Category Archives: YIOM

Review and Giveaway – First There is a Mountain

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As part of a book club for my “home” yoga studio, I recently read First There is a Mountain: A Yoga Romance by Elizabeth Kadetsky. In the post below, I expand upon the response to the book that I presented as part of the book club discussion, and ponder the reasons for some of my own reactions.

The book, theoretically a memoir of the author’s yoga experience discusses the life events that brought her to yoga, and then primarily focuses upon the time she spent learning with legendary yoga guru B.K.S. Iyengar.  The novel reads like a combination of personal journal and historical account of yoga lineage.  The “romance” mentioned in the title is not a romance in the boy-meets-girl sense, but (I suppose) her romance with yoga.

As I read this book, I found myself frequently conflicted about it.  On one hand, I basically enjoyed the read and at times I thought the writing was compelling. At other times, I found it confusing or felt like the organization made it difficult to follow. The time-line in the book jumped forward and back in a non-linear fashion, which is not particularly problematic for me in most cases, but here I found it a challenge due to the writing.  Time was also handled inconsistently, with long periods skipped so completely that I didn’t have a good sense of how old the author was in each segment, or what she had experienced in between the events discussed.   Because so much of the book is about her evolution as a yoga practitioner, being able to understand how long she had practiced, and in what way, at various points of the book was rather crucial to understanding the work.  I had similarly mixed feelings about the issues discussed.

Much of the book was about B.K.S. Iyengar, and his relationship with his students – including the author.  His role as guru is addressed in some detail, with descriptions of students prostrating themselves at his feet, following his commands (and those of his family who taught in the institute) without question, and continuing their studies with him for years.  In U.S. culture, I don’t think we are as likely to accept a guru in the way discussed here. We are too individualistic.  I think that probably informs my reading of the book.  I felt uncomfortable with some of the characterizations of relationships between Iyengar (and his family) and the students. I can’t really imagine finding that sort of treatment acceptable in a student/teacher relationship, but then again we live in a culture that tends to prioritize the power and rights of the student over those of the teacher in many ways.  Because so much else about the author’s psyche here, I wondered that she didn’t do more to explore and unpack her own acceptance of the relationships.

The same contradictory response was there for me in regard to her discussion of eating disorder (or anorexia), which appeared briefly in her discussion of college experience, and was referred back to infrequently through the remainder of the book. While I appreciated her willingness to engage the topic, I feel like the presentation of it (because so much time was compressed between her college years and her trip to India), made it read as if that experience was a short blip on the radar that was easily overcome as soon as she realized what she was doing to herself. That, to me, does a disservice to the women who struggle for years, or their whole lifetime, with eating disorder – even knowing that the behavior isn’t healthy or isn’t what they want to be.  There was also a little bit of glorification of the state of starvation in her discussion of how it made her feel.  I certainly get what she means there, but there wasn’t enough working through it to re-problemetize those feelings.  Overall, I wasn’t sure what  the discussion of her eating disordered period was adding to our understanding of here experience, and that – in combination with the brevity of the discussion of recovery – made it seem a little gratuitous to me.

A final issue that I wish had been worked through a little bit more related to the male/female relationships in the text.  The relationships in India overall, and at the institute specifically, were definitely presented as male-dominated and female dismissive.  The misogyny issue was another thing that the author sort of did a hit and run on. With as much personal reflection as she did, there was virtually no reflection on the connection between the position of women (in either culture) and the relationships she saw and experienced, her eating issues and the eating issues of others, the breakdown experienced by her peer student, her own responses to the relationships she saw, etc.

Basically, I am left unsure how I feel about the book and whether I got anything out of it (or even whether she did) beyond an interesting tale of Iyengar training.  It’s not that I think a book has to be about everything, but it seemed like she wasn’t sure what it was about, so it would touch on something and then scamper away from it without really developing her point.  When the book was over, I found that I could not succinctly say what it was “about” or the main point that it made, and to me that is problematic writing.

So, overall, it’s not a book I would recommend you go out and buy for a lot of money (particularly since it’s out of print and a little hard to find).  But, if you can pick up a used copy cheap (amazon has them) or someone gives you one, it’s worth a read.  In fact, I have a copy you can have!  If you would like my copy of the book – please note, I bought it used, so there are markings in the margins and some underlining – let me know in your comment below and I’ll select a “winner” next Sunday and ship it out!

Namaste,

L

Casual Yoga

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At the moment, I’m vacationing in Indiana to see family.  Over the course of the last few days, my 20-year-old has coined the phrase “casual yoga” to describe the stretches or folds that I tend to go into when I’m sitting on the floor or just standing around for a long time.  He uses it to tease me “oh, just doing a little casual yoga again, Mom?”  He’s a smarty pants.  I think he views it as odd or even overly yogi-like, but I really barely even know that I’m doing it unless someone calls my attention to it.

Yoga asana has become enough of a part of my life that it is how my muscles remember to behave.  When I sit on the floor, half lotus is a comfortable position.  If my back is a little stiff, I’ll fold into a forward fold (not at a meeting or anything, but just hanging around the house).  If I’m standing for a long period, one leg will occasionally creep up onto the other ankle and I’ll barely see that it has.  The really nice part about this is that it means I end up getting in a little stretching on days when life is making it hard to get to a class.  The disadvantage, I suppose, is that I apparently look a little odd.  But, that’s really never stopped me before!

Do you find yourself sliding into yoga poses without even noticing?  Are you a victim of “casual yoga?”

Yoga and Eating Disorder – The Other Side?

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Recently, I’ve found myself reading a lot of discourse about yoga and body identity – including eating disorders.  For the most part, when it is directly addressed, the focus seems to be on the ways in which yoga can aid in the recovery from eating disorder.  There are even much cited studies from 2005 and 2009 that show a “scientific” connection between doing yoga and recovery from E.D.  But, I want to just trouble that conclusion for a moment.  I’ve written in the past about how yoga can operate as a positive force in combating body issues, including eating disorder.  And, I don’t want this to be perceived as a “taking back” of that point, but I think that the crucial word here is can.  Yoga can assist in eating disorder recovery.  But, that doesn’t mean it will and it doesn’t make it a cure.

Before I go on, let me be clear here about what I mean by eating disorder.  From my perspective, and based on my own scholarly work regarding the issues, I elect to operate from a definition that is not based primarily on body size/shape, nor on official diagnosis.  From my viewpoint, having a weight that is higher than the currently accepted social norm is not an eating disorder.  Having a weight that is lower than the currently accepted social norm is not an eating disorder.  An individual can have a perfectly “normal” weight and still have a disordered relationship with food and the body.  And, from my view, “eating disordered” isn’t about an official diagnosis of anorexia, bulimia, compulsive overeating, etc.  In fact, I would argue that most people in the U.S., and probably even a  higher percentage of women, have a disordered relationship with food.  I see it as a continuum.  On one end would be a perfectly healthy relationship with food.  On the other end would be a totally destructive relationship with food.  Few people are at either end of the continuum.  Most of us are in the middle somewhere.  This means that there isn’t a specific cut-off where we can say that someone has leapt over the barrier from healthy to unhealthy relationship with food.  This being my belief, functionally I tend to define eating disorder as a state in which the relationship with food significantly negatively impacts other parts of the individual’s life.  Those other parts can include other relationships, physical health, emotional well-being, occupation, school success, etc.   So, that’s where I’m coming from.

Looking at it from this standpoint, I can see, and have seen in my own life, how developing a more yogic mindset can assist in E.D. recovery (moving toward that perfectly healthy end of the continuum).  Such a mindset encourages us to see the unity between self and other, to value the self in a different way, to see the body as both less and more important (less important in appearance, more important in the need to maintain its health so that we can work on the other issues), to let go of our attachments/aversions (to food, to fat, to being thin, and so on).  But, and this is an important but, that is about really having that yoga philosophy and having it resonate through the whole worldview.  And that isn’t what yoga ends up being always.

In the U.S. (and I’m not saying it isn’t this way other places – I just don’t live there), yoga often is understood to mean primarily or only the physical practice.  And, I don’t just mean by people who don’t regularly do yoga.  I still find myself thinking “no yoga today” when I mean no asana.  And, therein lies the rub – or one of them.  If yoga is mostly about the physical, it not only might not reduce eating disordered behavior/thoughts, it may increase them.  This is the yoga that makes curvy yogis say that they feel disenfranchised by studios, yoga organizations, and yoga publications.  This is the yoga that leads to contests that seem to be primarily about appearance.  This is the  yoga that promotes the notion that a yoga body should look like X.  And all of these beliefs are contributory to the perceptions of reality that create eating disorder.

But, it doesn’t end there.  Even when yoga is understood as going beyond the physical, there are beliefs and understandings floating around in yoga-land that can be problematic for recovery.  What serious student of yoga has not heard stories of ______ (great guru of choice) who only consumed 1 ________ (fruit, vegetable) a day because he/she was so beyond the needs of the physical body?  There are a lot of these legends in the yoga culture.   That’s dangerous, because “I don’t need food at all” and “If I don’t eat, I will be a better person” sound an awful lot like anorexic  thoughts.   The competitiveness that has  become a part of yoga culture is another issue.  There is no denying the pervasiveness of the “x style is better than y,”  “x guru is better than y guru,”  “so-and-so is a more real yoga practice than such and such” that goes on.  Maybe it shouldn’t be there, but it is.   Is it surprising that this might contribute to an eating disordered worldview that is already based on preoccupation with being more-than or less-than, better-than or worse-than?

So, yeah.  I don’t really have some big pronouncement to end with here.  I guess my point is that, before we wander around patting our own backs (ha ha, yoga joke) about how good yoga is for treatment of eating disorders, let’s take the time to recognize the ways in which the yoga culture we have created can be contributory as well.  If yoga is about unity, let’s understand that “yoga” isn’t all good, any more than it is all bad.  It just is.

Namaste,

L

p.s. While I fully respect how the revelation of detailed personal battles with eating disorder can be useful to speaker and audience, I have elected not to do that here, not as a condemnation of anyone else’s choices, but just because of where I am right now.

p.p.s.  I had a very hard time selecting an image for this post without it appearing that I was being overly critical of one particular person or establishment or presenting images that might be bad triggers.  So, this boring fork was the result of that debate.