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
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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.