COURTESY OF ELENA BROWER
DESPERATELY
SEEKING SERENITY
The presentation of the female
“yoga body” in the media has also
drawn criticism.
“The yoga body is Gwyneth
Paltrow’s body — the elongated
feminine form,” Karyln Crowley,
a women’s studies professor at
St. Norbert College, recently told
ELLE. “That is still the way yoga is
represented in mainstream media.”
And of course, many have noted
the irony that a practice originally
intended as a vehicle for transcending the ego has become a
seemingly vanity-driven pursuit.
Wellness junkies share Instagram
shots of kale smoothies and selfies of figure-contorted inversions
and balancing postures — there are
more than 400,000 photos tagged
#yogi on Instagram, enough to warrant a New York Times trend piece.
“Isn’t yoga supposed to be
about turning your gaze inward?”
The Times quipped.
But in true yogic fashion, Khalsa and some other more traditional practitioners, like ViraYoga
founder Elena Brower, are unperturbed by these changes.
When Brower practices and
teaches yoga, she puts a personal
issue at the forefront of her mind
— something that she’s confused
or conflicted about. While she’s
practicing, she is simply with that
issue, “until all the movements
in my body and the way I’m pay-
HUFFINGTON
12.22.13
“Yoga is the
time where
we don’t have
our phone, we
are just with
ourselves,
our bodies
and our
movements,”
ViraYoga
founder Elena
Brower says.