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{yoga stinks of selfishness} jonathan bitz Walk into a bikram yoga studio after a class. What do you smell? Intestinal methane, sweat and chemical yoga mats, you say? No, what you actually smell is selfishness. Sweet, sweaty selfishness at its finest. For delirious decades, western culture has been eating-up hand and footfuls of supplements, herbs, organic foods and kombucha, steeped in the teabag of probable health benefits. Now we live in a world that has embraced meditation as just another, newer, faster, better opioid. And while I’m a proponent of changing popular and uncritical opinions about ANYthing, it’s apparent that people have lost themselves in, well… their selves. The scary thing? They’re spitting them out of the factories at alarming rates. Yoga teachers that is. Where once the grand “cop-out” for a person with no real ability to contribute to society was going to the police academy, now the new orange is to go through yoga training. Oh yes! To be a yogi. Now you too can, for only $19.95! Hooray! Just gimme some tight pants and a holier-than-thou attitude, or maybe I can pick that up along the way too! Really, the results of this yogic fanaticism shouldn’t come as a surprise: for millennia, creatures of all varieties have possessed a great and pungent myopia and short-sightedness. I suppose this is what sits at the core of an ideology like evolution. Don’t forget it: selfishness is simply the ongoing battle to preserve one’s self for the benefit of propagating one’s genes into the future. However, here, we have a demarcation: between selfishness and self preservation. Self preservation is useful: it is the most fundamental factor in not only long-term survival, but daily life. Let’s not obfuscate terms: self-preservation is vastly different than selfishness. To preserve one’s self is creative. And, it can be performed not at the expense of another. Self preservation is a sustaining force. It doesn’t harm others – in fact, the act of aiding (helping) others can be of significant advantage to any creature. Alliances create strength. Alliances are smart. Alliances preserve one’s self. Selfishness, however, is ghastly. It is an uncreative form of living, it’s a dictator bull in a glass pipe shop. It is demanding and ignorant. And so it is, in this contemporary climate, where I find the funniest of twists occurring: we are becoming even more selfish. Understand: this is not simply an attack on aged ideologies boringly-fangled into a new set of ideas that I have a problem with. This is not a lashing-out. Nay, my revolt is born from experience. Those that I have known that have immersed themselves, toe and cap, in these waters of yoga and ashrams and holistic health – have nearly all shared one predominate quality: they are the most selfish people I have known. Theirs is a world that is steeped in “what is best for me” and “my space” and taking long walks and finding their “center”. Theirs is not a world that is concerned with what is best for you. And this is because of the central prevailing notion that you too need to heal your self from the inside, so that you too can be strong and stable and inspired and grounded enough to not need anything from anybody else – especially when they need time for a hike. Maybe the issue is not with selfishness but rather with moderation. Fanaticism. Fundamentalists. Going-too-far. Many of those attracted to holistic health approaches and yoga are typically unwell people. They are afflicted with something so profound that they believe that only something unorthodox, like these methods of approach, will assist them. Many times they do find some ease and solution through their wanderings down the herb aisle and bending over backwards on their mat. As a result, they move to spread the gospel. And that quacking is fucking annoying. The problem with their imminent and lopsided selfishness may find its genesis in the fact that these new (old) age approaches require one to face fiercely inward – to spy things in themselves they never knew they possessed. Quickly they become lost in their unknown forest. But because of their shared grief, which they lament over with other yoga-matted bodies – an acceptance is born and the world becomes about a journey: about your journey. And your journey becomes the most important thing. At whatever cost. Cover, bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes and, voila! Socially acceptable selfishness. It is strange then that this new wave of holistic health seekers have set-up multitudes of paradigms that preach to a wheatgrass choir of givers in the hope that we can all make this a shiny, happy world of huggers. Love your neighbor. No need to lock your doors at night! Speak from the heart! Open your heart! Let’s all be giant dander flakes in our own hermetically-sealed hippy-dippy world! All this when at the root are passels of pilgrims that really have no place for you in their world, apart from you marveling at their nutrition. Truth be told, if you don’t provide them a mirror, you are of no use. And that mirror? It’s disguised as well-being. It’s guised in the notion that, if you too walk down this kook path to Narnia you will find Nirvana – and only then will you be able to reflect back to me my true and unadulterated self when I am looking at you. The aim is to become more self-aware. I see this both as solving one of the malaises of our common era as well as: totally fucking hilarious. Admittedly, we are absent from most of our lives. For certain, we are moronic. Need proof? Do anything. Step outside. Drive on the roads. Everybody is sealed in their bubble. And, everybody sucks. The remedy? Yoga, of course. The problem? Get mentally-handicapped people looking inside themselves for something they’ll never find and holy shit: the epidemic gets worse. And holy shit, the epidemic has become worse. Now, because of these yogis and the lessons of the monks on the mountaintops, people have gone inside, locked the door and disappeared behind their eyes. Want to be a true hero? Want to inspire those around you? Get off your fucking mountaintop and live in the real world. I know, all I’ve done is broken down an empty paradigm. I haven’t constructed anything or provided anything useful. So, with this computer as my yoga mat, I have meditated this answer: Why not be an artist about your life? Drop the walls and the rigid constructs. Break down the barriers between the self and the other, all while recognizing it, playing with it and maintaining it. This is done with communication and it is created with the paintbrush of aptitude. Try that. Get off your mat and begin thinking for your self, because of the other. Remember that the yield sign means that YOU need to yield to the traffic already in motion. Yield does not mean: the world around you should stop and accommodate you and your bullshit antics. Wake up. Kick your dopey meditation habit and join the real world. |
