When Did Yoga Start Causing Injuries?

So let me get this straight: yoga now has a "bad boy?" Yoga features "competitive trash talk?" Yoga needs a "road warrior" to preach its many benefits? This is yoga we're talking about - meditative poses like downward facing dog, saying "namaste" to our mat neighbor. We now need to be warned about the injuries that might result from undertaking yoga too strenuously, too sweatily? You can get a drink after performing the lotus position during Happy Hour Yoga in the Twin Cities?

What about the folks who just want 20 minutes to sit on their mats, breathe, and be calm? Like dedicated but subdued sports fans, they have been banished to the margins of the media's discourse on exercise. 

It seems we've taken a peaceful activity like yoga and turned it into a multimedia, multiplatform business run by zealous folks like John Friend, a multitasking dynamo and founder of Ansuara, a form of yoga that's "nothing like the more rigid schools that demand students repeat the same poses in the same way at every single class." Friend claims his spin on yoga is "accessible. Easily applicable. And yet it has depth and sophistication." 

Friend's response to all that rigidity sounds comforting, even empowering; the latter is the point of pretty much every activity we undertake in our cost-benefit happy society. "Failing to execute a post meant nothing more than that you might succeed next time," wrote Mimi Swartz of The New York Times Magazine. Friend quietly encourages to "contain divinity within ourselves," Swartz explained, and "express our inner goodness to fulfill our obligation to better our world."

But sustaining this flexibility - spiritual as well as physical - requires that Friend, like the mega church preacher Joel Osteen, be charismatic and driven. "Yoga is my life," Friend told Swartz. "It's not just something I practice on a sitcky mat." Mastery of Ansuara's tenets isn't required, only unswerving, unstinting dedication. Bedecked in our pricey togs, we strive to become part of "the cult of John," which now reaches 200,000 students around the world with its "new American cocktail of spirituality and exercise." 

Yoga has had other TV practitioners, most notably Richard Hittleman, who hosted the syndicated Yoga for Health in the 1970s (my mom was a regular viewer), and Lilias Folan, host of Lilias, Yoga, and You, which debuted on PBS in 1972. Folan, who sees yoga as a source of healing as a means to achieve calm rather than as an endurance contest, performance art, or spiritual marathon, still teaches her less frantic brand of yoga to Cincinnati-area residents. 

But for Friend, along with power yoga educator Baron Baptiste, who claims on his website to have been "bred to teach and educate" and hosts boot camps for aspiring power yoga teachers, and Bikram Choudhry, "self-proclaimed guru to the rich and famous," who sells franchises and charges $1,400 for advanced seminars in Bikram Yoga delivered in rooms kept at 100 degrees so students "will be able to heat up their muscles right away and be prepared for the intensity of the message," zeal and self-promotion have bastardized this once tranquil pastime, at least in its current media iteration.