.
I am wondering how much real difference there is between this kind of raging hucksterism and the ethical improprieties of the Yoga Works factory which trains thousands of yoga droids each year yet employs none of them to teach at their school. The clear intent is to grease their bread and butter play – the windfall 2 month seminar- and rake in the greenbacks. The same ofcourse holds forth for all of the celebrity weekend seminars marketed now like the buttermilk special at IHOP. What they all have in common imo is that they smack of devious intent. They are firstly all about the teacher and not about yoga or the student.
On another level isn’t it silly to assume that an academic approach to yoga is going to create real depth in understanding and practice? The simplest translation of PAAIC is to keep coming back to the mat with sweat and discipline and dissappointment and then more shall be revealed. Correct me if I am wrong but Patt. doesn’t say ‘write the big check,give me the essays,listen to my endless alignment lectures and then in 10 weeks we will begin 4th series’.
I know this opens a pandora’s box but so be it. I prefer the intensives at Zen centers. You make a small donation go in shut up sit down and face all the mental monsters for 7 days. Your ass is owned by the monks while your there and the whole thing is absolutely INTENDED to raise the hindrances. Americans can’t stand hindrances. They want french fries. Hell 52% even want to bomb Iran now. Sick.
Posted by: tristan · Oct 31, 07:50 AM · #
Arturo, the “I want to be enlightened” pull down menu is hilarious. I went to the site, too, and it is interesting in places.
The bigger question is what are you doing reading about enlightenment on the internet at 3 in the morning? I hope the jitters from the quake wore off eventually.
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 31, 10:11 AM · #
Yes, teaching people to handstand and maybe find the breath in the process: I’m all for it on even the crassest terms. It’s the people who promise to transform you into a “teacher”—and what’s worse, a “spiritual guide”—who disturb me.(As this plays out in the YW machine and presumably elsewhere, the be-a-teacher promise is largely flattery. But there is a tiny truth in it: a program might help you learn to be your own teacher.)
Criminy. You don’t even know what your obstacles are until you have some practice, for Chrissakes. Hindrances, yes. Ultimately you want to remove your obstacles, yes; but they’re also what stops you in a good way! This idea shows up all over the place including in Christianity. Jesus called himself the “scandalon,” the stumbling- stone that stops you in your tracks and more or less creates a scandal.
So is this enough ranting for you Carl? Yes, of course, I’ll be happy to fuss on occasion if you like it. Besides, if me and ESJ really are both having our addresses sold by the same entity we’ll have to vent as the shitta vritta nirodaha continues to feed on itself and thus generate more mail.
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 31, 10:29 AM · #
Oh, and I guess I’m greedy, CR. I do want the whole cow. (Kornfield: it’s not that we’re greedy… it’s that we’re not greedy enough.)
Patrick, yes. I tempered my rant here because of that thought—that there is something spiritual to everything. People will initiate transformation from the weirdest shit. They are hungry for it. So the market knows it. So what. Let the market produce shit. Some people will still be able to take that and mine it for gold. People are stupid smart.
And Patrick, God, there is too much talking, isn’t there? Listen to me. :) I was disturbed by the teacher who told his students to shut up, because the impulse sounded authoritarian and self-protective, and carless of modern students’ needs to process their experiences interpersonally. But my own silence about my physical practice in these pages belies my critique. On some levels, I also am not in to talking about it at all.
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 31, 10:41 AM · #
I’d view it as a signal of the maturation of the Yoga Teacher Training industry. It’s an acknowledgement that “regular” teacher trainings are a dime-a-dozen, so they’re raising the bar from “postures” to “transformation.”
Assuming they conducted some consumer research, they’ve probably discovered that teachers/prospects are also looking for more than just the physical practice. So that might actually be a positive trend.
Are you on the various “do not bother” lists?
Posted by: cody · Nov 1, 11:27 AM · #
Ouch, ouch, ouch. Ouch. Are you being devil’s advocate, Cody; or I have been unclear? My main suggestion here is that there are things—many things—consumerism usually can not accomplish. Including giving you a practice and transforming you. (Even if it can tell you that you have purchased these things and consumed them successfully: yoga diploma, anyone?)
Seriously. The market (here on the rich consumer side of it) is inherently shallow, unsubtle, and full of ideas that quickly (necessarily) become unfashionable. There is a drive, an economic imperative, for ceaseless change, disguised as “innovation” and “maturation.” The market is ravenous, and it will indeed suck in every idea and culture and practice that it can find and spit it back out as a commodity. On some level if the market research says people want more than just asana, it's just them feeding back into the machine what they've been told by the yoga celebrity objects--those personifications of love, charisma and great abs-- to want now.
The market is not a mere mechanism of translation from one time and place to another, not just a “democratic” “efficiency”: it is a mechanism of substantive transformation. And not in a nice way.
In other words, it commodifies every practice, process or idea it touches. Sometimes there’s enough pushback from people who do buying and selling that commodification is partial, benign, and merely efficient (e.g., the market in human genetic materials, but see Dirty Pretty Things —a good drama—for why that’s fucked up too). Other times, it’s just extraordinarily tacky and full of lies. [E.g. “Yoga is about joy in the workplace and love in the home”: talk about telling people what they want to hear and repackaging yoga to leave out anything alienating, non-western or less than fun. But ceasing the fluctuations of the mind isn’t what most consumers would think of as wantable, and actually if they get there they'll suddenly stop coveting body cosmetics (Feuerstein's term) and other packaged experiences to self-express the aforementioned "love" and "joy."]
My persuasion is to understand that COMMODIFICATION IS PROBLEMATIC.
It is only a “positive trend” if you do not see the ways practice is denatured when you commodify it.
I’m on the do-not-call list and am paperless with my finances, but I actually want to get some of this shit. As an economic sociologist, I’d feel dishonest if I got too far out of touch with the culture of capitalism.
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 1, 12:36 PM · #
No, your point was clear and I was not arguing against it; rather I was just analyzing the copy as a communications vehicle in and of itself. A cursory glimpse of the messaging indicates that: 1) the teacher training world is becoming saturated and as a result the messaging is changing; and 2) the message is expanding beyond just teaching asana. caveat emptor.
While the collective result of the market economy is the commoditization of everything, I can assure you that there is no grand conspiracy in place – it’s more of just an unintended consequence. In individual situations, the goal is merely to sell more product. The process is fairly straightforward: understand your brand, the target consumer and the marketplace conditions. Figure out how to develop messaging that resonates with the target.
Personally, I don’t think consumerism accomplishes anything, but it is the baseline of our capitalist society.
Posted by: cody · Nov 1, 02:27 PM · #
I agree there is no conspiracy and would not suggest such a thing. I do hope my thinking never gets that corny.
And yes, many people take the logic of their daily actions (the logic of consumerism, in this case) for granted in this way.
My hope is to see it another way.
There’s an interesting tension in your words, between individual actions and “our society.” Pace Adam Smith, individual rationality can add up to collective irrationality, as I think the limits of our exploitation of the environment and labor markets sometimes reveals.
As for seeing it another way, when it comes to the soul-crushing aspects of capitalist society (the tendency to objectify everything, even spiritual practice, being one aspect of that soul crushing when carried to extremes), this is the mode of liberation. Realizing the contingency (non-necessary nature) of our given situation, envisioning how else it could be, and creating practical, everyday critiques that open up space for being more than a product and producer to “our capitalist society.”
Critique isn’t about bitching. It’s about undoing socially-conditioned assumptions (see Mircea Elidae on yoga as de-conditioning). It’s about challenging apparently self-serving complacency… and getting a little bit free.
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 1, 03:07 PM · #
awww come on, don’t you want JUST A LITTLE conspiracy and radical architecture with that? To say nothing of the Surveillance Camera Players? (I agree, by the way, about everyday critiques as you’ve written above)
www.notbored.org
Posted by: patrick · Nov 1, 04:37 PM · #
In honor of Halloween:
In conspiracies, negative outcomes are produced via the hidden machinations of evil people with nefarious motives.
As scary as this may seem on the face of it…
...it is to me much more unsettling when negative outcomes are the unintended social consequence of the transparent, conscionable, and well-intentioned actions of otherwise good people.
As a sociologist, it is my unfortunate duty to report that the latter is a lot more common than the former.
When evil has no heart, where do you drive the wooden stake?
Posted by: R · Nov 1, 06:10 PM · #
Theorizing about this problem is a little like pissing on a forest fire. Consumerism is a far too ubiquitous and addictive phenomenon to hope to effect or change. It will however change from within as it inevitably burns itself out over the centuries. There will soon enough be close to 12 billion on the planet. Rampant consumerism as we know it today will have already begun to devour itself by then. Scorched earth and ever more scarce resources will create new philosophical and economic paradigms.
What has always attracted me to Ashtanga is that it is essentially consumer proof. It is far too difficult to can and market to the domestic farm animal population of blithe,mindless,mewling sheeple. Its much too unpleasant a discipline for the prototypical new age glutton. Hopefully this won’t however spell its doom.
I reiterate with some conviction that yoga teacher trainings are not at all about educating yogis. They are blatant attempts to milk an ever restless leisure class. The celebrity teachers that further this myth are shameless in appetite for fame and fast money. Many of them are so busy reaching around into the back pockets of their ‘students’ that they stopped practicing yoga a long while ago. All of this has led to a sick caricature of yoga itself.
Posted by: tristan · Nov 1, 09:11 PM · #
Oops, busted. Now you know my habits. Yes, I was writing again at 3:45 am. I wake up around that time to have breakfast, because it is very difficult for me to practice without having eaten before hand, and one has to eat no earlier than 2 hours if it is fruit (my case) or 3 if it is protein (not my case). Another of my practices is calorie restriction and my style of practicing it involves eating smaller, more frequent meals. So at that time is my earliest meal.
This whole subject of consumerism in yoga is kind of sensitive and I understand the point of view being shared by everyone. I agree that ashtanga is less affected by those cycles, since it is sticking to a tradition. One thing, though, is that if you had the time and had saved the money, it is less expensive to go to Asia and study with an ashtanga master than to study here. That is not necessarily because of greed here, but because there are differences between the economies of those countries and ours. Here for an event to take place, it requires advertising, the support of a studio, the paying of higher rents, etc. The same costs in another country may be far less, so the student ends up paying less.
One of the worse events I attended in yoga was with a teacher who many years prior had started in ashtanga than veered into her own style, involving music, demonstrations of poses from Third series, clothes designed by herself- it was so canned as a preparation for a YJ conference that it left me feeling burned. Workshops with ashtanga teachers do not leave me feeling that way.
I must say I’m personally going through a phase where I’m blabbing off too much about my practice and what my Teachers are passing to me. One of my Teachers likes to give a lot of verbal instruction, another doesn’t. Each one has their own style and I learn from both. At least I balance myself out with the yoga artwork I produce, and with other things such as architecture.
I must say, though, that even in ashtanga workshops I see a push for different things other than asanas. I’ve been doing this more than 6 years, and if you go with a beginner’s mind, you learn something, regarding of how it is presented. A person like me can’t just put his life on hold and go spend 2 months in India, so I have to learn what I can here, when it is offered. I think all of you are not talking about ashtanga, but of the Heinz57 varieties of yoga out there that are canned in the big national conferences, then distributed throughout shalas.
I do agree with Tristan, the Zen daylongs (or weeklongs – I haven’t been to a weeklong) require modest investments of money and put your life on suspension while you meditate. It’s a way to accomplish a settling of the mind, without investing $250.
I just went out for a glass of wine with coworkers and an old friend whom I wanted to introduce to my coworkers. That explains my chattiness. I would normally be asleep now so I can go meditate with the monks on Saturday morning.
Cheers,
Arturo
Posted by: arturo · Nov 2, 09:06 PM · #
Arturo – 3:45 wake up? That’s hardcore! :)
I agree with you that traditional Ashtanga tends to be one of the least commercialized forms of yoga. Paradoxically, it is also the most bastardized, as the entire power/vinyasa movement is a commercial/westernized derivative of Ashtanga.
Of course, there is also the thorny issue of the appropriation of the name “Ashtanga” in the first place.
Posted by: cody · Nov 3, 05:49 AM · #
see www.zenofzombie.com for Shiva Rea’s new flow class in Manhattan. please hurry because the list is nearly full.
Posted by: tristan · Nov 5, 10:56 AM · #