March 1, 2012--Hot Yoga

We have friends here and in Maine who are always slipping off to sessions of hot yoga. When we ask them about it, they speak ecstatically.

Up to now, I thought that this meant they did their thing in a hyper-heated studio. The extra-hot heat, they universally say, is not enervating but allows them to get loose and to contort effortlessly into all sorts of double-jointed positions that are beyond my imagining much less attempting.

But, now, not to doubt the reports of any of our friends, the bad-old New York Times is blowing the whistle on a very different kind of hot yoga. Yoga that leads to sex with the instructor. (See linked article.)

They begin by citing one recent example of improper behavior--John Friend founder of Anusara Yoga taking sexual advantage of his prominent position in the yoga field who announced he is stepping down as the leader of one of the world's fastest-growing versions of yoga so he can engage in "self-reflection, therapy, and personal retreat." To cynical me, all very yoga-sounding.

But deeper in the article the ever-thorough Times , in the weekly decidedly non-gossipy Science Section, claims that from its beginning in medieval India, modern, or Hatha yoga began as an offshoot of Tantra and that at its heart Tantra seeks "to fuse the male and female aspects of the cosmos into a blissful state of consciousness." Again, to the cynical part of me, though this too is yoga-sounding, at least it is derived from the spiritual origins of yoga. Far from what apparently goes on in John Friend's ashram.

Tantric cults were often steeped in symbolism and who knows what else. According to the Times again, one Tantric text encouraged devotees to "revere the female sex organ" and enjoy "vigorous intercourse."

Hatha was devised as a way to speed up the Tantric agenda. Its various poses, deep breathing, and simulated sex acts were used to hasten "rapturous bliss."

But about 100 years ago, the founders of yoga as we now know it did what they could to purge Hatha yoga of its Tantric "stain," concentrating instead on improving fitness and health.

That sounds good to me. But obviously not to Mr. Friend, who, by his practices, appears to be a yoga fundamentalist, wanting yoga, at least for him, to be returned to its Tantric roots.