Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Asanas Without Yoga

The recent YJ article covered earlier in this blog confirming that virtually all asanas were derived from Scandinavian exercise systems in the 20th century by Europeans, Americans and Indians and that there is really nothing like these in traditional yoga, has reached its logical end point - "asanas without yoga".

James Lough, who i worked with for some time before he relocated to Savannah, GA, found a recent NYTimes article on Jan 23 ( http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/nyregion/23stretch.html?src=me&ref=general.)

The article is about Tara Stiles, "Yoga Rebel" and former fashion model who has a studio in NoHo in NYC called "Strala Yoga", a best-selling book "Slim, Calm, Sexy", her own iPhone "app" and a "powerful yoga brand with no less than Jane Fonda and Deepak Chopra among her devotees".

Agree with her insights into the NYC yoga scene (it's not just NYC that is this way), and its being "exclusive and elitist", with discrete "religious" camps and her refusal "to pledge allegiance to one teacher, one studio or even one style of yoga."

Obviously, don't agree with her complete focus on asana and the body, and her approach is far, far from Patanjali's definition of "yoga" in the yoga sutras as "yoga is the stilling of the modifications of the mind". However, she may represent a major face of yoga in the U.S. in the future with its obsession with the physical.
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1 comment:

  1. Gary WeberJanuary 31, 2011 at 8:26 AM

    i hadn't seen those offerings before. The "free .pdfs" are only brief summaries and the hard copy is what is being sold. The translations of some of the verses of the Gita that were shown were interesting, and the Devanagari is included, but there aren't enough to make good comparisons. There are many free on-line versions of many of these texts, esp the Gita. i have many different versions of the Gita, which i recommend for serious folk, key ones of which are Shankara's, Dayananda's (CDs) and Sivananda's.

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