Periodically I'll attempt to answer Owl's chewy question from last time. I've been thinking on and off about this since last time's post, so here are some things.
1. I took a vacation from asana for about the last week of November and two weeks of December. A sort of surrender of the practice, of the mode in which I was practicing. I did this in 2008 too, and can't remember 2009, but I probably did the same there. The easy answer is that I have too much life, work, whatever, but this time it was also something different.
I practiced HARD over the winter of 2010, early this year, up to April when I busted a shoulder. This gave me a high level of physical skill, to be sure. Recently I was doing the Intro to Intermediate class and it kicked my butt, which made me think of April when I was regularly doing the whole sequence. Sure, with modifications, but I was handling that sequence several times a week. Anyway, "watch things appear and disappear." The point of this most recent asana vacation is that I realized that I'd practiced so hard early in 2010 (and throughout 2009) in order to preserve some sense of my life pre-parenthood. In short, that's practicing for the ego.
Now let's be clear. Most of the time when I read/hear people talking about "I was doing X for the ego" they mean overreaching in some pose, showing off; they mean EGOTISM not simply "the ego." And that's not what I mean here. The tremendous ego pain of transitioning from what Hanson calls "couple" to "team" (couple to parents, basically) was like any other death, real or imagined. You struggle against it; it's not yet native to simply accept those things. So hard asana practice was meant not to aggrandize or be showy, but to keep "I" alive, literally to serve as a handhold for the ego as it plunged off that cliff.
So I surrendered it for three weeks, asana vacation. Explicitly to make myself accept the loss of practice, to live through it, and to see how silly the handhold is, how silly the panic about "survival" is. It's like when Wile E. Coyote is tricked by the roadrunner, and off the cliff he goes, with his tiny umbrella, but what the frame of the cartoon hasn't shown us is that there's a little ledge there and when he extends a toe down, he stands.
You don't die when the ego loses something, when its grip is made to loosen. But suffering that lost grip is really infomative for seeing how locked into the ego we get.
2. French Buddhists. We had visiting French Buddhists (she's American; he's French; they've lived over there for ten years and we went to their Buddhist wedding in the woods of Georgia a couple years ago and it was very rad) for three days, probably three weeks ago now. Great conversation. Absolutely fantastic. I often talk about these conversations when I'm sending off students after yoga class; my closing sort of meditation often comes from this visit.
One of the things we talked about while they were here is how one moves from singledom-coupledom to parenthood. They are not parents. I said that often people just attribute it to magic, with this euphemistic "you just do it" Nike ethic. But in my experience, you get massively overwhelmed, but you do the thing anyway. The child must be carried around all night, the child must be changed, and so on. You can't negotiate with those needs, you just do the thing, catch what sleep you can, and you live hand to mouth. When you start to get used to it, you do the tasks, but complain about it a lot, because it's hard, and because "the way it used to be" was easier (really? a dissertation's easier than parenting, are you sure?).
But then you find out, with time, that you're doing more than you're complaining, just out of repetition, just out of EXHAUSTION from fighting it. The switch from being to doing cannot be over-emphasized. Being is so "Who am I," so "Who was I," "Who will I be." Doing is simply doing. And yeah, we can go all Foucault on it and talk about bodies and pleasures and then "being" but Foucault never wanted it to get existential like that. The idea is that you do, and you DON'T WORRY about being. WHO CARES?
BEING someone doesn't mean ANYTHING.
Right, there are followup questions: "Well then how do I know what to do if I don't know who I am?" The void in which that question is asked, never exists. That question is a parlor game for college students. There is always doing to be done, and as long as that exists, we'll never have the void where we need to confront "being" as something we need to do. The whole "game" of being is simply watching things appear and disappear.
I could say that lesson a thousand ways; it's really the primary thing that I've learned about myself from parenting so far, even though it, itself, is not technically about parenting at all.
3. Move stuff around. C began new daycare at the start of this month, which is a quarter-mile from the university where we work. This means that instead of a 6 mile drive north and then an 8 mile drive southwest, making a triangle from home to daycare to work (and then back, each day) we now drive 5 miles west to work, make that little quarter-mile dropoff loop, and repeat, when we leave. SO much simpler than the old commute. And with J's 8-5 schedule and my ever-changing class schedule, morning dropoffs and afternoon pickups are negotiable. For example, today I'll get the boy at 3:30 or so.
What this change of commute has meant is that I don't have easy access to that northside YMCA anymore, which means changing my winter practice time/space. A thousand questions. Do I go to the downtown Y, where parking is impossible unless I practice at 8 am? It is on the way to work, and I am teaching all afternoon classes in the spring semester. Do I practice in the cold house? Do I ask the yoga studio if they'd let me run a 2-hour "DIY room" five days a week? Thousands of options here. Of course, this interferes (along with family travel, which comes up next week) with regular practice, and I simply let it do that. Some days I don't practice, other days I'll do some sun salutations, other days I do a half Intermediate, etc. When it's fluid, I don't try to regulate it. I don't love how random it is right now but this is all about getting away from that "must do" mindset that was really just a fierce grip on "who I used to be" and "how I used to do." New routines will appear; right now, it's more important that it stay juicy and random.
Activities recede, become optional. I find that I don't really miss bars, movies, that sort of thing. Climbing gyms, sure, but that's loaded history, hard to let go of. Parenting is largely about negotiating between an external schedule (work, breakfast, those sort of "day to day" structures) and the child's curiosity and desires and native fluidity. C likes to see seals, dogs, cats, and other critters, even in movies and electronic greeting cards if not at the zoo. So many mornings, he will be slapping his thigh (which means, "dog"), and running to a computer, instead of wanting to eat breakfast so that the day can be gotten underway. I'm often willing to negotiate with him, and J is less so, more schedule-focused. So that's additional negotiation. She gets her (more scheduled) way, and already I can see that I'm going to wind up being "the parent who lets you get away with stuff." That's fine.
One of our French visitors said that a friend who is a physicist had said this about kids: "They open your heart more than anything else does, and they drop a nuclear bomb on your relationship." Totally agreed. I mean, cats are cute and fabulous, but a 1 year old beats just about anything for cute. Plus, they talk and interact with you in human terms, but need constant cautioning and chaperoning everywhere, so you really get deep lessons in caring, simply from DOING, not in any kind of distanced, imposed Hallmark way.
I grew up with pets, lifetime--my parents had dogs from before I was adopted and all the way through college and then some. So nurture has always been an element, and you can see it when I'm teaching people something that I dig and that they dig. But there's even more of it now. I never cared for parenting described as, "it makes you less selfish," because I don't see self-discovery as selfish. It's only the martyr-parents who talk about "selfishness," much the same way that it's only people with a certain degree of self-loathing who talk about "I was doing it for the ego."
Nurture's not easy if you're a boy, especially if you're one with good exposure to gender politics. Obviously, nurture is marked feminine in this culture. I was having lunch last week in the campus center and sitting near a table of about eight college guys: sporty, trendy, loud. The energy coming off them, the sheer extroverted testosterone, was absolutely tactile, touchable, visible. Instinctively, I didn't care for it, because those guys mocked me for years when I was in my teens, but then I re-looked at them, imagined them as guys who'd maybe gotten curious about the US yoga trend and walked into my room. And that changed everything; they became powerful bodies with curiosity, with shyness, and immediately I developed a sort of intimate empathy with them. Just to play with it, I let my view switch from one to the other, reinventing the human beings in front of me by means of different lenses. Then it became very funny and amusing and I turned someone that I used to be, into a tool in my toolkit.
Being is history, is memory, is samskara. As my new favorite book of the Sutras, book Three, tells us, samskaras of noise can be replaced with samskaras of stillness.
Kumbhaka (retention) is hard for me even when I'm practicing a lot, so what I've done lately is just to slowly "sip" as big an inhale and exhale as I can (this is separate from practice, often done just seated in the house). Inhaling until I can feel the in-breath sort of rolling just under the top of my head, swirling under the sahasrara. Exhaling until I can feel the whole body sink down to the mula bandha. It takes a LONG time to do that breathing, just that simple breath, and as Larry once said to us, pranayama makes time stop.
But what I also found in doing this is that I can move my mind, my sort of "sensing self" to a place just behind the palate in the roof of the mouth (like where the uvula is, but not in it, sort of above/behind it) and an energetic plumb line drops from that point DIRECTLY to the mula bandha. It's the keenest sense of the MB I've ever had, and I can't get to the "palate point" unless I do some of the breathing pattern that I was just talking about. This experience comes with pretty intense sense-withdrawal, very much a "being within" not a being without (or as Maehle's translation of the Sutras has it, involution rather than evolution) and it's easy to lose it, as soon as my attention turns outward again.
Dada sound poetry from the teens was described once as, "Poetry is made in the mouth," a physical act. This type of "being in my head" is not a cognitive thing but is a physical thing, literally BEING in the head, in the flesh of the head, but also the energy of the head, the body, thus the plumb line down.
These are some of the things that are going on.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Encinitas, June, 2011. Do I do this? Your vote...
100 hours, my first stay in someone's Mysore room that's longer than 4 days, since the summer of 2010 and since May 2007 before that. It's hard to count Troy's room as a Mysore room in some respects given how non-traditional it is, but if we're talking pure facts, then yes, I spent 8 days there.
Reasons to do this:
1) Tim Miller, two weeks. A revelatory first meeting in summer 2010.
2) Pronunciation, philosophy, pranayama, 100 hours training. Deliciousness.
3) Two weeks in what is pretty certainly the most well-renowned Mysore room in the United States.
Reasons to be cautious, careful, and wary:
1) I get paid 10 months a year. When I get paid at the start of May, I don't get paid again until the start of August, or depending on how they cut the calendar, maybe even September. That's a LONG DROUGHT.
2) True, I've been paying off debt and paying for a new furnace, but right now, I have NO SAVINGS. Not one cent.
3) J doesn't know this plan of a plan yet. She's leaving in May for a week and leaving me with C for a long weekend in February, so there may be some balance as to who does how much baby care. She won't like the $1750 price tag, but she knows that I've sacrificed things I love to do this family gig.
4) $1750 is training alone. Plane, food, shelter, et ceteras?
Other things to consider:
1) Kino no longer visits Chicago twice a year, but she is coming to see us (Indy) in May, which rocks. Still, a weekend with her, while brilliant, is not two weeks solid and 100 hours.
2) Tim visits Columbus Ohio (3 hours from here, directly east) every April. I can't do the weekdays but I can do the weekend, April 8-10. Same as above, though.
3) A friend of a friend once offered me a bed in San Diego, approximately 40 minutes from Carlsbad (I asked her to check). That might solve housing but might require rental car. Hm.
4) June 18-July 1. This training sells out, every year. Interest forms are online. I'm tempted, CONSTANTLY, to fill one out. Do these dates interfere with family stuff (summer reunions in May, J's people)? Do these dates interfere with potential Seattle travel? When should I begin negotiating?
SO:
The main attraction is ashtanga ala Tim Miller. There is no debate about that.
The main worry is money, pure and simple.
I don't expect J to hate this idea except that it's two grand (probably three when all counted) over the summer in the middle of our poverty and we know that's coming.
THAT is what I have to solve if I can. HOW? Summer data entry? I already cannot teach over the summer, that schedule is long past.
Drop language on me.
Reasons to do this:
1) Tim Miller, two weeks. A revelatory first meeting in summer 2010.
2) Pronunciation, philosophy, pranayama, 100 hours training. Deliciousness.
3) Two weeks in what is pretty certainly the most well-renowned Mysore room in the United States.
Reasons to be cautious, careful, and wary:
1) I get paid 10 months a year. When I get paid at the start of May, I don't get paid again until the start of August, or depending on how they cut the calendar, maybe even September. That's a LONG DROUGHT.
2) True, I've been paying off debt and paying for a new furnace, but right now, I have NO SAVINGS. Not one cent.
3) J doesn't know this plan of a plan yet. She's leaving in May for a week and leaving me with C for a long weekend in February, so there may be some balance as to who does how much baby care. She won't like the $1750 price tag, but she knows that I've sacrificed things I love to do this family gig.
4) $1750 is training alone. Plane, food, shelter, et ceteras?
Other things to consider:
1) Kino no longer visits Chicago twice a year, but she is coming to see us (Indy) in May, which rocks. Still, a weekend with her, while brilliant, is not two weeks solid and 100 hours.
2) Tim visits Columbus Ohio (3 hours from here, directly east) every April. I can't do the weekdays but I can do the weekend, April 8-10. Same as above, though.
3) A friend of a friend once offered me a bed in San Diego, approximately 40 minutes from Carlsbad (I asked her to check). That might solve housing but might require rental car. Hm.
4) June 18-July 1. This training sells out, every year. Interest forms are online. I'm tempted, CONSTANTLY, to fill one out. Do these dates interfere with family stuff (summer reunions in May, J's people)? Do these dates interfere with potential Seattle travel? When should I begin negotiating?
SO:
The main attraction is ashtanga ala Tim Miller. There is no debate about that.
The main worry is money, pure and simple.
I don't expect J to hate this idea except that it's two grand (probably three when all counted) over the summer in the middle of our poverty and we know that's coming.
THAT is what I have to solve if I can. HOW? Summer data entry? I already cannot teach over the summer, that schedule is long past.
Drop language on me.
Friday, December 3, 2010
This is how one academic would do the whole Jois Yoga thing.
I'm not terribly interested in the Jois Yoga question/debate/whatever it is, but I am interested in what I've been reading and teaching recently, so here's this.
This isn't going to be (I think) partisan about change or tradition or really even about ashtanga vinyasa; basically what I'm going to do here is to take a cultural critic point of view (largely borrowed from a frame used by Laura Kipnis when she was still a hardcore post-Marxist and not the spectacle-manufactured soap-operette who wrote AGAINST LOVE, a book I liked) on the idea of marketing a subculture (yes, I just used that word).
Here goes. In art history, the word "postmodern" refers always back to "modern" (as it does everywhere else) and "modern" comes in part (I would argue in large part) from the work of Clement Greenberg, THE MAN who helped to make Abstract Expressionism the movement which seized the gold medal ("art capital of the world") from Paris and hung it around the neck of New York. Sure, Greenberg wouldn't have been able to do that solo, without people and contextual events like the Works Progress Administration and Peggy Guggenheim's love of Surrealism (and Surrealists, heh), but nonetheless, Greenberg's definition of avant-garde art as that which refers to and struggles against its own medium, became a seminal part of what it means for one to be part of "modernist" art history.
Greenberg wrote, in a much less systematized and useful way, about politics, hinting in usually contradictory ways that avant-garde art could somehow serve leftism and even save the world (as Tom Wolfe reminds us, Greenberg could get downright maudlin). Postmodernism is often seen as having either no politics, having sacrificed them instead for style, or as having frustrated or wishful politics, as in the work of what I call the "surrender post-Marxists" (I'm looking at YOU, Frederic Jameson, and your French cyborg clone, Baudrillard). I realize that there is political intent in Deleuze and Guattari and so on and so forth, but for purposes of not getting caught up in that to a totally impractical degree, I'm looking mostly as the post-1968 "eh, fuck it" attitude taken by many former Marxists and I am totally leaving out the third world (where politics never has taken up any kind of post-Marxist surrender as far as I'm aware).
In short, then, and this is already a generalization that I'm forcing myself to make so that I can get to JOIS YOGA without having to write a book of theory to do so, let us say that the postmodern in an art historical context is largely about multiple styles within artwork and is low on politics (there might be gender politics, or in relational art, there is an interactivity that's potentially political, but we are low on Ye Olde Grande Narrative politics, i.e., Marxism).
Kipnis is mostly known for her Hustler magazine analysis, or else, for AGAINST LOVE, her 2003 (?) book which attempted (so, so bravely!) to give us a properly Marxist and unsentimental analysis of what "love" is and means in American culture. Sadly she went for empathy, got human about it, and this cost her academic sharpness and now she's popular and disdained all at once and called things like "lonely." You start with Marxism and a sharp knife, and you wind up Oprahcized. Welcome to America, Laura.
Anyway.
In 1991, Kipnis wrote a piece called "Repossessing Popular Culture" in which she compellingly and with great complication (but that's academics for you) argues that we need to admit popular culture into a consideration of active politics and to forge a properly POPULIST leftist "popular culture." Why is this important? Greenberg, for example, separated the "avant-garde" (complicated art for elitists, to be snarky about it) from "kitsch" (easy to understand art for anyone), calling kitsch even "fascist." The avant-garde has promise for intellect, for politics, for everything; the avant-garde is PROMISE itself. Kitsch is sold, salesmanship, selling. Kitsch is basically prostitution and the prostituted (Jean-Luc Godard makes like criticisms throughout his 60s work before turning into an obtuse Maoist in 1968 and remaining so until 1972).
In short, avant-garde is promising and kitsch is sold out. Subculturally, a new scene contains the promise of whatever (getting a girlfriend, making a social revolution) and the old scene is sold out, commodified, "gone to the masses." We STILL operate in Greenbergian categories, which is part of why and how we see the postmodern as apolitical (well, that and its suspicion of "grand narratives" but then, you can still do politics ala Foucault and all that, but then you have to not only read but also understand that stuff....).
Kipnis shows that various different critics, even those writing on the avant-garde as a historically isolatable discourse, reproduce this high/low dynamic where high culture is potentially political, but elite, and low/mass/popular culture is basically pure sold-out capitalism. Her counter-argument is literally to repossess popular culture, to find a politics there, in fact to GROW a politics there.
What can this tell us about JOIS YOGA?
Much of this debate comes in a binary form, "tradition versus marketing" or words that are easily translatable to those. When Kipnis talks about high culture, she deploys the French to say that there is a sort of sanitary barrier that avant-garde erects around itself, to protect itself from icky capitalist pop culture. "Cordon sanitaire" is what she says. A sanitary fence, if you will. She then goes on to prove that the avant-garde isn't, in fact, free of the market, and in fact, it doesn't even WANT to be free of the market. But somehow there is some kind of magic line crossed where pop culture is TOO committed to the market. Where's the line between commodification and simply "selling to live"? Kipnis doesn't go there; for her it's enough to prove that high culture's "cordon sanitaire" is imaginary and that it's keeping us from reckoning with pop culture as something perhaps politically valid.
So why and how does "the tradition" think it is/should be free of the market? And how free does it need to be, exactly, in order to "remain" the tradition? How much sell out is too much? We can see answers to this in any of the "yoga debates" like the ones over TOE SOX. But all of that relies (assuming that my translation of yoga into art historical criticism is worth anything) on the MAINTENANCE OF THE CORDON SANITAIRE.
Say that "spirituality" replaces "politics" and that capitalism remains capitalism. There, is it clearer now? We segregate the "true" tradition--even to the point of naming particular teachers--from the "icky capitalism" of popularity. This is precisely what the JOIS YOGA debate is.
In Kipnis' terms, what we should do is GROW OUR OWN POPULISM in that capitalist soil. This isn't the same as that weak-kneed sellout "well it makes the yoga more popular and that's a good thing." Popularity ALONE isn't enough. Kipnis argues that we need not just to assume a populism will appear but to ACTIVELY CREATE ONE, basically to FORCE CAPITALISM TO GROW ONE. As Becky Goldberg once put it in her video on feminist porn, "If women demand feminist porn, even the most patriarchal market will have to provide it to them." That's some faith in the market, assuming that it underrides (and overrides) all. Hah--how MARXIST! :D
So the creation of a properly spiritual ashtanga vinyasa is a responsibility that lies with the teachers and probably most with THE STUDENTS. You want spirituality? Make the capitalists teach it to you. Force them to teach it. DEMAND that they teach it.
This isn't going to be (I think) partisan about change or tradition or really even about ashtanga vinyasa; basically what I'm going to do here is to take a cultural critic point of view (largely borrowed from a frame used by Laura Kipnis when she was still a hardcore post-Marxist and not the spectacle-manufactured soap-operette who wrote AGAINST LOVE, a book I liked) on the idea of marketing a subculture (yes, I just used that word).
Here goes. In art history, the word "postmodern" refers always back to "modern" (as it does everywhere else) and "modern" comes in part (I would argue in large part) from the work of Clement Greenberg, THE MAN who helped to make Abstract Expressionism the movement which seized the gold medal ("art capital of the world") from Paris and hung it around the neck of New York. Sure, Greenberg wouldn't have been able to do that solo, without people and contextual events like the Works Progress Administration and Peggy Guggenheim's love of Surrealism (and Surrealists, heh), but nonetheless, Greenberg's definition of avant-garde art as that which refers to and struggles against its own medium, became a seminal part of what it means for one to be part of "modernist" art history.
Greenberg wrote, in a much less systematized and useful way, about politics, hinting in usually contradictory ways that avant-garde art could somehow serve leftism and even save the world (as Tom Wolfe reminds us, Greenberg could get downright maudlin). Postmodernism is often seen as having either no politics, having sacrificed them instead for style, or as having frustrated or wishful politics, as in the work of what I call the "surrender post-Marxists" (I'm looking at YOU, Frederic Jameson, and your French cyborg clone, Baudrillard). I realize that there is political intent in Deleuze and Guattari and so on and so forth, but for purposes of not getting caught up in that to a totally impractical degree, I'm looking mostly as the post-1968 "eh, fuck it" attitude taken by many former Marxists and I am totally leaving out the third world (where politics never has taken up any kind of post-Marxist surrender as far as I'm aware).
In short, then, and this is already a generalization that I'm forcing myself to make so that I can get to JOIS YOGA without having to write a book of theory to do so, let us say that the postmodern in an art historical context is largely about multiple styles within artwork and is low on politics (there might be gender politics, or in relational art, there is an interactivity that's potentially political, but we are low on Ye Olde Grande Narrative politics, i.e., Marxism).
Kipnis is mostly known for her Hustler magazine analysis, or else, for AGAINST LOVE, her 2003 (?) book which attempted (so, so bravely!) to give us a properly Marxist and unsentimental analysis of what "love" is and means in American culture. Sadly she went for empathy, got human about it, and this cost her academic sharpness and now she's popular and disdained all at once and called things like "lonely." You start with Marxism and a sharp knife, and you wind up Oprahcized. Welcome to America, Laura.
Anyway.
In 1991, Kipnis wrote a piece called "Repossessing Popular Culture" in which she compellingly and with great complication (but that's academics for you) argues that we need to admit popular culture into a consideration of active politics and to forge a properly POPULIST leftist "popular culture." Why is this important? Greenberg, for example, separated the "avant-garde" (complicated art for elitists, to be snarky about it) from "kitsch" (easy to understand art for anyone), calling kitsch even "fascist." The avant-garde has promise for intellect, for politics, for everything; the avant-garde is PROMISE itself. Kitsch is sold, salesmanship, selling. Kitsch is basically prostitution and the prostituted (Jean-Luc Godard makes like criticisms throughout his 60s work before turning into an obtuse Maoist in 1968 and remaining so until 1972).
In short, avant-garde is promising and kitsch is sold out. Subculturally, a new scene contains the promise of whatever (getting a girlfriend, making a social revolution) and the old scene is sold out, commodified, "gone to the masses." We STILL operate in Greenbergian categories, which is part of why and how we see the postmodern as apolitical (well, that and its suspicion of "grand narratives" but then, you can still do politics ala Foucault and all that, but then you have to not only read but also understand that stuff....).
Kipnis shows that various different critics, even those writing on the avant-garde as a historically isolatable discourse, reproduce this high/low dynamic where high culture is potentially political, but elite, and low/mass/popular culture is basically pure sold-out capitalism. Her counter-argument is literally to repossess popular culture, to find a politics there, in fact to GROW a politics there.
What can this tell us about JOIS YOGA?
Much of this debate comes in a binary form, "tradition versus marketing" or words that are easily translatable to those. When Kipnis talks about high culture, she deploys the French to say that there is a sort of sanitary barrier that avant-garde erects around itself, to protect itself from icky capitalist pop culture. "Cordon sanitaire" is what she says. A sanitary fence, if you will. She then goes on to prove that the avant-garde isn't, in fact, free of the market, and in fact, it doesn't even WANT to be free of the market. But somehow there is some kind of magic line crossed where pop culture is TOO committed to the market. Where's the line between commodification and simply "selling to live"? Kipnis doesn't go there; for her it's enough to prove that high culture's "cordon sanitaire" is imaginary and that it's keeping us from reckoning with pop culture as something perhaps politically valid.
So why and how does "the tradition" think it is/should be free of the market? And how free does it need to be, exactly, in order to "remain" the tradition? How much sell out is too much? We can see answers to this in any of the "yoga debates" like the ones over TOE SOX. But all of that relies (assuming that my translation of yoga into art historical criticism is worth anything) on the MAINTENANCE OF THE CORDON SANITAIRE.
Say that "spirituality" replaces "politics" and that capitalism remains capitalism. There, is it clearer now? We segregate the "true" tradition--even to the point of naming particular teachers--from the "icky capitalism" of popularity. This is precisely what the JOIS YOGA debate is.
In Kipnis' terms, what we should do is GROW OUR OWN POPULISM in that capitalist soil. This isn't the same as that weak-kneed sellout "well it makes the yoga more popular and that's a good thing." Popularity ALONE isn't enough. Kipnis argues that we need not just to assume a populism will appear but to ACTIVELY CREATE ONE, basically to FORCE CAPITALISM TO GROW ONE. As Becky Goldberg once put it in her video on feminist porn, "If women demand feminist porn, even the most patriarchal market will have to provide it to them." That's some faith in the market, assuming that it underrides (and overrides) all. Hah--how MARXIST! :D
So the creation of a properly spiritual ashtanga vinyasa is a responsibility that lies with the teachers and probably most with THE STUDENTS. You want spirituality? Make the capitalists teach it to you. Force them to teach it. DEMAND that they teach it.
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