I MUST HAVE purchased something over the Christmas season that alerted the marketers of yoga paraphernalia to my existence. I suspect it was a top I purchased for my niece in a store that was heavily scented and had an entryway made out of twigs. Whatever it was, these retailers suddenly care about me in ways they never did before, joining a long list of merchandizers who send me catalogues and never earn a dime in return. I have just received two substantial, glossy mail-order catalogues featuring yoga mats, Zen fountains, exercise pants, Buddha sculptures, compost activators, and meditation chairs. This is strange because I’ve never practiced yoga. I will never sit in the Lotus position in public, not only because I consider it unbecoming, especially for a woman, but in the way of spiritual positions, I prefer kneeling.

Kneeling is a superior type of exercise. There is no such thing as “power kneeling.” As a form of mindfulness, kneeling returns the self to where it properly belongs: a position of subjugation and awe.

Yoga is a spiritual system and, in that, it is all too peace-seeking. “A spiritual life without a very large allowance of disquietude in it is no spiritual life at all,” said Frederick William Faber, in one of his nineteenth-century sermons in London. “It is but a flattering superstition of self-love.”

I don’t deny that yoga has health benefits and even attains to some beauty. But the popularity of yoga is due more to a longing for simplicity than for exercise. We all crave simplicity. Where are the trickling fountains and verdant glens and vocal chants of simple-ness? We crave simplicity because it is real and true. We are hounded without simplicity. Without the peace and wholeness it offers, we are hunted down in the alleyways of life by growling, feral dogs.

Yoga, however, is deceptively simple. In truth, it takes us to emptiness and to complexity. There is only evanescent simplicity to be found on a yoga mat. In one universal, throbbing, undifferentiated mind, we cannot find prolonged escape from the unnerving complexity that is everywhere, inside us and all around.

                                                                                                                                               — Comments —

Cindy writes:

My husband, whom I’ll call Harry because that’s his real name, still does one or two yogic things – a bit of breathing and stretching. But that’s it. Before I ever met him, back in the late 60s and 70s he was an everyday practitioner, not from any class but from books, for a few years.

He tells me now what a bad thing he thinks yoga is. He claims that he began to experience the sorts of feelings (or non-feelings) you somewhat alluded to. Because he was able to run his business and conduct his life, I think it was more for ideological reasons (he is a hypercapitalist) that he decided to give it up as a serious practice. That’s okay, too, as I see it. I guess it was a combo of both considerations.

I asked him just now to recite to me again what he has against yoga. Well! He pointed to India as an example of the culture that produced yoga and said, “Need I say more?” But of course he did say more. He considers the attitude produced by serious, dedicated, continuing yoga practice to be a rejection of “the creative act.” He says you become more relative-minded. “Too blissy? Too accepting of everything?” I asked. Yes, exactly he said. And a total rejection of the Western outlook and culture, though prior to meeting me I don’t think he had any conscious recognition of Western-ism. It just ain’t US, he claims.

Some people come to yoga from a life of serious degeneracy and near-dissolution. Good on them. But ultimately they’ll dissolve even more, I suspect.

Moi, I’m only a “cultural Christian” but I have occasionally watched the evangelical shows. A guest on one of these shows was talking about his flirtation with Eastern religions. I recall so clearly how he slagged the much vaunted disappearance of “desire” that’s the goal of some Eastern religions and said Christianity meant “the ERUPTION of desire” [he really emphasized the word, wanting to make his point] and how beautiful that was. It must be ten years ago I saw this and it really spoke to me.

Michael Konieczny writes:

I did a yoga class for a couple of years without slipping into a materialist, narcissistic spirituality that yoga becomes in the west. How anyone can make the leap from stretching your appendages this way and that to substituting it for God, I have no idea. Well, that isn’t really true. I speculate that it is like a plug to block God’s calling voice from your life if you don’t want him to come into your life. You have faith and you have to do something with it. You don’t want to give God his due so you just take your faith and put it in yourself. Yoga and Buddhism are great for that. I whole heartedly agree that kneeing is far more appropriate as a prayerful posture.

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