City Safari: Yoga: The Flexing Flux Of Tight Pants
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Wed, Aug 07, 2019
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In my Fishtown-Northern Liberties, Philadelphia neighborhood, many of the young women in their twenties and thirties wear tight black Yoga pants. Yoga pants have become a uniform of sorts like bell bottoms and love beads in the 1960s. Many, but not all, of the women who dress this way have incorporated Yoga into their daily lives. Yoga has become big business, big enough to accommodate hundreds in a rehabbed warehouse near the Market-Frankford El station at Frankford and Girard in Northern Liberties. The sign Amrita Yoga graces the front of the building like the identifying framed information board outside the city’s Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul.
The Fishtown-Northern Liberties neighborhood is also home to Grace & Glory Yoga, MotherHeart Yoga Sangha and Pacific Yoga. The Yogic Encyclopedia states that “Ananda Sangha also provides people with two options for formal renunciation as Brahmacharis or Sannyasi. Brahmacharis renounce family ties in an inward path of realization.”
On Girard Avenue not far from Amrita Yoga you are likely to spot smiling yoga proselytizers handing out colorful booklets entitled Yoga. This is a relatively new development in the neighborhood. The proselytizers tend to be young, some Indian and some not, but every time I’ve encountered them they have always been deeply engaged with one or more passersby unlike the stoic but bored Jehovah’s Witnesses standing under the El by their portable rack of Watch Tower magazines. Because yoga has broken the stratosphere of Super Cool status, the yogic street missionaries are almost always found in deep sidewalk conversational huddles.
I might add that the online video advertisements for these yoga workshops usually feature young women talking about yoga in that unique millennial way of ending each sentence with a question mark. Observing these trends, one is tempted to ask: are these angelic looking proselytizers advocating yoga as a form of physical exercise, or is there something else going on here?
Hatha yoga is mostly an umbrella term for all the branches of yoga that emphasize yoga’s physical practice. Other branches of yoga, like kriya, raja, and karma yoga are more meditative and interior. All yoga, of course, is at the heart of the New Age movement and it all comes from India. Yoga, it might be said, is the heart of Hinduism despite the many different schools of practice. Hatha yoga promises mental and physical health. At the outset in many of these yoga-as-exercise industries there are no mantras involved or instructors who appear to be wannabe gurus in waiting (called geshe’s in the yoga world.)
I say ‘at the outset’ because I have read of instances of how some yoga instructors assume more and more power among class attendees so that eventually the student practitioner comes to see the instructor as something much more than someone who shows them how to flex or stand on their heads. They become total life teachers with specific guidelines on how to live your life—food-sex, fasting, etc.-- outside the yoga class. This sneaky personal invasion happens so gradually it may not be noticeable at first, although the first red flag may be when the exercise instructor suggests a light mantra to accompany exercise.
One mantra leads to two mantras and after that might come a repetition of ‘OMs’ and before you know it you have a yoga class that’s tipping into the tenets of Hinduism. But Hinduism is cool because it has yoga, so who cares, right?
Besides the types of yoga already mentioned, there’s 1) Baby Yoga, 2) Mama Yoga, 3) Laughing Yoga, 4) Superbrain Yoga, 5) Beer Yoga, 6) Drunk Yoga and Yoga and Wine. Yoga covers the waterfront, so that by the time this column is published there are likely to be additional Yogas added to the list.
It is an established fact that there are more women than men enrolled in Yoga classes, although that doesn’t mean that men have any objections to observing the high numbers of women walking around town in Yoga pants. Numerous articles on yoga point out that Yoga started with male sages 2000 years ago and that male leaders dominated the world of yoga until the 1990s, so that today it’s mostly a female-dominated practice. And while there’s been a tiny upswing in male participation, the truth is that Yoga is perceived as being much more conducive to the female body with its built-in ability to twist and turn in pretzel-like body discombobulations. Most men are just not that flexible and don’t see yoga as providing a sufficient workout routine. One Huff Post article explained that men “might also be turned off by various spiritual aspects of the practice, such as “OM’ chanting or naming poses in Sanskrit.”
But why are young and older women in yoga pants chanting ‘OM’ anyway? If yoga is supposed to be merely exercise and a way to loosen up, how does chanting ‘OM’ fit into the equation? One could say that the repetitious chanting of ‘OM” puts one in a transcendental state much like any chant, be it Hare Krishna, Make America Great Again or “Mary Had a Swarm of Bee’s.” ‘OM’ is said to approximate the vibrational sound of the universe, which might be perceived as a very neutral thing but yet there are fervent Christian practitioners of yoga who avoid saying ‘OM’ because they say it lends itself to more questions than answers. They might as well be saying that ‘OM’ opens the vestibule door to Hinduism.
The multidimensional work of Yoga also includes The Uniform.
An Op Ed in The New York Times in 2018 mapped out Why Yoga Pants Are Bad for Women. The writer questioned the necessity of going out and buying a uniform in order to “do” yoga. “Seriously, you can’t go into a room of 15 fellow women contorting themselves into ridiculous positions at 7 in the morning without first donning skintight pants? What is it about yoga in particular that seems to require this? Are practitioners really worried that a normal-width pant leg is going to throttle them mid-lotus pose?”
The writer is right, of course.
The one- must- have- a- uniform-infection virus has contaminated the world of bicycling and running so that participants in these once ad hoc casual activities now find it necessary to spend serious money on the right clothes in order to engage in the sport. Grown men have even taken to the soy fem boy practice of shaving their legs because they think that shaving off a few hairs will give them additional speed while pedaling or running.
Robert Hurst, in his book Cyclist’s Manifesto: The Case for Riding on Two Wheels Instead of Four, writes: “And then there are the bicyclists who wear the clothing for reasons having virtually nothing to do with practicality. They dress up in bike clothes so they feel and look like ‘real’ cyclists, because that’s what ‘real’ cyclists wear. A lot of unnecessary leg shaving occurs for this reason as well. There are those who are attracted to the look-at-me factor of a shiny, bright colored outfit.”
Aerobics, popularized in the U.S. by a physician named Kenneth H. Cooper, swept the City of Philadelphia in the 1980s, inspiring men and women alike to take classes so they could dance in the form of exercise to music by Pat Benatar, Kool and the Gang and Michael Jackson. For a couple of years, I took regular aerobics classes at the (now defunct) Maywood Dance Academy near 17th and Sansom Streets. The exhilarating hour sessions led to a heightened state of physical being so that all I wanted to do after class was continue dancing at a local disco. There was no ‘OM’ in aerobics and there was certainly no meditation.
The push with yoga today it to move it “off the mat” and to discover “a deeper understanding of who you really are,” at least according to Darren John Main, a yoga teacher. Main uses quotes from The Yoga Sutra, the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads to bring “these ancient Hindu texts to life in contemporary cities.”
So, yes, there does seem to be yogic missionary activity going on but it’s a lot more suave and cool than, say, those poor Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Alexandra Stein, a scholar of social psychology of ideological extremism, writes that a cult is, “A group that violates the rights of its members, harms them through abusive techniques of mind control . . . Or, a group that is adverse to adherents’ best interests.”
Is Yoga a cult?
Pope Francis seems to think so.
“You can take a million catechetical courses, a million courses in spirituality, a million courses in yoga, Zen and all these things. But all of this will never be able to give you freedom”, Pope Francis stated in a homily in 2015. The Greek Orthodox Church, reacting to the UN’s decision to designate June 21 as International Day of Yoga in 2014, reminded its adherents that the postures of yoga were created as adulation to 330 million Hindu gods. The postures are viewed in the Hindu faith as offerings to gods that in Christianity are considered to be idols.
But in today’s world, idols may be Yoga’s stellar selling point.
