Yoga, Official Mystic Activity of Late Capitalism

yo⋅ga [yoh-guh] - noun: A ritual and regimen involving svelte blonds in stretchy black pants, tank tops, and roll-up rubber mats. It emphasizes breathing and flexibility. Great for stress. Everybody who does it seems skinny. Involves vague feelings of eco-consciousness, too.

Yep, lots of sex appeal in yoga.

I'll go out on a limb here and argue that the majority of yoga enthusiasts in trendy urban neighborhoods have never heard of the concept of Hatha Yoga--or of Yogi Swatmarama, its 15th Century originator. This is what most Westerners think of as "yoga." Yogi Swatmarama originally conceived of his physical regimen as a preparation for long periods of meditation, "a stairway to the heights of Raja Yoga" (enlightenment through meditation). In other words, "yoga" (as commonly mis-understood) is a means to a means to an end. It prepares the body in order to make possible the meditation that will itself make possible the eventual enlightenment.

Non-believers doing yoga to get skinny is kind of like appropriating the bend-and-kneel Islamic prayer to tone your buns and a thighs.


"Allaahu Akbar! Feel the burn!"

Ok fine, say our bendy patrons of lulumon atheltica ("a yoga-inspired athletic apparel company with over 100 locations in Canada, the United States, Australia and Hong Kong"), maybe our interests veer more towards the yuppie than the yogic. What's the harm? You can loose weight, "increase your range of motion," and purge all the stresses of modern living!

Here's the thing--all you mystical weekend warriors looking to get "Stronger, Better, Wiser, Lighter! ☮"--you have wrapped your pliable thighs in a tight embrace of the very source of your angst and malaise.

Yes, the moment you debited a hundred dollars to your Visa for that 100% recycled post-consumer content yoga mat, you lost it. When you entered that air-conditioned, hermetically-sealed, Windex-scrubbed glass box of a yoga studio, you lost it. When you looked around you and meditated either on how super-skinny you already are, or should be, you lost it. When you strutted your way to be seen purchasing an organic açaí protein smoothy, you lost it. And when you told all your friends how yoga has totally changed your life, you did so wafting a subtle air of faux humility barely able to cloud the self-righteous avarice of the fab yogic elect--and you lost it.

But now, after an hour of heavy breathing and narcissism, cells bathed in oxygen and antioxidants, you're feeling pretty good. These days, you simply have to come back every week, or every other day, to "decompress."

And you might be addicted to therapy. Or maybe even heroin, too.


"For the love of God, I neeeed to perform the down dog pose!"

After each respective dosage of therapy, yoga or heroin, you'll feel pretty good (in the case of the latter two, you'll feel pretty slim, too). But then after a while, the Crisis creeps back into your life. Sobriety makes you feel frazzled again. Threadbare. Stressed. So, you head back to the studio to sweat a little--to wash out your soul like you wash your clothes. But there is no solution, only maintenance.

Oh ye bendy Seekers, realize that yoga is the new Opium of the Masses! That old-time religion was just too involving, it turns out. Plus, it didn't do much for those embarrassing love handles. So why not distill some Hindu wisdom, containing the highest possible concentration of marketable content? A 90 Proof shot of spirituality. A high-potency multivitamin for the soul.

In shooting up just enough therapy into your beleaguered veins, you've perpetuated your spiritual demise. In making a creeping madness "manageable," you've assured the insanity's ultimate success. All that stress that you pursue yoga to expurgate is normalized and its ultimate cause ignored. It is responded to like a routine hunger easily satiated by a nice lunch.

Even worse, you've intensified the Crisis by becoming even more of a consumer--of yoga, its image (spiritual skinniness!), and related "essentials" (Nike Dri-Fit™ high-performance tank!). But your life remains, as in the suburban dystopia of Revolutionary Road, filled with "hopeless emptiness." An existential drift sweetened just enough with an relentless torrent of consumer items and experiences, of which yoga is just another example. By cheapening yoga with consumerist commodification, you've vexed another route of potential escape (what the old-time Yogis called moksha) for yourself and others.

The word "yoga" was derived from the Sandskrit yuj, meaning "to control." Ask yourself, the next time you are standing in line for salads with a flock of other identically-attired Yuppie Yoginis, just who is controlling whom?