Yoga Bodies
By John Thursday • Dec 10th, 2008 • Category: FeaturesThis is a short piece. It’s a rant of sorts. I’m going to be a bit of a hater.
If you are the kind of person who prefers to think the best of others may I suggest you go read something else, the cover story in People perhaps, or 7 Roads to Happiness by the Happy Lama. Oh dear, I’ve started already.
What is it I feel the need to hate on? In a word, yoga bodies.
It is not the bodies themselves, but rather the individuals who take such pride in their shape.
Yoga bodies, long, lithe and skinny skinny skinny.
The women walk through the Berkeley Bowl with their yoga pants cupping their bottoms, leaning over the organic grapefruit to reach the farthest one, stretching, stretching, stretching.
The men strut along the pathways at Harbin Hot Springs, a sarong hanging halfway down their pelvis, slow steps to better preen, their hands passing over their concave stomachs, feigning absentminded enlightenment.
The hand-stomach-pass is the smoking gun of the vain yoga body.
They keep their eyes focused far off, as though gazing at a lotus flower in the treetops, as though unaware that their hand is continually passing over the flat of their stomach. But pass it does, belying their contentment.
With each sweep of the hand the yoga body is reassured that their stomach is, indeed, flat. That reassurance brings one of two emotions. There is pride, which is different from happiness. And there is relief, relief from their fear. No, a tummy has not formed since lunch.
The round-belly Buddha has found no favor in this world.
I hate them most on the dance floor. Rather than dance for joy or peace or to heal the yoga bodies are there to show.
Like Westminster dog show contestants without the benefit of a leash they turn the dance floor into their stage leaping and stretching and then suddenly planting their hands on the ground to better shoot their bums into the air under the auspices of a yoga pose.
They could have gone to a quiet corner for that pose, but they stay in the center of the dance floor, limber bodies folded in half; their pose shouting, “Look! Look! Look!”
What gets me about this, what makes me a hater, is that yoga was not created as a means to a sexualized body.
Yoga was created as a means to control the body, to open the conduits of energy, to allow energy to flow through your body.
Yoga is a path towards emptiness. It is a way to free the body of all that it holds. You hope to one day have the ability to let whatever enters your body flow right back out.
And yet here are these people, the ones I’m hatin’ on, using ancient yoga practices like they were invented by Jack Lalane. They use yoga to stay in shape and attract people to them. That’s like going to a sweatlodge because your skin glows afterward.
Come on everybody, it’s ok to hate now and then. And it’s ok to hate on the yoga bodies.
I mean, for all of their alternative lifestyle stuff, aren’t they just buying into the dominant beauty paradigm of the West?
I always felt an affinity for the round-belly Buddha when I was young. Not that I aiming for a round belly. But there is the way that Buddha smiles unperturbed by his belly. He recognizes that his body is but a vessel and that his true happiness rests inside him. Round-belly Buddha is the real deal.
I love round-belly Buddha.
And I hate… Come on, say it with me, I hate the yoga bodies.
John Thursday >> John Thursday was born and raised at Harbin Hot Springs, unaware there was such a thing as clothing until he was 15. He has since renounced all things Hippie. He earned a doctorate in Erotic Philosophy by defending Kant's lesser known The Critique of Pure Fellatio as a seminal work. he was hit on by Allen Ginsburg twice but not even once by Sami Beinstein, a non-hippie jewess. He currently beds a shiksa named Misty.
All posts by John Thursday
