Yoga Needs to be Saved?

Yoga is apparently in grave danger of losing its core. The gooey center of enlightenment coated with flexibility frosting has been ... gasp ... sucked into the American obsession with money, ownership and power.

Yoga?

There's a point or two to be found in the purists arguments that yoga is veering off into an exercise industry. The "uniform" is label conscious and pricey. Studios jealously guard "their methodology" which they would patent if Bikram hadn't already tried to and failed.

Yoga's material trail is considerable and the path to practice is increasingly sold through teacher training programs that has lead to organizations ladling out "accreditation's" which in most parts of North America mean exactly squat in terms of state or provincial oversight. But it's making someone money. A lot or a little.

Westerners can't stand to not profit. Or so it seems.

But a few of the anointed yogini elite are now banded together in an effort to stop the "making a living off yoga" corruption - even as they are presumably doing just that.

Barbara Benagh, Patricia Walden, Natasha Rizopoulos, Justine Wiltshire Cohen, and Peentz Dubble, all of whom teach at Wiltshire's studio in Newtonville, MA, are planning to actively yank yoga back to its egalitarian roots.

They've created the Down Under Yoga website with their mission being the following:

We believe that yoga studios should act in ways that are consistent with the teachings of yoga. We will never sell plastic water bottles that go into landfill (because ahimsa means “do no harm”). We will never sell $150 yoga pants (because aparigraha means “identifying greed”). We will never accept offers from companies to promote their gear in exchange for free publicity or products (because satya means “truthfulness”). We will never brand, trademark, or pretend we’ve made up a new style of yoga because humility is the whole point.

Somewhat of a Marxist manifesto, yoga-style?

It is difficult not to agree with their worry. My last browse through Lululemon caused me again to wonder at the sense of paying hundreds of dollars for a basic start up: mat, bottom and top. And the subtle way the chain pushes the idea that "fatties" aren't allowed by capping their sizes at 12 (when the average North American woman is a size 14) seems very un-yoga.

There is also the sexing up of yoga from Yoga Journal's recent Toesox scandal to Tara Stiles' new book Slim, Sexy, Calm.

Perhaps then that brakes do need to be put on "the madness".

But what do you think? Is yoga at a tipping point in the West? Has it been infused with greed and boot camp fitness mentality to the point where its purpose has been lost?