Does anyone remember this issue of Time Magazine?
I do. In fact, I might still have it in a box of yoga articles that I've clipped and saved. I remember the picture. I remember buying this issue. I remember seriously considering Christy Turlington's hair cut at the time and I also remember discussing the article with some family members that wanted to know "what all this yoga shit was about".
What's interesting is that this issue hit newsstands in April of 2001, before the world changed. Before September 11th, back when yoga was in response to our excess, not a saving grace from our new post 9/11 reality.
Due to the power of the internet - you can still read the featured article. In fact, if you have a moment, take the time to put your finger on the pulse of yoga a decade ago so we can discuss what they predicted for yoga versus what actually happened.
Back then, yoga was all the rage because of the famous people doing yoga. I don't think that's changed much. US Weekly will still run a picture of someone famous with a yoga mat strapped to their back. We just aren't surprised by the image as yoga is now a established activity and not something on the fringe.
As a speech therapist, I prescribe a lot of yoga to help improve a patient's voice problem. Ten years ago most folks over 60 thought yoga was a cartoon bear or a New York Yankee. Today my elderly patients have no problem being open to yoga - it's the long drive to Middletown for Mountain Spirit Yoga's Senior Chair Yoga class that they have a problem with. When an 85 year old happily grabs a yoga pamphlet from you - you're officially mainstream.
In 2001, I remember thinking how cool it was going to be now that doctors were hip to the affects of a yoga practice. Per the article...
Because so many Americans have said yes we now find ourselves unrolling our mats next to a myriad of people with opposing lifestyles, beliefs, politics, and spiritual paths. It has given us the unique opportunity to be a surrounded on all sides by the type of people we'd normally judge and discount. Suddenly people I would have ignored or written off completely are a mere 2 inches from me! Farting near me! His sweat, dripping on MY MAT!! Her manicured nails touching MY THIGH! Her perfume accosting MY NOSE! And there's nothing I can do about it.
Yoga has successfully and slyly, I might add, stripped away the pretense, taken us out of our comfort zone and forced us all to breathe. It has brought a melting pot of people together in studios all over this nation to center themselves, inhale, get grounded and exhale. Yoga doesn't want our obedience, she simply wants our silence. It doesn't occur to her to tell us what to do, how to live, how to be in this world. She trusts that we'll know what to do with whatever comes up on our mats.
Did yoga morph into the first responder for all things medical, spiritual, physical and psychological as predicted? Absolutely not. Have more Americans have been freed up to consider her than ever before? Absolutely. Wonder what she'll be up to ten years from now?
Namaste,
Linda
I do. In fact, I might still have it in a box of yoga articles that I've clipped and saved. I remember the picture. I remember buying this issue. I remember seriously considering Christy Turlington's hair cut at the time and I also remember discussing the article with some family members that wanted to know "what all this yoga shit was about".
What's interesting is that this issue hit newsstands in April of 2001, before the world changed. Before September 11th, back when yoga was in response to our excess, not a saving grace from our new post 9/11 reality.
Due to the power of the internet - you can still read the featured article. In fact, if you have a moment, take the time to put your finger on the pulse of yoga a decade ago so we can discuss what they predicted for yoga versus what actually happened.
Back then, yoga was all the rage because of the famous people doing yoga. I don't think that's changed much. US Weekly will still run a picture of someone famous with a yoga mat strapped to their back. We just aren't surprised by the image as yoga is now a established activity and not something on the fringe.
As a speech therapist, I prescribe a lot of yoga to help improve a patient's voice problem. Ten years ago most folks over 60 thought yoga was a cartoon bear or a New York Yankee. Today my elderly patients have no problem being open to yoga - it's the long drive to Middletown for Mountain Spirit Yoga's Senior Chair Yoga class that they have a problem with. When an 85 year old happily grabs a yoga pamphlet from you - you're officially mainstream.
In 2001, I remember thinking how cool it was going to be now that doctors were hip to the affects of a yoga practice. Per the article...
In 1998 Ornish published a new study, in the American Journal of Cardiology, stating that 80% of the 194 patients in the experimental group were able to avoid bypass or angioplasty by adhering to lifestyle changes, including yoga. He also argued that lifestyle interventions would save money — that the average cost per patient in the experimental group was about $18,000, whereas the cost per patient in the control group was more than $47,000. And this time, Ornish says, he is convinced that "adherence to the yoga and meditation program was as strongly correlated with the changes in the amount of blockage as was the adherence to diet."
Ornish hoped for more than the respect of his peers: he wanted action. "I used to think good science was enough to change medical practice," he says, "but I was naive. Most doctors still aren't prescribing yoga and meditation. We've shown that heart disease can be reversed. Yet doctors are still performing surgery; insurance companies are paying for medication — and they're not paying for diet and lifestyle-change education." (Medicare, however, recently agreed to pay for 1,800 patients taking Ornish's program for reversing heart disease.)The reality? Only one doctor has told me, on purpose, to practice yoga over the past 10 years. Certainly no one's told me not to practice yoga, but they haven't prescribed it, so to speak, the way they prescribe medicines, further testing or therapy regimens. To be fair, the article predicted this as well...
Why have so few studies tested the efficacy of yoga? For lots of reasons. Those sympathetic to yoga think the benefits are proved by millenniums of empirical evidence in India; those who are suspicious think it can't be proved. (Says Coble: "There seem to be no data to substantiate the argument that yoga can heal.") Further, its effects on the body and mind are so complex and pervasive that it would be nearly impossible to certify any specific changes in the body to yoga. The double-blind test, beloved of traditional researchers, is impossible when one group in a study is practicing healthy yoga; what is the control group to practice — bad yoga? Finally, the traditional funders of studies, the pharmaceutical giants, see no financial payoff in validating yoga: no patentable therapies, no pills. (Ornish's prostate-cancer study was funded by private organizations, including the Michael Milken Foundation.)I've been associated with Sol Yoga since it's inception either as a volunteer, teacher or staff member. I've had the pleasure of watching numerous people come through the door stressed out only to exit, grounded. Ten years ago I thought for sure the yoga vibe I felt inside the studio was going to find it's way into the minds, hearts and adrenal glands of the average American.
This ritual of relaxation is cresting at a cultural moment when noise and agitation are everywhere. We work longer hours, with TVs and portable radios blaring as the sound track for frantic wage slaves. If a teen isn't trussed to his headphones or plugged into a chat room, it's because his cell phone has just beeped. America is running in place, in the spa or at work. And after Letterman and Clinton, nobody takes the world seriously; everything is up for laughs.Yet here we are ten years later and we're still a nation of stressed-out crazy people trying to make it through the day. As much as yoga helps the collective, I don't think we've quite evolved to the point where we're living it 24/7 outside of the studio. I think many of us leave it in the studio. Some of us take it to the parking lot with us. Others are fortunate enough to drive yoga home and seat it at the dinner table. A small percentage take it to the work the next day and a few, elite Zen Masters live their yoga day in and day out.
During the last decade, I don't think it was yoga that got us out from behind our gas guzzling SUVs - it was gas prices. Yoga didn't get us to downsize our houses, our items, our stuff - the recession did that. Yoga didn't entice us to carve out time to become one with the universe - losing our jobs and having 12 extra hours in our day was the catalyst. Yoga didn't convince us to use it as part of our health and fitness regimen - Madonna's ass did.In this modern maelstrom, yoga's tendency to stasis and silence seems at first insane, then inspired. The notion of bodies at rest becoming souls at peace is reactionary, radical and liberating. If it cures nagging backache, swell. But isn't it bliss just to sit this one out, to freeze-frame the frenzy, to say no to all that and om to what may be beyond it, or within ourselves?
Yoga was little known in the U.S. — perhaps only as an enthusiasm of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and other icons of the Beat Generation — when the Beatles and Mia Farrow journeyed to India to sit at the feet of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1968. Since then, yoga has endured more evolutions of popular consciousness than a morphing movie monster. First it signaled spiritual cleansing and rebirth, a nontoxic way to get high. Then it was seen as a kind of preventive medicine that helped manage and reduce stress. "The third wave was the fitness wave," says Richard Faulds, president of the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, Mass. "And that's about strength and flexibility and endurance."Perhaps this has been the biggest change of all for yoga these past 10 years. It's not a wave. It's not alternative. It's not even all that cool anymore. It's downright ordinary. It's become a part of the collective, easily accessible to anyone that wants to experience it and morphed to fit our western lifestyles. Finding a yoga studio is as easy as finding a Denny's and because of that we say yes to yoga more often.
Because so many Americans have said yes we now find ourselves unrolling our mats next to a myriad of people with opposing lifestyles, beliefs, politics, and spiritual paths. It has given us the unique opportunity to be a surrounded on all sides by the type of people we'd normally judge and discount. Suddenly people I would have ignored or written off completely are a mere 2 inches from me! Farting near me! His sweat, dripping on MY MAT!! Her manicured nails touching MY THIGH! Her perfume accosting MY NOSE! And there's nothing I can do about it.
Yoga has successfully and slyly, I might add, stripped away the pretense, taken us out of our comfort zone and forced us all to breathe. It has brought a melting pot of people together in studios all over this nation to center themselves, inhale, get grounded and exhale. Yoga doesn't want our obedience, she simply wants our silence. It doesn't occur to her to tell us what to do, how to live, how to be in this world. She trusts that we'll know what to do with whatever comes up on our mats.
Did yoga morph into the first responder for all things medical, spiritual, physical and psychological as predicted? Absolutely not. Have more Americans have been freed up to consider her than ever before? Absolutely. Wonder what she'll be up to ten years from now?
Namaste,
Linda
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