Friends - I started a letter to Yoga Journal about their contest, and I hope you'll write your own or take a minute to add something to this one. I'll put your name if you want, or leave it off if you prefer. But do add your comments. Consciousness is writing letters to bastards with marketing degrees.
Dear Yoga Journal,
Yesterday morning I received several invitations from yoga 'friends' to vote for them in a talent search/cover model contest through your website. I was appalled. I started yelling obscenities in my mind and jumped on Facebook to start yelling them on line. Many other people had the exact same reaction as I did - we want to ask you, simply, "Et tu, Brute?" I came to yoga as a way to feel more connected to my self, my body, and to others. I wanted to be a virtuoso of the relationship with my Self. I had practiced Vipassana meditation at the Wat Suan Mokkh in Southern Thailand, and had an established meditation practice of about a decade when I started asana practice on a dedicated, daily basis. Over time I took classes, went through a teacher training program and continued to study and go through an advanced teacher training program.
Having taught yoga for ten years now, I find that fewer and fewer yoga students and teachers have any understanding that yoga is something that is not based on the values of the U.S. monotheistic, Protestant-dominated, capitalist, sexist, racist, classist value system. They are using yoga as a way to be virtuosos of the free market and the results are very sad, indeed. A lot of this comes from students looking to Yoga Journal as the benchmark for what yoga is. I have a running joke that Yoga Journal should be treated the same way as Playboy - the articles are good, just avoid the pictures. But I've kept my subscription to Yoga Journal to read Sharon Salzberg, Sarah Powers, Ana Forrest, and other insightful experts on yoga and meditation. I don't have any illusions that losing a subscriber will affect what type of contests and/or marketing you use, but I do feel compelled to speak up about this Miss Yoga America thing. I hope that others are taking the time to drop you a note about this - that is, if they're not too busy setting up photo shoots to fill out embarrassing profiles for your contest. One of the worst things about this (for me) is that now that you have gotten every yoga student or teacher who thinks they are pretty and look good doing Hanumanasana to make an idiot of themselves by posting such nonsense as "It's always been my dream to be on the cover of Yoga Journal" or "I gave up a successful career in blah blah blah to teach yoga so I could work barefoot and help people connect to themselves and to nature" the magazine will likely choose someone extremely physically handicapped who teaches yoga to other handicapped people as the cover model as a nod and a Sarah Palin wink to the deeper meaning of yoga. Or maybe you'll just go whole hog and put all the finalists in a wet tee-shirt contest. Same same.
I hope you're catching serious flak for this, and I hope you're listening. This is not yoga, and it doesn't take a swami to call this one.
Sincerely,
Amy Pancake
When I first saw something come up on the Yoga Journal Model Search I truly believed it was a joke. My first thought was this was like the Yoga Pose Off in 2002. Surely this can't be real.
ReplyDeletehear, hear!
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