In 2016 I had some back problems, someone recommended yoga and I tried it and it helped. Great, since then I’ve intermittently done some yoga, for a while with popular YouTube instructor Yoga with Adriene.
Except recently I have decided consciously I don’t want to do it anymore. Or at least I don’t want to call stretching and movement “yoga” and I don’t want to have anything to do with the yoga and spirituality industry.
It’s pretty clear most people who do yoga in its modern form don’t really know what it is, nor do they really care, since yoga is ‘spiritual’ and it makes you feel good. What does it mean that it’s spiritual? It has, in theory, it’s roots in practices in ancient India and so is a profound ascetic tradition.
Except not really, yoga has made its way to the West through many avenues, not the least Swedish gymnastics and what remains has little to do with anything you would find in the bhagavad gita. Modern yoga is fitness and wellness, it is part of the industry of self improvement and optimisation.
Which is fine, that’s exactly why I wanted to start doing it, I had backache and I wanted to feel better. But after a while certain aspects of how yoga exists in the Western world started to bother me.
In another article I pointed out that Yoga with Adriene’s ‘Find What Feel’s Good’ catchphrase is not only slightly contrary to religious or spiritual traditions as they have always been, but could equally be a catchphrase for a porn site. Someone took issue to this, saying I was out of line to say so by.
I don’t think I am. The contentless nature of modern spirituality, the self orientated, self indulgent nature means not only is it not remotely moral, and so hardly in the realm of spiritual or religious, anyone who spends any time perusing Yoga as it is found will notice it is strangely adjacent to pornography.
Is that just because being an attractive woman and bending over a lot in tight pants inclines you to a lot of views and so people naturally exploit it and the algorithms capitulate? Perhaps, I have lost count of the amount of yoga videos I’ve been recommended that have a not so inconspicuous onlyfans link in the description. Some popular yoga teachers have men that follow their videos and put timestamps in the comments for the positions that involve their butt in the air, something said teachers are blatantly encouraging because of the huge numbers of views.
But there is more to it than that. Yoga as it is found today is a morally contentless practice of self-wellness, but somehow couched in moral language. Adriene for example may use language about self-love, and suggest that doing yoga makes you love yourself and so you’ll go off and love others, using titles like “compassion yoga”. Except somehow yoga is also massively popular among the selfish and the narcissistic, the influencers, fitness gurus and yes, onlyfans girls who all see absolutely no contradiction with spirituality and selfishness because, well, self-love. I’ve got to love me first.
Recently the YouTube algorithm decided to recommend to me a yoga video called “Manifestation Flow.” In fact there are endless of these videos out there with millions of views, Yoga for “Manifestation & Success,” and so on, all there to help you channel “abundance,” which means to get whatever you want. No really, you can meditate for financial abundance. So you can…help others by passing on this wealth? No, no, just so you can be rich.
In fact Yoga with Adriene did an interview with the now disgraced Russell Brand in which she said Yoga was ‘Spiritual’, yet she has endless videos in the “Yoga for…” category. Some examples — yoga for hips and lower back, yoga for gut health, yoga for vertigo, yoga for nurses, yoga for teachers, yoga for chefs, yoga for your butt and thighs, yoga for skaters, yoga for manual labour (I swear I’m not making these up), yoga for risk takers, yoga for brain power, yoga for when you’re in a bad mood, you for writers (yay, call out when it gets to your job), yoga for actors, yoga for gardeners, yoga for hangovers, yoga for surfers, and on and on and on and on.
When I read the bhagavad gita I must have missed the bit where Arjuna asks how he can get a better butt and thighs because no matter how many selfies he takes, he can’t make it pop in the mirror.
So what is yoga if it is all at once a mystical source of manifestation, something you use to medicate your hangover, and something you use to make your butt look better? The answer is, none of these people have a clue.
Indeed look through Adrienes’ decade long category of videos, what you see is someone go from friendly home yoga instructor full of self-deprecating humour to someone whose net worth is estimated in the millions in a luxury studio filmed through an instagram tint with shiny pearlescent white American teeth talking in a ‘spiritual’ voice, meaning she now sounds and looks less like a fun school teacher and more like a nurse in a Swiss death clinic. This change in style is perhaps a quibble of my own sense of taste or style, but frankly if this is what becoming more spiritual looks like, I’ll pass.
Don’t get me wrong, breathing and stretching, relaxing, all of the features that yoga brings together are no doubt good things. But the spiritual language it is couched in is nothing but the faux-moralising of self-centeredness. If you want to can the spirituality and accept that yoga is in the same category as Athlean-X, then fine. But it is almost impossible to find yoga that is neither sexualised nor overflowing with garbage spirituality from which you will learn absolutely nothing about Eastern religion and plenty about Western individualism. The fact that many see it as a magical panacea that can solve all your problems from hangovers to not having enough financial abundance is a reflection of just how spirituality destitute we actually are.
I’ve watched this happen to the ASMR community as well (there’s a surprising overlap between ASMR, yoga and porn actually) and I wonder if there isn’t something deeper than all three of these things that is causing this distortion (well, porn itself is a distortion). Simply, the attention economy is at play, and it’s infecting every area of media content - particularly made by women - where appearance is valued. Take away this incentive, and I suspect you’d see a retreat to the true fundamental principles of both yoga and ASMR, which are pure.
"a catchphrase for a porn site"
Portrayed on NCIS with Tony DiNozzo nearly catatonic with lust and on The Sopranos with Janice Soprano attracting Richie Aprile with sexy poses. And, if you do an internet search for videos of nude or naked yoga, you get thousands of hits. Yoga certainly has a porn component--even in its original form.