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– Yoga in America is super white. There are several theories for this. But is it racist?
“Racism is so implicit that you never even notice that it’s a white girl on the cover every single time,” added Amy Champ, a PhD from the University of California, Davis, who wrote her dissertation on American yoga. “But when you begin to ask yourself, ‘What does yoga have to do with my community?’, then you begin to question all these inequities.”
– Not only may yoga be racist, it may be stealing your soul as well. A priest in Ireland believes yoga is “contemptible” and advises we should not “put your soul in jeopardy for the sake of these contemptible things.” Which plays perfectly with our new style of VERY hot yoga. Devil May Care™.
– Time Magazine lends a voice to the neverending hot yoga = weight loss debate. Hint: the results are disappointing, but your heart says thank you.
Williams also stresses the importance of hydration and nutrient replacement. “You can’t sweat out a bunch of minerals and then replace them with water alone,” he says. Dangerously low levels of potassium, sodium, and other electrolytes contribute to those scary health risks mentioned above.
Left unanswered are questions about the long-term effects of hot yoga practice, or how people with heart defects or other health conditions might react to the strenuous conditions, Tracy says.
– Free Download! Always a nice thing, and especially nice when it’s a free talk from Judith Hanson Lasater on “Teaching Mixed Level Classes: Creating Conscious Community,” something every teacher could benefit from in this hyper-popular, multi-leveled yogi world we live in today.
Happy weekend!
FYI … you link to Teaching Mixed Level Classes: Creating Conscious Community goes to a “Page Cannot Be Found”
oops…thanks for the heads up. fixed!
There is an exercise that is very sick and really weird its called isometric exercises . Its like yoga but the exercise is very sick!
Yoga isn’t racist, Americans are racist. Sure, you don’t see a whole lot of diversity on the Yoga Journal cover, but that goes for fitness Magazine, Health & Fitness, Women’s Health, and so on.
Yes, hot yoga does not equal weight loss. Just because you sweat a lot does not mean you’re burning fat (long term stored energy). The one good thing about hot yoga is that in a warmer environment your muscles, ligaments and tendons can become more giving and lend themselves to greater flexibility increases. In a colder environment, your muscles, ligaments, and tendons want to tighten up and contract giving rise to being less flexible.
In the strict physical practice of yoga, we should be leaving religion out. But, traditional yoga thousands of years ago fell under the guise of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. It was not so much the physical practice we do today, but used to attain enlightenment in these religions. So if a Catholic priest is saying something about yoga. Just remember that Catholicism is not Hinduism. There has always been a battle of religions in this world.
Yes, a lot of yogis are racist. They think being Indian automatically makes some one a better yoga teacher than a non-Indian. That’s racism. The lack of minority groups in some yoga classes in some places simply reflects the fact that those are places where minority groups lose out financially and yoga is expensive; there may be racism behind the financial inequality, but not yogi racism.