DESPERATELY
SEEKING SERENITY
according to CEO Richard Karpel.
“[When] the Yoga Alliance created standards for teacher training programs back in 1999, one
of the primary focuses was on
respecting diversity … nobody
wanted an organization to tell
people how to practice or teach
yoga,” Karpel told The Huffington
Post. “By [2011], the balance had
shifted … where the concern was
more about rigor.”
Currently, all YA-certified, 200hour teacher training programs
include 20 hours of philosophy,
intended to give teachers a deeper
understanding of the practice’s
origins. “Every studio, every teacher, and every teacher-training program counts,” Karpel says, adding
that YA recently implemented a
new social credentialing system
to gain more feedback on various
teacher-training programs.
“Yoga’s very popularity creates the possibility of corruption
and distortion, and lowest common denominator teachings,” says
Goldberg. “The very fact that if
you ask the average person what
yoga is, they immediately think of
a beautiful woman doing stretches and bends, that tells you how
commercialized it has become,
and how limited. What yoga has
HUFFINGTON
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meant for thousands of years is
not just that.”
Complaints about the commercialization of yoga go as far back as
the Beatles’ 1968 trip to India, but
as the multibillion-dollar industry
“The very fact that if you ask
the average person what yoga
is, they immediately think
of a beautiful woman doing
stretches and bends, that
tells you how commercialized
it has become.”
has grown, so have efforts to keep
the practice rooted in tradition.
In 2010, the American Hindu
Foundation launched the “Take
Back Yoga” movement to raise
awareness about the practice’s
Hindu roots. “Our issue is that
yoga has thrived, but Hinduism
has lost control of the brand,”
AHF cofounder Dr. Aseem Shukla
told The New York Times.
The movement didn’t gain
much traction, but it did spark a
conversation about yoga’s modernization and adaptation. Religion aside, some have argued that
yoga has become an elitist practice that’s inaccessible to the majority of Americans. As one Bustle
writer put it, “inner peace comes
with a high price tag.”