By this stage in January, your resolutions are probably in the process of being sorely tested. Especially when the tennis is on, the sun is shining, and the afternoons are just so dreamily endless and given to, well, drinking beer. Well, I speak for myself…

I just finished an introductory course at a yoga school which will remain nameless. It provoked a lot of questions, not so much about yoga (in all its complexity), but about what ‘we’ (a Western we, a middle-class we, a ‘white’ [in the stuffwhitepeoplelike sense] we) turn yoga into. Almost unfailingly. Lululemon make good, if overpriced, clothing, but their core philosophy is not only creepy, and/or even frightening, it is *exactly* what this is all about.

I think there are a lot of potential harms here, and the ways and means of the harm speak deeply and directly to the gaps between who we are, who we think we are, and who we’d rather be. This quote nails it:

“I’m more balanced and yet more assertive and efficient at work – my friends who do yoga say the same.”

Wow, that’s what yoga is to us… a utility to make us more assertive and efficient… at work…  So… .yoga helps you enter data, be chirpy, and maybe sack people, going forward… ‘Now I can be literally across all the relevant documents, thanks to my increased flexibility – thanks, yoga (going forward)’. When I pause on that quote, I feel like I’m staring into the abyss (and as Nietzsche said, when you stare into the abyss, the abyss has a habit of staring right back into you).

Said quote is taken from a response piece to a big feature published a few weeks ago in the New York Times (How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body – yes that’s right, YOUR body) that’s been doing the rounds with my friends. I strongly urge you to read it carefully, at the very least it will prepare you for the funny poses and postures I’m intending to work myself into for the feature here next week. I also see it as closely akin in many ways to a lot of the other ‘embodied practices’ that are really going hogwild right now, from barefoot running (read this piece, by Born To Run’s Christopher McDougall, The Once and Future Way to Run), crossfit (which, I declare, I am into, though it is worth being highly critical of – a critical rant from a prominent, jaded ex-believer is here) to Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, to paleo diet and a thousand other things besides.

Anyway, please receive all of the above as food for thought, and please feel happy to add any salient links and comments you have in the comment box. Boom shanka, Pete.