what a waste of time for everyone to either write or read
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, tartbrain <no_re...@...> wrote:
>
> Starts with a classic photo of Marylin Monroe doing asanas in 1948.
>
> As sideways answer to Turq's (I was going to say back door -- but thought
> Curtis's gunas might get whacked out of equillibrium) here are famous women
> involved in yoga (promotion).
>
> "Arriving in Hollywood in 1947, Devi almost immediately enlisted Greta Garbo,
> Gloria Swanson and Jennifer Jones, along with others who, as Syman puts it,
> "were under constant pressure to look radiantly youthful." Soon, Marilyn
> Monroe was claiming that yoga improved her legs."
>
> [Also, in more direct answer to his question -- Joni Mitchell]
>
> Here is the article -- Interesting stuff.
>
>
> Posing as Fitness
>
> By PANKAJ MISHRA
> Published: July 15, 2010
>
> A few years ago, the pop singer Sting confided to an interviewer that a
> specific yoga asana, or posture, had enabled him to have sexual intercourse
> with his wife, the star of a line of yoga videos, for as long as eight hours
> at a time. "Your stomach," he said, "goes as near to the spine as you can
> make it, . . . and you never lose control, you just keep going." The news of
> this priapic tour de force "went around the world," in Sting's own words,
> "like a forest fire." Then he admitted he had been joking. His epic bouts of
> lovemaking, he said, included "four hours of begging, then a movie and then
> dinner."
> THE SUBTLE BODY
>
> The Story of Yoga in America
> By Stefanie Syman
> 390 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27
> THE GREAT OOM
> The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America
> By Robert Love
> 402 pp. Viking. $27.95
> Multimedia
>
>
> Related
>
> Excerpt: `The Subtle Body' (thesubtlebody.net)
>
> Excerpt: `The Great Oom' (April 15, 2010)
> Books of The Times: `The Great Oom' by Robert Love (April 15, 2010)
> Times Topic: Yoga
> From the Magazine
>
> The Yoga Mogul (July 25, 2010)
> Sting probably didn't realize how many would-be erotic athletes he had
> brutally disappointed by this confession. Even while the news of his sexual
> prowess was rumbling across countless magazine profiles, few people seemed to
> have suggested that eight hours of hydraulic exertion, however rapturous,
> might cause a slight problem of tedium, not to mention soreness. Nor did it
> provoke fundamental questions about the purpose of yoga, which in India, the
> country of its origin, is identified as one of the six main schools of
> classical philosophy as well as a form of intellectual training, ethical
> behavior, meditation, alternative medicine and physical culture. (The
> Sanskrit word itself means "union," of the individual self with the cosmic
> Self.)
>
> But then, as two new books on the strange history of yoga in America show,
> even the most esoteric and ancient spiritual tradition mutates weirdly when
> it meets a modern culture pursuing happiness with ever diverse means. As
> Pierre Bernard, one of the first of many indefatigable charlatans who
> popularized yoga, or at least its physical-training aspect, hatha yoga, in
> the United States, put it, "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!"
> Fabulous sex was high on Bernard's menu even in the strait-laced 1910s.
> Robert Love's entertaining biography, "The Great Oom," depicts a bold and
> successful liar who could tell his gullible disciples with a straight face
> that oral sex, punishable in 1915 by up to 20 years in prison, was a sacred
> practice in India and produced orgasms 10 times longer than ordinary
> intercourse.
>
> Bernard, Love writes, "filtered the sacred literature of India . . . through
> his own point of view, that of an energetic Midwestern American." Still, this
> conflation of yoga with the Kama Sutra India's most famous exports to the
> West prior to information technology would have startled not only its
> Brahman practitioners in the Himalayas or along the Ganges but also the sages
> of Walden and Concord who first embraced Indian ideas of nondualism, the
> indivisibility of mind and matter, and the essential oneness of the universe.
>
> Stefanie Syman's more spacious history of yoga in America, "The Subtle Body,"
> begins by describing how deeply and enduringly classical Indian philosophy
> influenced American transcendentalists. Both Emerson and Thoreau admired the
> "Bhagavad-Gita"; Emerson's Oversoul resembles the Brahman, the all-inclusive,
> all-pervading Self of the Upanishads. However, neither Emerson nor Thoreau
> knew much about the physical-fitness side of yoga. The earliest Indian
> vendors of spirituality, like Swami Vivekananda, who lectured on Hinduism at
> the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, looked down on the
> asanas, or poses, of hatha yoga as a defective path to yoga's goal: the union
> of the individual self with the divine Self.
>
> Not that Americans were eager from the start to assume en masse the
> shirshasana, or headstand pose. Syman may be right to assert that as "one of
> the first and most successful products of globalization," yoga today has
> "augured a truly post-Christian, spiritually polyglot country." But back in
> early-20th-century America, a nativist backlash against Asian immigrants
> resulted in xenophobic laws keeping Indians out. And, as Robert Love puts it
> in his account of Bernard's struggles with various authorities, the "legion
> forces of conformity and puritanism occupied the highest reaches of
> government, law enforcement, the press, and the clergy." "This Soul
> Destroying Poison of the East," ran the headline of a long article in The
> Washington Post that blamed Bernard's "Hindu occultism" for everything from
> marital infidelity to suicide. Hounded by the yellow press and the police,
> Bernard scurried between various yoga centers for years before he found a
> congenial refuge near the Hudson River in Nyack, N.Y., in 1918.
>
> So what changed? Preoccupied with rendering biographical detail (impressive
> but occasionally redundant in both books), Love and Syman rarely step back to
> give a broad overview of culture and society. The prospect for yoga
> brightened only with the arrival of a new generation for whom the "rock of
> ages" "the sanctity of property, the patriarchal family, hereditary caste,
> the dogma of sin, obedience to authority," as Walter Lippmann put it in 1914
> had been blasted away. Bernard also learned well the lesson of all
> successful purveyors of self-help from the Buddha to Bikram Choudhury, the
> controversial founder of today's heavily marketed (and copyrighted) Bikram
> Yoga: target the very rich, who, as their shrewdest chronicler in the 1920s
> reminded us, are "different from you and me" because "they possess and enjoy
> early" and grow "soft" (while the rest of us flounder at an elemental stage
> of the human struggle).
>
> F. Scott Fitzgerald wouldn't have found it hard to understand why the
> beautiful and damned flocked to Bernard's large estate, often eager to toil
> in the most menial tasks. Like Bikram of Beverly Hills, the owner of many
> Rolls-Royces and Rolexes, and whose client list includes Madonna and Britney
> Spears, Bernard was especially lucky with his patrons, keeping one of the
> more flush Vanderbilts on tap for decades. Indra Devi, the sari-clad
> Swedish-Russian star of 1940s Bombay cinema (and the most intriguing of the
> colorful cast of eccentrics who brought yoga to America), seems barely to
> have bothered with the B-list. Arriving in Hollywood in 1947, Devi almost
> immediately enlisted Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson and Jennifer Jones, along
> with others who, as Syman puts it, "were under constant pressure to look
> radiantly youthful."
>
> Soon, Marilyn Monroe was claiming that yoga improved her legs. Yehudi Menuhin
> wrote the foreword to Devi's 1959 book "Yoga for Americans." Yoga was quietly
> going mainstream. Syman slightly discounts the contributions of B. K. S.
> Iyengar, the author of "Light of Yoga" (1966), the most widely read book on
> modern yoga, and gives Devi credit "for ridding hatha yoga of sordid
> associations and accumulated ill will." Indeed, she writes, "Indra Devi was
> so good at packaging hatha yoga as a defense against illness and aging" that
> it became "easy to lose sight of its real purpose spiritual liberation."
>
> Meanwhile, fiercely entrepreneurial Indian gurus, previously limited by
> strict immigration laws, began to arrive in the United States, just in time
> for the counterculture. One of these bushy-bearded minor cultists even showed
> up at Woodstock in 1969, exhorting the crowd that "the time has come for
> America to help the whole world with the spirituality." Many of these gurus
> were later outed as lecherous frauds and crooks. But by then the secular
> therapeutic culture of America's liberal elites had begun to accommodate the
> less far-out aspects of Eastern religion and philosophy. As early as 1969,
> Syman writes, "yoga was something the hippies had in common with their
> putative enemies: the middle-class conformist, the corporate drone, the happy
> housewife." (And the adulterous one: yoga is seamlessly suburbanized in John
> Updike's Maple stories; and in "The Culture of Narcissism" (1979),
> Christopher Lasch grumpily lumps it together with oral sex as symptoms of
> Americans' weakening sense of self.)
>
> Demoted to a mere workout, yoga in the 1980s lost some of its appeal to
> aggressive rivals in the fast-growing fitness business. Syman speculates that
> career-conscious women of the 1980s found aerobics more masculine, better
> able to help them break through the glass ceiling than presumably
> limp-wristed yoga. It was not until the late 1990s that yoga made a comeback,
> this time as a strenuous, calorie-immolating 90- minute workout. Bikram yoga
> (which takes place in rooms heated to 105 degrees), Ashtanga (pioneered by K.
> Pattabhi Jois) and Jivamukti (developed by two New Yorkers) demanded a
> grueling regimen that their upper- and middle-class adherents were only too
> relieved to surrender to. These new, quasi-masochistic movements, Syman
> writes, "had tapped directly into that deep, pulsing vein of American
> puritanism." But Syman can sound a bit puritanical herself as she berates her
> compatriots for ignoring the grand metaphysics of yoga and turning it into
> yet another prop for their isolated, hypercompetitive egos. "The Self, that
> God spark in everyone," she complains, has been demoted to the lowercase
> "self," forcing yoga to "surrender its claim to transcendence."
>
> The image of incorrigibly individualist and materialist Americans rummaging
> through ancient cultures in search of eternal youth, beauty and
> self-gratification has long provoked scorn. "Yoga in Mayfair or Fifth
> Avenue," Carl Jung sternly declared, "is a spiritual fake." But such a fetish
> of the "authentic" assumes that people in the country of yoga's origin have
> upheld a timeless and unchanging yoga rather than practicing what Wendy
> Doniger, the distinguished historian of Hinduism, calls the world's greatest
> "have your rice cake and eat it" religion.
>
> It was in India that the tradition of Tantrism first exalted the human body
> as the source of this-worldly liberation. The generation of semi-Westernized
> Indians who brought about the renaissance of yoga in the early 20th century
> were themselves syncretists, combining ideas from both East and West. Even
> the physical aspects that dominate yoga today are partly reimports from the
> West. T. Krishnamacharya (the South Indian teacher of Indra Devi), B. K. S.
> Iyengar and K. Pattabhi Jois borrowed from gymnastic postures introduced to
> India by British colonialists.
>
> Whether in the streets of Mysore or on Fifth Avenue, yoga cannot be
> disentangled from specific histories or specific cultural and economic
> practices. Of course, the more vulgar aspects of its inevitable
> commodification in the United States, like $1,000-a-night yoga cruises, ought
> to be deplored. Certainly, the civic or political virtue that results from
> limber, yoga-toned bodies is not yet measurable. And it would be nice if
> American followers of yoga, who increasingly define the future of this Indian
> discipline, would at least occasionally seek something like spiritual
> transcendence, though, for some at any rate, prolonged lovemaking and deeper
> orgasms will remain more feasible than and may even resemble ecstatic
> oneness with the big Self.
>
>
> Pankaj Mishra, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, is the author of
> "An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World."
>
