Yoga and western psycho-culture

A number of years ago I used to do a bit of Yoga -in my 'New Age period'. I'm interested to note that it seems still to be going strong and continuing to mutate in western culture. It's interesting to note a niche in western culture that it seems to be adapting to and there is a downside: "'Paradoxically, the characteristics that create a great yoga practice - extreme sensitivity, perfectionism and wanting to be in control - are also characteristics of anorexia,' says Clare, a London-based yoga teacher. 'Being sensitive, you feel the nature of the postures more, so get more out of them; perfectionism makes you want to keep doing it better; and I remember a friend once saying to me that all yoga teachers are control freaks.'"

Of course, this is just why having religious traditions that have a bit of a track record and a history of making their insights work for real people living normal lives, can be important: compassion and wel-roundedness can start to be part of the picture if they weren't before. Not that I am saying that Yoga as often practiced in the west is religion, just acknowledging that it has had a respected place within religious practice which is not necessarily the same thing: the tools a religion uses may be applicable more widely where they are actually touching on things to do with our common humanity: neural structures, brain-body interface, etc.

There are a few questions that arise from this report though. One is the need to monitor and act on the results of seeing how different personalities interact with disciplines, rituals, aids and insights. What is helpful for one may be baneful for another. I certaily wonder whether some of those who have achieved status as canonised saints were in fact being 'rewarded' for following unhealthy impulses which just happened to impress people who had a different personality structure and differing weaknesses. Some Catholic and medieval practice seesm to be a particularly good area to study in this repsect. I'm thinking of asceticism and mortification of the flesh understood in a dualist thought-world where matter tended to be denigrated and desire too easily and fully equated with concupiscence and therefore sin. SO we can't afford to be too smug. Motes and beams, folks, motes and beams.

We see something of this cultural contamination in the yoga report:
Several teachers point to the fact that yoga seems to be understood in a certain way by westerners. "It's give me, give me now, I want it now, I want enlightenment now, I want to relax now, I want a body beautiful in a few weeks," says Radha at Yoga Plus in Crete. McCreddie adds, "It's really sad that the western world has taken something and just bastardised and contorted it to the point at which we no longer know what it should have been."
That's part of my evidence to say that we shouldn't necessarily understand western yoga religiously in the strict sense. Mostly it seems to be a set of practices, a cultural artefact, that has been taken fronm the context it was found in and reintegrated into a western philosophical mindset crucially determined by consumerist values and issues of self- and body image. This is a typical move in that rag-bag of ideas and practices we tend to label 'New Age' where the common factor is precisely the concern for self and self-identity informed by consumerism and so a Borg-like assimilation of the distinctiveness of other religious, spiritual and cultural items and ideas. It looks like diversity and pluralism; in fact it is assimilation. It actually goes beyond newagery; our whole culture tends to be implicated. Newagery is just the spiritual/religious face of it.

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