Late in August, YogaCityNYC, a New York yoga blog, sent me to Omega for their Being Yoga conference. There, I interviewed a lot of high-profile yoga teachers---Shiva Rea, Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa, Dharma Mittra, Sharon Gannon and David Life, Tias Little---about what they thought of their status in the yoga world. (Rodney Yee was there, too, but he wasn't giving interviews.) Rodney Yee and Colleen Saidmain, photographed by Michael O'Neill for Vanity Fair, June 2007 I also interviewed Glen Black who has taught and practiced for 38 years but in contrast to everyone else, has actually avoided the spotlight.The result of my weekend in Rhinebeck, NY? An article on celebrity yoga teachers. What do we do with them? What do we think about them? Is a media-friendly yoga teacher a natural outcome of yoga's presence in America's consumer culture? Turns out the peaceful yoga crowd at Omega had a lot to say, as well...Read the article and send in your thoughts.... had any experiences with"celebrity" yogis?
India Patents Poses
This from a 2005 article from the London Telegraph. Dated, but still news: outraged that Americans and Europeans are making money off yoga, India started a project to record and patent 1,500 yoga poses.
This argument has been bubbling beneath the surface for a long time: who owns yoga?
Are Americans like Baron Baptiste and John Friend really corrupting yoga? Or, as with Western interpretations of Buddhism and meditation, are they reviving the practice as well as putting their American twist on it? Would yoga be so popular in India today if it hadn't first caught on in America? After all, yoga was nothing to get excited about 50 years ago.
Hmmm...
Taking Our Pulse
Hanna Rosin, former Style writer for the Washington Post and a current contributing editor for The Atlantic, takes the pulse of yoga in America in her December 2006 article "Strike a Pose." According to Rosin, the good old days of hard-core yoga--like that practiced by Jivamukti teachers and practitioners--have been superceded by the more mainstream yoga like Power Yoga taught by Baron Baptiste, a pragmatic blend of gym workout and church pep talk.
The article is not available online, but you can read a related interview with Rosin on The Atlantic's site here.