no wine with my yoga please
Sunset in India
Okay so I realize that being sick with pneumonia for many days might be making me a little cranky, but I just have to vent on the topic of why I believe that mixing yoga classes with a little wine or chocolate gathering afterwards is creepy. I’m sure I’m breaking all sorts of “blogging” rules (the one where you aren’t supposed to blather on and on about your opinions) and possibly may offend a person or two in this writing. I also realize that on a scale of 1-10 me being sick is less than zero when we consider world disasters and earthquakes. But when you’ve been laying on the couch coughing, sneezing and feeling sorry for yourself for a couple of weeks then you get to have a moment like this…right?
For the past couple of years I’ve slowly been noticing that more and more studios and teachers are offering “Yoga and Wine,” or “Yoga, Wine and Chocolate.” EEEEEEEK. Is nothing sacred? We live in a culture obsessed with getting high, being healthy, cool and beautiful all at the same time which is completely nuts. So why do we have to take something as healing, basic and simple as yoga and mix it up with booze and sugar…arghhh…
Humans need places and time to be quiet, aware, learn how to breathe and how to move with intention in their bodies. They also of course need time for play, laughter and socialization. Mixing yoga and wine drinking after yoga class just goofs up the boundaries in my opinion. If a group of people want to go to yoga and then go drink wine afterward…great..but over the years I’ve had several students recovering from drug or alcohol abuse in my classes, and know that they need a safe place to be practicing yoga, especially new to their recovery process. They need a place where the cultural calling to get high isn’t happening..and to me a yoga studio is a really sacred space that holds energy from class to class in a powerful way. The studio says…we just aren’t gonna be doing that stuff in here…there is a bar down the street.
It just really bugs me that yoga is now so exploited that it’s losing it’s ancient coolness, and it was never supposed to be cool but in our great capitalist society we find ways to make a buck like nowhere else in the world …for a long time now yoga has been morphed into weird little subculture groups and courses that take parts of yoga and mix it with parts of other types of exercises or workouts…argh! Everywhere now you see classes advertised called Yogalates or ButtKicking Power Yoga Flow or Core Ab Yoga or Yoga for the Abs or Yoga for Hard Bodies…come on people!
Hopefully like most trends in America..these new silly trends that make yoga seem silly will die off..and the old guard will still stand. Okay well I got it out..I guess it felt pretty good. Hopefully I didn’t offend too much. If you want to let me know your thoughts on it…that would be fun:) Comments are welcome! And no….yawn…I will not be watching the Oscars either…yawn.
Yoga Jane
dailyyogalight 
Hi Jane,
It has been so long! I am sorry you are still ill. I have cranky, “What is the world thinking?” moments myself. Rants always follow, and sometimes come out in blog form. To me, a really good yoga session or whatever you want to call it, a good class, is a spiritual experience. My most loved yoga experiences are finishing a series of intentional poses with plenty of breath and consciousness, and feeling completely warm in my muscles and in my mind. I feel connected to my body and everything around me, with a gentle alertness.
In regards to your comments about our society, I think that we live in an endorphin based culture based in consumption and multiplicity. I live that way most of the time and haven’t made any sincere plans to change my habits. I’m in it. I am mostly engulfed by image and intake, with minimum output or reconciliation comparatively.
Our culture takes something as simple as exercise– something that is easily free, like yoga could be sans all the little extras at a “fair price” to “enhance it”– and makes it into something trendy and affordable, or outrageous, hence luxury workout centers or upscale country clubs. People make a decent living motivating rich people to get off their asses and sweat. It makes it competitive and into a multi-billion dollar industry if you consider sports as a means of exercise. The Olympics, hello, sponsored by McDonald’s, of course. Yes, eat at McDonald’s, not only will you feel instantly amazing with all that fat, salt, sugar, and rat meat flooding into your belly, you will also be able to snowboard like what’s his name. Carrot Top.
I think people are drawn to exercise (or anything really, I shop online compulsively) that gives them a rush of endorphins, instant gratification, just like taking a drug, that power boost can give a similar feeling. But power stretching isn’t yoga. Yoga is not just doing a pose. You have to feel it.
If you aren’t in the moment, you aren’t actually practicing yoga, you are just positioning your body and stretching your muscles. Yoga is an intentional clearing of the mind. There’s nothing wrong with getting high, it can be good for you if you don’t overdo it, but yoga is not about putting a substance into your body, it is about release and letting unnecessary additives navigate out of your body, including negativity and bottled emotions. When you let things out you have space to welcome new energy in, and if you block it immediately with a new substance then what good have you done? You are instantly right back where you started.
I think as human beings with all of our potential, it is somewhat ridiculous to merely maintain oneself without any attempt at improving. I feel like inviting societal pressures into yoga devalues its purpose. Do you really need $60 yoga pants? Is it really going to make your practice that much better? Why don’t you just do it naked in the privacy of your own home? Do you actually need people to know what you are doing at all times? Are you going to twitter people that you are in the middle of the most amazing wheel pose of your life? Where are peoples guts these days? What happened to people owning themselves and apposed to being own by everything else?
When you have empty wine glasses awaiting purple pleasure staring at you all throughout your class it’s just not the same anymore. Like bulldozing a pristine and balanced forest and building a bunch of log cabins on the clearing. Sure its still “nice”, but so not the same. Not the same at all.
Homogenization is something to take pay attention to, it sneaks up on you in the guise of something good, and then it gives you cancer. Cancer is a rape and destruction of resources and able structures. It negates the possibility for peaceful decomposition. The way nature intended. She wants to pick the way things go but we are getting in the way, so she gets destructive right back. She sends earthquakes in a fit of frustration and she gets what she wants, less cancer, but we are a germ that wont quit and get right back on our feet and build more permanent invasive structures. Hopefully we can scale back and operate like the healthy little bacterias we ought to be so she can stay alive, or we will consume her to a point of death.
I hear what you are saying Jane. Its hard to watch people take a beautiful thing and turn it into something sad and gross.
There’s a little more Sunday afternoon blog rant for ya!
Great well soon! I want to practice yoga with you!
-Katie
I have to agree with all that both of you said. For me, yoga is present moment thinking-not doing it for the “whatever” at the end but doing it just to do it for that moment. It is “being with” yourself however you are right there. The reward IS the moment and until people truly feel that, we will continue to see offerings of “more to your yoga”. Maybe it can be good if it gets more people doing yoga– there is a chance that they will come to the reality that the poses in and of themselves are the reward if they let themselves just be.
peace and get well soon
Susan
Thanks Susan and Katie for posting. I received numerous emails from people expressing similar opinions. Wish they would have posted them here but often times people are frightened to go public with opinions. Understandable. Feeling better day by day. Peace-Yoga Jane
Many thanks for the data on this blog, it is comforting in the dark days of restricted food intake.