Yoga and "scandal" seem to walk hand-in-hand these days. It's a "union of opposites" that's growing more comfortable with time.
First, there was the controversy three months ago over the posh yoga apparel company, Lululemon. That seemed to lay bare the rapacious greed of its founder Chip Wilson, the boorish ex-snowboarder who's made a mint convincing affluent white suburban women that if they just wear his pricey workout clothes, they'd soon be in Nirvana. Some American yogis, it seemed, were content to serve as marketing props -- if not flat-out apologists -- for a firm whose bizarre organizational culture and lack of basic business ethics had possibly engendered everything from sweat-shops to murder.
And Wilson seemed to have found the perfect way into the yoga consumer market. His employees, many of them fitness junkies, owned 20% of the firm's lucrative stock, giving them a strong incentive to sell, and neighborhood yoga start-ups could piggy-back on the store's customer base to obtain a ready-made clientele for their studios. And with his store customers also getting a discount to attend those yoga classes, the circle of complicity was complete.
Of course, despite its obvious success, many in the yoga world have never really taken Lululemon seriously. Wilson largely admits that he knows next to nothing about real yoga, often comparing its meditative bliss to an endorphin high. And many of his customers and staff, while trained to extol yoga's virtues, don't actually practice it all that much. Lulu's strategy is known in the trade as "conceptual" or "lifestyle" marketing. Consumers purchase a product and get to soak up the positive vibes and aura associated it but they don't actually have to get off their sofa or stop eating bon-bons. The association works, of course, as long as the lifestyle activity retains its clean and popular image.
And it's here that the yoga industry -- and the grassroots movement associated with it -- may soon be facing a backlash of sorts. That's because a new book, The Science of Yoga, by New York Times science reporter William Broad, is about to hit the sales counters. The book calls into question whether yoga is actually the karma-free, healing balm its proponents claim. An excerpt, "How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body," has already appeared in the pages of the Sunday New York Times Magazine -- and the news is disconcerting. The excerpt sent shock waves through the yoga world, leading many long-time yogis to wonder whether their $6 billion industry could suffer a collapse worse than the US stock market crash of 2008, and if so, whether it's time to cash out.
Broad, who's actually reviewed what little scientific and medical evidence is available on the subject, suggests that yoga can often be beneficial for consumers, validating, in part, the thousands of yoga "infomercials" currently floating around the Internet, extolling the virtues of this or that yoga pose. But most of his article, and a good part of his book, details the many ways that yoga, especially the more "powered up" and calisthenic varieties so popular today, isn't good for consumers, and can seriously hurt students and teachers alike, in fact, without them even knowing it.
Broad's not just talking about slight sprains or muscle pulls or minor ligament damage, though these injuries are far more common than people realize. He's referring to permanent and debilitating injuries, including strokes, and chronic hip, knee and spinal cord damage, injuries that can cripple yoga practitioners for life and that may not show up in their body for years, when it's too late to take remedial action.
Many leading yogis have already developed their talking points to defuse any potential fall-out or controversy from Broad's book. Their basic argument: It's not yoga's fault if students get hurt, it's the fault of the students themselves. They're too aggressive and demanding and often push their yoga poses too far, too fast. What's a dedicated yoga teacher to do? Well, Broad, suggests, it's not just students; some of the ones doing the pushing are the teachers. They're young, and poorly-trained -- especially in the intricacies of anatomy -- and they don't know how to tend to their flock, which usually isn't as bendy or body-worshiping, as they are. And many of the more advanced poses -- including headstands and handstands -- aren't really that therapeutic anyway, no matter what your age, Broad argues. If you know your yoga history, these poses aren't even deeply rooted in the yogic tradition. They emerged at the turn of the century when countries like India were developing "fitness" cultures as an emblem of national pride. In short, much of what passes for yoga these days isn't really yoga.
But it's not just Broad's book that's likely to give the yoga industry -- and yoga teachers -- a huge black eye. In the past week, much of the yoga world has been engulfed in turmoil over revelations that John Friend, founder of the yoga brand known as "Anusara," may not be the saintly guru that his publicists have promoted so successfully over the years. It turns out, that he's allegedly a shameless adulterer, sex fiend, marijuana dealer, and small-time corporate thug who probably broke the law by freezing his company's pension fund, in the process betraying the trust and marriages of dozens -- and possibly hundreds -- of his loyal followers.
Rumors about Friend have been circulating for months, as first one, then another, then still another of his long-time female "disciples" -- and business partners -- publicly separated herself from him, citing "professional differences." But the reasons for the splits were left vague, until the online magazine Yoga Dork published an anonymous but highly detailed memorandum in which Friend's wide-ranging transgressions were spelled out in gory detail, with emails and letters describing his fondness for yoga witchcraft, marijuana peddling, and ritualistic sex with just about anyone who might find the pudgy 52-year-old an appealing bed mate -- including, it appears, hundreds of his "followers," as well as dozens of trusted associates over a period of many years.
The memo also recounted details of Friend's attempt to, in effect, steal his yoga company's pension fund, until the Department of Labor was tipped off and threatened to prosecute him, forcing him to release control.
Predictably, the initial reaction from the Anusara world was akin to devout Catholics facing revelations of transgressions by their priests: shock, fear, denial and anger -- not at Friend, but at his accusers, suggesting that they were out to destroy such a beautiful man -- and their beloved yoga "brand" -- out of sheer jealousy, and that the online magazine should be ashamed for publishing what amounted to anonymous and unsubstantiated "gossip and rumor."
A number of Anusara "communities," most notably, the Willow Street Yoga Center in Takoma Park, MD, began desperately circling the wagons, calling on Anusara yogis everywhere to "affirm" Friend and his "pioneering" yoga "system." Naomi Gottlieb-Miller, one of the many spunky and sloganeering Sarah Palin-types to emerge from the ranks of Anusara's "teacher training" programs in recent years, went so far as to compare Friend's critics - many of them veteran yogis twice her age -- to high school "Mean Girls," suggesting that they lacked compassion and should hold their tongues.
But, of course, where there's this much smoke -- and this many names, dates, and salacious details -- there's usually a bonfire raging nearby. How much more about Friend's activities is likely to emerge and the days and weeks ahead is still unclear. However, Friend, sensing that his Wall of Denial -- and Loyal Deniers -- won't hold up, quickly moved to head off the gathering lynch mob by issuing a terse but glib "confession" -- the classic, "controlled disclosure" -- to a long-time yoga associate at Elephant Journal. But in response, a group of Friend's long-time admirers, including Willow Street Yoga founder Suzie Hurley, have decided to stage what amounts to a semi-public "intervention," desperate to salvage not only the man and his reputation, but also the future of Anusara yoga, once described as the "fastest growing yoga brand in America."
Friend, it appears, has agreed to step down, in what amounts to a "preemptive coup," and for the time being, an informal "committee" -- none dare call it a "junta" -- will rule the Anusara organization in his place, until the entire mess that Friend's created can be sorted out, and the company overhauled and its leadership formally restructured.
For many in the yoga world, this latest turn of events is as bewildering as it is disheartening. But the fact is, guru charlatans with bizarre power agendas have ruled the yoga world for generations. Some of the best-known modern yogis, everyone from Sri Ramakrishna to Swami Vivekenanda, the man who first introduced yoga to the West, were known to have a fondness for young boys or to be serial adulterers, according to published accounts. Amrit Desai, the head of the highly respected Kriplalu Yoga Center, who extolled the virtues of traditional marriage, resigned in 1994, after his extra-marital sexual escapades came to light.
And Friend's attempt to build what amounts to an American yoga "cult" has numerous precedents, too, most recently in the case of Dahn Yoga, a South Korea-based organization that bilked thousands of gullible American college students and their families out of their personal fortunes, and whose founder, Ilchee Lee, has fled the country after being charged with raping one of his students. Several lawsuits against Dahn, first filed in 2006, are still pending, but the group -- through an intensive damage-control effort similar to the one underway now at Anusara -- has managed to keep most of its studio doors open.
Again, is any of this really all that surprising? Generations ago, some of India's oldest and wisest sages warned of the consequences of trying to transplant sacred Hindu spiritual practices to American soil. They weren't worried that Americans would reject these practices, but that they would embrace them too wholeheartedly. Yoga and meditation would become engulfed by American materialism, they feared, and its practitioners, ruled by status competition and consumed with an endless quest for personal "fulfillment" through glamor beauty, and sex would no longer be avatars of enlightenment but agents of psychic domination. Little did they know how quickly that painful karmic cycle could begin or how often it might repeat itself.
As the increasingly ugly Anusara scandal unfolds, yoga and yogis in America seem to be approaching yet another defining moment. Do the movement's most sincere and thoughtful leaders have the strength -- and above all, the humility -- to push their industry to reform its ways? To abandon their long-standing opposition to professionalizing their teacher corps, perhaps, and to set up more modern and democratic, and less charismatic, guru-based governing structures?
Time, it seems, may be running out. Market research data suggest that despite an increase in gross revenues, the number of people interested in trying yoga is rapidly shrinking. In fact, slightly fewer are practicing yoga now (about 14 million) than they were in 2005 (about 16 million), before the latest scandals and turmoil began. Apparently, many American consumers have already "caught on" to yoga with some homespun wisdom of their own. Which means that if the industry hopes to survive, it may want to try to recapture -- and re-inspire -- them -- with something more than Manduka's "John Friend-inspired" yoga mats, that is -- before they're gone for good.
Mark Morford: Please Join My Tantric Yoga Sex Cult
Elena Brower: Art Of Attention: Misconduct In The (Yoga) World
Promoters of Hatha yoga in America since Iyengar have promoted yoga as a spiritually-centering "wellness" practice, with Hindu "roots," certainly, but not necessarily a reflection of an explicit Hindu religious devotion.
Now these promoters aren't necessarily the crass mass-marketers you suggest -- many are serious and well-intentioned spiritual-minded people.
Many says the practice is "universal" in its application, and that people of any religious faith, or none at all, can practice without being de facto followers of Hinduism.
I take it you disagree?
Namaste! Thanks for sharing it...:o))))
"Dear Anusara Yoga Kula,
John’s sabbatical has begun, and so the following 2012 events until June will be postponed.
Specifically:
Arlington Heights, Illinois
Maui, Hawaii
Austin, Texas
Denver, Colorado
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Montclair, New Jersey
New dates are not known at this time, so we ask that you please be patient. We will continue to send updates on John’s schedule as they become available.
John will be traveling in Israel March 12th – 17th in a tour group for his own personal pilgrimage. His previously scheduled weekend workshop in Israel has been cancelled. The pilgrimage tour has now been extended to 5 1/2 days. A central intention of this tour is to send prayers of world peace from the center of all major western religions in Jerusalem.
We appreciate your dedication and understanding during our transitions for a bright future,
The Anusara Staff"
http://jezebel.com/john-friend/
I would draw you attention to the two-minute promotional video that John Friend narrates. It's embedded in the article. It's perhaps the best succinct statement of the Anusara yoga "philosophy" I am aware of.
Curious for your reactions. The relationship between the Tantra - which Friend and others insist is about "intrinsic goodness" - and the Hatha asana, especially, the universal principles of alignment, so-called.
The theory is much like, say, a boat, your body, navigating in the wind with a sail that can be placed and adjusted in different positions, propelling you powerfully, or mindfully as you see fit.
That's one, somewhat naturalistic analogy.
Again, someone with your background, interested in your reaction. For Friend, the emphasis on the Spirit within, and the developed asanas, are fairly inseparable.
A) Not entirely accurate.
B) Really? You feel the need to be so vicious and obnoxious? John Friend is, obviously, not perfect, but neither does this situation deserve such excoriating, humiliating, and wrong-headed commentary.
C) This is not objective journalism
A lot of compassionate writing has been posted as a result of this situation. Your article, frankly, sucks. It's full of hostile innuendo, inaccuracies, and sensationalism.
But it's not the main thing, perhaps. In any event, most of what JF did was illegal, and really, in a decently regulated yoga industry, with the proper licensing standards, he would be in jail probably, or have his license revoked, not contemplating his rebirth and resurrection Jimmy Swaggart style.
"If you know your yoga history, these poses aren't even deeply rooted in the yogic tradition" is a statement that cannot be backed up. The encyclopedic Tirumandiram (~5-6thCE) describes 7 important poses, and says there are some 188 all told. That they were put in certain sequence does not mean they are not "of yore." Further, it is only recently that in India it has become popularly accepting of yogins, who were regularly derided as madmen, and some yogis encouraged this because it kept The Man, ever distracting, off their backs.
But to Friend, he is not said to have been dealing pot, but to have had it delivered to studios and other places he was staying.
He received one (yes, that's one) letter from the the labor department, over not disclosing that the pensions had been frozen, not the the freezing itself. As far as I'm aware, it still hasn't been disclosed what the loan was for that he froze the pensions to get. Lame, stupid, bad, sure, but "small time corporate thug"? Perhaps this accolade was for his charging a 10% commission for any materials produced under the Anusara name by Anusarins, the brand he owns completely. It's franchising, McDonalds et al are held to a lower standard I know, but Friend is a thug?
(cont...)
Again, the problem with the pension was his not mentioning having frozen it for a year, and not in writing for another year.
Who are the "India's oldest and wisest sages" warning us about us? Are we all so vindictive of heart we cannot listen for love?
I'm not Anusara anything, just following the story and ugly way the ugliness is treated. To me yoga is about mantra and meditation, and I see far more self-destruction done going about meditation in an ambitious way, than flubbing some pose.
American yoga, off-brand spirituality has seen plenty "scandal" (many more than in this article), yet flourishes, perhaps because its teachers are held to a high standard (no Tysons here, yet). I wonder why so many place themselves and "impartial observers" on high while being as salacious and barbed as this sentence would like to be.
However, people who say that yoga is a "way of life" applicable everywhere to all people no matter their race, creed, or religion are being quite disingenuous, I think. They're actually stating a spiritual agenda, and it's far from an innocently "ecumenical" one.
There are real issue to be sorted out in yoga, theologically, so to speak, depending on your relationship to the Tantra, for example. How we understand the "body" and the question of its innate "wisdom," let alone its "divinity," are really not settled matters - far from it. Even yogis can disagree profoundly on these points, which is one reason Friend and Iyengar parted company.
Christians tend to view the mind-body connection in very different terms. At what points and in what ways can these different perspectives be reconciled? Can we really "Christianize" yoga, as some have suggsted? Just by calling the Salute to the Sun, the "Salute to the Son," and replacing the Sanskrit chants with Christian hymns?
Alternatively, is the Christian-yoga relationship invariably one of theological disharmony, as some leading theologians (e.g. Mohler) now insist? It's tempting to think that at some point, all theologies converge, but there's a lot of soft-headed, New Age thinking in this area.
Back in the mid 70's while in Santa Barbara i had a chance to take a few of classes with a couple of BKS Iyengar's graduates who studied with him in Europe and - maybe strange to some- there was absolutely no religious connotation to the instruction, and i took it at face value that this very strict (posture-wise) yoga was the real deal and one only needs to be dedicated to the form and need not turn the teacher into a guru. It was quite the opposite of the sloppy hatha yoga taught by Vishnu-devananda and some of the other 70's era yogis that frankly were looking more for followers (and their money) than anything else.
But by then i had figured out that i didn't need a guru -or anyone- to tell me how to live or how to be healthy in the proverbial *mind & spirit*.
http://youtu.be/4yz6ZL-TC94
Mohler's version of Christianity has been dealt a severe blow by science and Joe Campbell's version of Christianity. The ever shrinking literalist reading of Christianity won't last much longer, save in small enclaves. So I think what Mohler has to say is not so important anymore. Even Catholicism is seeing a huge exodus... I give it a few generations before Joe Campbell completely wins out.
Once Christianity is seen in non-literal ways, then it becomes like any other mystery cult, like it used to be. Then it can join the cult of Krishna, Shiva etc, on equal terms, rather than trumpeting itself as the 'true religion'.
Shopenhauer saw it coming: "We. . . now send the Brahmins English clergymen and evangelical linen-weavers to set them right out of sympathy, and to show them that they are created out of nothing, and ought thankfully to rejoice in the fact. But it is just the same as if we fired a bullet against a cliff. In India our religions will never take root. The ancient wisdom of the human race will not be displaced by what happened in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian philosophy streams back to Europe, and will produce a fundamental change in our knowledge and thought."
The issue being, as with Luluemon, how closely can you really control and monitor your overseas labor and product suppliers, mainly small sub-contracted firms in China, Vietnam, Peru, the Philippines, etc.?
Companies claim to know what's going on in these firms but they are under local law, and as everyone knows, when the state inspectors show up, maybe once a year, it's often like a Potemkin tour - everything's been all prettified for public presentation.
As a consultant, you probably have the skinny on this with Barefoot Yoga. Of course, it can depend on whether the firm manufactures in US or overseas.
In today's consumer market, there's a lot of money involved in being able to claim or certify the "green" qualities and benefits of your products.
Canadian consumer watchdogs really threw the book at LLL over its blatant lying about its "Vita-Sea" products which apparently did not include one iota of seaweed, let alone provide any of the therapeutic benefits that the company claimed.
In industry, this is as much a "fair business competition" issue, as it is anything else.
First, there is a large and growing number of mainstream - thus far, mainly apparel - companies that are trying to replicate Lululemon's success with high-end consumers (primarily women) by introducing their own yoga-inflected product lines.
GAP, Nike, Nordstrom's and Costco are beginning to offer yoga pants and tops at 1/2 to 2/3 the prices of Lululemon's - though the quality seems far less luxurious. There's nothing spectacularly different about these companies from an industry standpoint.
They are aiming at less high-end niche consumers than Lulu is, and Lulu seems quite confident that its brand name and quality will trump such challengers.
Second, some of the companies preaching the more politically correct yoga sales gospel - and closer to the actual yoga world and its ethos - seem to be hedging on whether the sources of their products are as sweatshop free or green as they would like.
They make that claim but if you read the fine print, a number say things like "to the best of our knowledge" the clothes/products we sell are produced from renewable sources, or "the best of our ability" we have verified these conditions.
They give people what they want and what most people want is a mating of Yoga positions and aerobics. It appeals to the american psyche.