What if there were an ancient eightfold path to samadhi? Then another to enlightenment? |
Why are they like this!?
American yoga is a cartoon, a facsimile, a joke. |
(joeybtoonz) Sept. 1, 2024: Today let's explore people who pretend to be yoga instructors. [This is Kook Town, this is BS, this is, hold on, let me grab another pizza slice and brewsky so I can keep watching and criticizing this bogus bull.]
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Why we love yoga
It's easy to imagine that "yoga" is a bunch of beautiful gals and lithe guys capable of doing ballet, undressing into tights and athletic shirts so they can sweat while they pose. There's that. It's the face of the brand. But the brand is much older, much deeper, much more useful than flexibility and fulsome breathing. There's a point. The whole of yoga (union) is aimed at meditation and reaching samadhi ("stillness").
Tibetan Vajrayana yoga Yab-Yum |
Anything can use the word. It needn't be from India nor linked to the Vedas, because "yoga" just means whatever the American industry can make of it. And that's money. One of the more woo-woo forms of yoga was invented by Yogi Bhajan, a turban-wearing Sikh promoter, who came to the U.S. to think and grow rich.
I was trying to make money and get girls. Win! |
Sure there were sex scandals and profiteering, but don't think about that. He invented the company Yogi Tea, which has great boxes and too many synthetic "natural flavorings" (a term that means the artificial synthesis of a naturally occurring flavor) to recommend. Flavorants are artificial neurotoxins used to sell product not promote health. So when it says "natural flavor," read "artificial chemical" simulation of something real.
A pose series is not yoga even if called Ashtanga |
Yoga can get to seem that way when it's Yogi Bhajan's brand of Kundalini Yoga. That is a lot of what Joey is boohooing. It looks crazy. It's trying to give participants an experience, a head rush, a movement of kundalini (energy bundled at the base of the spine, which if opened too soon will make one cuckoo); shaktipat might be a better name for what Kundalini Yoga capitalists are trying to evoke so that people keep coming back. Anything goes.
If it was good enough for JC... |
American teachers want to patent something like convicted criminal Choudhry Bikram of Bikram Yoga infamy. Now it's Hot Yoga, keeping the overheated rooms and changing nearly everything else. But there are plenty of diehard Bikram fans still out there because it was anti-spiritual and all about the workout and kickstarting the endorphins, which is what city folk want. Cities have doshas (body types), too. It isn't just bodies. LA and NYC are very pitta (fiery). one can imagine a lot of kapha in Minnesota and vata in Hawaii.
We're just looking on our search |
All places and bodies have all three but usually suffer a predominance of one over the others, an imbalance. Kundalini Yoga is very vata (airy fairy), which will seem odd, silly, fake, and phony to New Yorkers like Joey.
Yoga is very ancient, pre-Patanjali |
Most of us imagine "spiritual" to mean "too airy" because air is the unseen force that moves leaves and whole trees and can be experienced indirectly by all its impacts. Hatha Yoga joins sun and moon, yang and yin energies, though some say that's nonsense, arguing it has another meaning. With so many kinds of yoga, like all the martial arts there are now, what is Royal (Raja) Yoga, the ruler of all other types? It is this very eightfold path of yoga called Ashtanga:
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