If Yoga's Chic or We've Been Here Before

I couldn't help but to laugh out loud when I ran across this article in the Yoga Journal Sept 98 issue by Anne Cushman (of Enlightenment for Idiots fame). With all the rancor going on in the yoga community regarding the commercialization of yoga, you have to take note that this was an issue 12 years ago. I'm sure if I dug more, I would find complaints from almost the beginning of the magazine. In fact, I'm sure that there were complaints about Krishnamacharya that he included all that "gymnastic crap" into yoga back in the day....humm, come to think of it, some yogis are still complaining about it...


As Anne concludes, “The next challenge is to look on to the current yoga craze with a discriminating yet non-judgmental eye, encouraging what’s best about it whenever possible. And besides, in a couple of years, the glitterati will have moved on to kickboxing or t’ai chi and yoga will be as passé as disco. It will be so, like, 90’s. It will go down in history books as an American fitness regiment briefly popular at the turn of the millennium. And those of us who still practice can breathe a vast pranayamic sigh of relief, and go back to be comfortably out of it again.”

Humm, they never moved on...:)



Click here for the article and scroll down to page 76.


Also go here for some replies to her article by readers of Yoga Journal. I'm sure if there were yoga bloggers back then, we would hear an earful from both sides of the issue and in the comments.