Slate Doesn't Like What it Sees

Ron Rosenbaum, Slate.com columnist, doesn't like the current mainstreaming of yoga.

"No, it's the commodification and rhetorical dumbing-down of yoga culture that gets to me. The way something that once was—and still can be—pure and purifying has been larded with mystical schlock. Once a counterweight to our sweaty striving for ego gratification, yoga has become an unctuous adjunct to it."

Yup.

But while the column begins with interesting insight and valid critique, it devolves into summarizing a recent article in Yoga Journal, chastizing the magazine's editors, and lambasting the phantom yogini-subscriber who would actually take the magazine's advice to heart.

"The final step in the great journey of self-understanding the Yoga Journal editors have force-marched [the writer] on is realizing it's all about her "relationship with herself." Whitney Houston yoga: I found the greatest love of all—Me! It's the return of New Age Me-generation narcissism. And there's nothing worse than narcissism posing as humility."

Okay, he's got a point here. Yoga Journal has been market-shaped into a women's lifestyle magazine. It's getting fluffier and fluffier.

But that YJ story was a particularly strange one. I remember it.

Still, Rosenbaum's column would have been so much more interesting as a think piece about the weird contradictions in the current yoga environment--the mass-marketification among them.

http://www.slate.com/id/2162283/