Fabricated Yoga

Our eldest works for a  group that encourages schools, hospitals, and businesses to buy from local farmers and also volunteers for African aid groups (one, similar to a micro-loan program, gives goats to villagers). The first, she says, is easier to sell people because it promises to help them as well as others. Everyone wants to be healthy.

Yoga seems to be the same sort of thing, though I admit I may not be the best person to comment on this, given how allergic I am to” spirituality” . It offers discipline and meditation and all that religious but not uncomfortably binding stuff, and also success in life. As Philip Kennicott writes in Upward Dog , quoting the early guru and Yoga promoter Pierre Bernard (born Perry Baker):

“The purpose of Yoga is to prepare us from getting cheated; to enable us to make better bargains, and to get what we go after!” You can read this in two ways: yoga translated into the crass language of marketing, commerce and self-actualization, or a profoundly American metaphor for Reinhold Niebuhr’s evergreen prayer: “The serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

He implies that the history of yoga in America suggests the first, describing yoga as

part of the national susceptibility to, and craving for, spiritual dogmas—and more, the adaptation of these borrowed spiritualities to, or their wholesale fabrication for, the fast-paced, no-nonsense pragmatism of the American character.