Jeez. isn't this great - an Awl article extolling ignorance? Looks like someone struck a nerve.
Some of this article sounds like some environmental lawyer for Dow Chemical arguing whether or not you can tie an entire community's cancer rates to your pestilence-spewing facility:
"Correlation does not equal causation! How can you tell me these people got cancer from our operation? Were they born in a lab?"
This is an extremely disingenuous and exploitative means of using skepticism as a means of attacking serious criticism and exploration of the facts. I mean, Sarah, when you say that "what is wrong with yoga is not yoga" - well, how the hell do you define yoga, Sarah? Are YOU a practicing Hindu? How close are any of us in the West to being able to authoritatively define it well enough to dismiss statements on it that rub you the wrong way, or get in the way of business?
The fact is that there is a dark side to yoga here in the west. We can exalt the Platonic ideal all we want, but ultimately, it's something humans practice, and human beings are fallible. Especially here in the West, we're prone to chasing after the attainment of specific body types as if they were the latest fashion, and there's plenty of marketing in the Western yoga industry that caters to these destructive tendencies. Moreover, yoga is something that is ever-evolving. Suggesting that a physical modality developed in a civilization totally different from our own is inherently perfect is IMO flat-out irresponsible, and, well, ignorant.
On Six Reasons To Ignore The 'New York Times' Yoga Article
Jeez. isn't this great - an Awl article extolling ignorance? Looks like someone struck a nerve.
Some of this article sounds like some environmental lawyer for Dow Chemical arguing whether or not you can tie an entire community's cancer rates to your pestilence-spewing facility:
"Correlation does not equal causation! How can you tell me these people got cancer from our operation? Were they born in a lab?"
This is an extremely disingenuous and exploitative means of using skepticism as a means of attacking serious criticism and exploration of the facts. I mean, Sarah, when you say that "what is wrong with yoga is not yoga" - well, how the hell do you define yoga, Sarah? Are YOU a practicing Hindu? How close are any of us in the West to being able to authoritatively define it well enough to dismiss statements on it that rub you the wrong way, or get in the way of business?
The fact is that there is a dark side to yoga here in the west. We can exalt the Platonic ideal all we want, but ultimately, it's something humans practice, and human beings are fallible. Especially here in the West, we're prone to chasing after the attainment of specific body types as if they were the latest fashion, and there's plenty of marketing in the Western yoga industry that caters to these destructive tendencies. Moreover, yoga is something that is ever-evolving. Suggesting that a physical modality developed in a civilization totally different from our own is inherently perfect is IMO flat-out irresponsible, and, well, ignorant.