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Happy Belated International Yoga Day!
I’m so utterly allergic to International Days of anything that yesterday’s Inaugural International Day of Yoga prompted me to skip my usual morning yoga practice, just out of orneriness.
And guess what. I spent all of yesterday feeling crabby, stressed, and tense. And today I woke up with a backache.
I’ve been doing yoga for a long time. A few decades. I discovered that it had a lot of surprising benefits way before it was a total poseur left-wing fad. And the greater part of me is pleased that it’s become so popular, given that it truly has improved my life, and I’m sure it improves the lives of many. While I’ve yet to experience some of the more extreme claims on made on yoga’s behalf — some of you may have noticed that I’m not Enlightened, for example — I’ve certainly experienced many of the more modest claims. Basically, without the combination of yoga and running (or some other kind of aerobic exercise), I’m intolerable. The aerobic part seems to be the key to mood elevation; the yoga part is the key to being — how to put it — well, let’s just say that without it, I’m a bit too aggressive to work and play nicely with others. Together, they keep me on a reasonably even keel. But if I miss one or the other, just steer well clear of me. You really won’t like me when my yin and my yang are all bollixed up.
So basically, I think it’s wonderful that so many people around the world have taken an interest in yoga.
But a petty part of me is highly aggrieved that yoga — which was an esoteric hobby but not a political statement when I took it up — has come to be associated with pretty much everything I loathe. In fact, I wrote about this back when Ricochet first opened its doors:
There are quite a number of issues and tastes that seem arbitrarily, or by accidents of history, to be associated with Utopianism, Marxism, hostility to private property, anti-clericalism and the other authentic core beliefs of the Left. Why, for example, is it a near-certainty that I can scandalize every other participant in any yoga class I attend, anywhere in the world, by declaring myself an avid admirer of Margaret Thatcher? I challenge you to read the yoga sutras and conclude from them that devotees of yoga must favor inflexible labor markets and an over-regulated financial sector. I challenge you to conclude anything at all from them, in fact; they’re more or less inscrutable. About the only certain thing you can say is that the yogic sages took a dim view of ignorance and craving, as do we all, I’m sure. It’s hardly a view that puts Patanjali next to Bakhunin in the pantheon of revolutionaries.
I love animals. I hate communists. There’s really no inconsistency in these views. There’s hardly even an intersection. Why yoga, of all things, should be seen as the purview of the Left, I have no idea, especially since yoga is almost exclusively the pastime of privileged, upper-middle-class bourgeois white women; indeed, you could pretty much scrap the UN’s human development index and assess a nation’s level of development by measuring the number of yoga studios per capita.
Had I not been doing yoga for some twenty-odd years, I’m pretty sure the hype about International Yoga Day would have been sufficient to ensure I’d never try it. Anything the U.N. General Assembly officially declares worthy of a “day” is something I know I’m against.
Fortunately, I acquired the habit long before the U.N. took an interest in it, so I’ll just keep on enjoying it the other 364 days of the year, except for moon days. (No, I do not believe in “moon days.” But I now believe in the principle the yoga sages seem to have been getting at, which is that you’d best take a regular day off to rest, whether you think you need it or not. I believe this because I’ve noticed that if I don’t, I get overuse injuries. So “moon days” it is. And it turns out a lot of yoga nomenclature is like that; it’s pretty much common-sense, after you de-woo it.) Anyway, yoga-with-cats (YwC) is a yoga sub-speciality of its own, usually assumed to be entirely the purview of the fruitcake left. Here’s a video of me doing YwC. Here I am a short time later, addressing the 2014 Ronald Reagan symposium. Going from one to the other doesn’t cause me any kind of intellectual (or physical) whiplash at all.
What about you? Do you have any hobbies or passions or favorite places that have been, if not ruined for you, precisely, slightly tainted by their association with or adoption by people whose political opinions you just loathe? (Whole Foods falls squarely in that category for me. Actually, so does the entire nation of France.)
Published in Culture, General
I’ve heard that claim, never bothered to run it down as a historian would, though it would be interesting. I’ll say this with confidence, though: I saw no one doing yoga in India in the ’90s. Traveled by train through India for months: I did not see a soul doing yoga. Last time I was there, I sure did — right where you’d expect to see it: in neighborhoods populated by stressed-out, upper-middle-class people. Like I said: toss the UN’s human development index and assess a nation’s level of development by measuring the number of yoga studios per capita. As for where it came from, who cares, really. Modi said it belongs to the whole world, and I’m happy to go along with that. Lots of Indian stuff — authentically Indian stuff — has the hallmarks of “borrowing” from the West. Or being colonized by it. Curiously cross-fertilized culture is quite authentically Indian. It may even be the most authentically Indian trait of them all.
It’s like the word “veranda.” English speakers got it from India. Where did the Indians get the word? The Portuguese.
That’s not even mentioning the St. Thomas Christians, or many other cross-cultural mixes.
Ms Berlinski,
Not that Yoga isn’t a fabulous topic as I suck down enough coffee to get through Monday morning but:
I clicked on your 2014 Ronald Reagan symposium speech. That was amazing. That was fantastic. Admittedly your attempt to distract me with a vision of you in yoga pants was a sneaky ploy but it didn’t work. I am thinking of your speech. It was perfect. Your creation of the Reaganite policy vs. Thatcherite policy was beautifully efficient in its simplicity but profound. It summed up what we are facing on the question of foreign policy. When you explained that Mrs. Thatcher could only succeed with a Thatcherite policy because there was a Reagan in the world you won the day. Hold this thought Claire. If you wish to write an entire book on this theme do so.
OK OK, so now that I’ve had 3 cups of coffee I momentarily thought of you in the yoga pants.
Regards,
Jim
I think yoga got popular because Pilates was too hard.
I moved to the East Village of New York the day I graduated high school, and there are a lot of cultural artifacts of the groovy guy bien pensant left that I miss. But God cursed me to be a conservative, so I’m stuck with it.
BTW you’re yoga with cats youtube is private.
It is? How’d Jim watch it? Well, you’re not missing much. It’s a woman doing yoga with her cats repeatedly trying to knock her over.
Claire,
I haven’t watched it. Just go on your youtube channel and click on the video and click on info and settings (the little pencil icon) and click where it says private and change to unlisted then save.
(I wonder if she’s wearing yoga pants)..I didn’t say anything..(I thought it but I didn’t say it)..just humming a little Beethoven.
Regards,
Jim
You should link back to your post on this.
This should work:
https://www.youtube.com/edit?video_id=kgPqzmP4RpI&video_referrer=watch
Nope. I can’t make the change you must. Once you have changed it from private to unlisted on the cat yoga video the original link will work just fine.
Regards,
Jim
Seconded! :-)
Claire,
The cat/yoga video is working perfectly now. Kitty seemed concerned that you might not make it out of the lotus position. I was worried too. Maybe I was just projecting. Older men are not very flexible (no personality jokes please). Actually, I wasn’t that flexible when I was young.
Regards,
Jim
I did for him.
Thanks Claire for the advice on yoga – all good – I used to do it in my younger days – and sometimes messed things up so I take it slow. But I think there is something to the mind/body connection and after reading your post, and hearing the benefits from others lately, I think it’s time to revisit, even if it is slow and easy does it.
PS I just saw the video of your doing the yoga and all I could think of to say was
O-U-C-H! You looked like a human pretzel – that’s just wrong! Don’t worry – that is too advanced or crazy for us stiff, sensible people – your black kitty obviously thought you needed a spotter as well !
I noticed two things there. First, not many of your cats are attempting to assist you. We only saw two of the seven, and the one hardly helped at all.
Second, so few books. There are great gobs of wall real estate for bookshelves. What a waste.
Claire, you got lucky. Could have been much worse:
It’s late in the thread here but you could take up movement with Ido Portal instead. It’s still yoga but lots more as well.
Been doing Yoga for 45 years, and it was lefty back then, too (and it is not easier than Pilates, Petty Boozhwa. They both cause pain!
I loathe Garrison Keillor, and hate the fact that his taste in music is so good.
To state this problem backwards, I dislike the fact that conservatives whom I otherwise love seem to feel they must defend junk food and companies like Walmart. I’m sure they all fill a need, or they wouldn’t exist, but they certainly don’t do it beautifully.
Some of us liked “World Music” before it was “World Music”, no’me sayin’? I liked things better when it was just “weird stuff”, and mind you, it was weird when I brought my records to kindergarten in the mid-60’s.
And lavender! My grandmother had lavender!
Neti pots–Here in Israel, we get no rain all summer long, and the dust builds up in my nose and makes me itchy. Nose-drool is a small (and containable) price to pay to alleviate this.
If they want my lavender, they’ll have to pry it out of my cold, dead, lavender-scented hands.
Stephen King books. It’s difficult reading them when I know the man would hate me.