Pre-Packaged
Yoga {
Janet Stone INSTAGRAM:
@janetstoneyoga
Y
ogalates. Core Yoga. Cardio Yoga. Black light Yoga. This is just the beginning of a long list of specially packaged “branded” yoga that promises to delight your senses, enhance your body, or fulfill your life. It wasn’t always so. Back in the day, most of what was called yoga took place in the inner landscape, guided by a teacher to whom one willingly entrusted their psyche. Students surrendered control when they had come to a point where they didn’t trust the tangles of their own mind to bring them toward liberation. Yoga recognized that our grooves, our habits, patterns, addictions, family lineage—our samskaras—were too deep and mesmerizing for an individual to find their way out of without a teacher, guide, guru shining a light, reflecting back, and guiding with selfless and profound inner wisdom. Flash forward three thousand years: astound me with your arm balance, titillate me with your beach-bikini meditation shot, impress me with a list of all the “famous” teachers on your training resume. It used to be a teacher would call us on our shit, but now we can choose teachers that will tell us what we want to hear in the way we want to hear it, tailor the dharma for our desires, meet our ego
Janetstoneyoga.com
26
MANTRAMAG.COM
needs, and sell us our own liberation packaged for easy consumption.
“
It used to be a teacher would call us on our shit, but now we can choose teachers that will tell us what we want to hear.
Okay, so this may sound cranky, but the moment money came into the spiritual art and science of yoga, it turned into a “buyer’s choice”—a designyour-own spiritual package. It’s oddly similar to our “news” consumption, where we tune into whatever we already want to hear, where the news can confirm our most illusory beliefs and fuel our deepest fears and most mislaid judgments. Sell me, entertain me, delight my every sense, give me some image I can transpose myself into so that I don’t have to sit here in my own wheel of churning thought upon thought upon thought that—without anyone to burst my bubble—continues to create deeper grooves in my own psyche. True, I am in it. A part of it. I participate and suspect I contribute to the myriad ways we alibi this new “yoga,” the one where practice is a DIY program and we believe we can see a social media post or buy into a meme and get a dose of yoga in the way that we like it. Yoga in 15-second soundbites reflects our current culture, in which our guru is busyness and we want our enlightenment to come without discomfort or compromise.
PhotoS OF JANET STONE BY Ali Kaukas
