Huffington Magazine Issue 80 | Page 43

ARNOLD BROWER DESPERATELY SEEKING SERENITY stress and burnout. Yoga has been shown to help fight everything from addiction and lower back pain to diabetes and aging, in addition to boosting overall wellbeing and stress relief. “Yoga is a traditional way of easing pain and people are flocking to it,” says Khalsa. “We’re on our phone all day, in front of the TV, in front of our computer. We hardly ever get away from it. But you can come to a yoga class and get rid of all this ‘stuff.’” Still, it’s the tradition that many worry is being lost. Yoga’s proven health benefits don’t mean that every form of adaption of the practice is valuable, says Goldberg. “People are very concerned about this, and for good reason,” he says. Variations began to proliferate as research on yoga’s health benefits became more robust. At that time, the practice became more widely accepted — and the industry started to cash in. “The sudden boom of interest led to people wanting to fill the demand by getting more teachers trained, and studios discovering that they can make more money training yoga teachers than giving classes in some cases,” says Gold- HUFFINGTON 12.22.13 berg. “The standards can get compromised along the way.” The new emphasis on asana meant that yoga institutions could train new instructors to teach physical poses without necessarily knowing much about the larger framework of yoga. Balancing the old and the new is the “number-one challenge” for the Yoga Alliance (YA), the largest nonprofit association representing yoga teachers, schools and studios, ViraYoga’s Elena Brower leads a yoga class at the the Pipilotti Rist Pour Your Body Out installation at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on Feb. 1, 2009.