Free Hell-Bent by Benjamin Lorr

parties why what the people in leggings at the YMCA do is just one small piece of the big yoga pie.
    All of which is why I’m sure there are plenty of people reading my description of Backbending and yoga champions with a steadily escalating sense of outrage. Outrage like: What is going on here? What type of insane corruption am I reading about? Doesn’t this asshole know pain has nothing to do with real yoga! And as much as I empathize with those reactions, their outrage will always be misplaced. Yoga is simply one of those things impervious to certainty, as incapable of corruption as it is of authenticity. And no amount of bossy, possessive attempts to claim a “real yoga” will make it otherwise.
    Imagine for a moment if a group of people decided to fetishize the English word craft. As in:
    “I practice craft.”
    “I’m a crafter.”
    “Oh, macramé—that is totally an invention of the 1950s. I mean, sure, it feels good, but honestly, plastic has no part in craft.”
    “I only Bead and Weave, because those represent the true spirit of craft.”
    “Macaroni Art? Farce! How could you have Macaroni Art before Arturo Boolini invented the mechanized pasta press in 1853? Which he did, by the way, in Chicago. Talk about cultural fusion, or should I say con fusion.”
    You would not like those people very much. An abstract noun like craft has no single pure meaning. And these craft-fascists would be profoundly unhelpful if you had a genuine interest in actually learning something. Figuring out the most authentic form of craft wouldn’t let you know where the most aesthetically pleasing crafts came from, and it wouldn’t tell you which crafting discipline would be the most personally fulfilling. Moreover, crafting techniques that were used one thousand years ago would be valuableonly if they were still relevant today. Who wants to weave baskets out of grass in a world where nobody really uses baskets anymore?
    In his book Yoga in Modern India, Joseph Alter makes a similar point by pulling out the Webster’s of India: Bhargava’s Standard Illustrated Dictionary:
Yoga: n. mas. One of the six schools of Hindu philosophy, a union with the Universal Soul by means of contemplation, means of salvation, the 27th part of a circle, a sum, a total, profound meditation to earn and enhance wealth, unity, conjunction, union, combination, mixture, contact, fitness, property, an auspicious moment, a plan, device, recipe, connection, love, trick, deception, as a suffix used in the sense of “capable, fit for.”
    If read with our YMCA expectations, this definition makes no sense. I mean, “a union with the Universal Soul” sounds familiar, but “a profound meditation to earn and enhance wealth” sounds like irony. A property? A recipe? A trick? Are you kidding?
    If there is a joke, it’s on us. Yoga is a vast history : it can be contemplation; it can also be a postejaculatory man attempting to suck his semen back up his penis like a straw. 6 It can be sticky mats and creepy Muzaklaced trance music; or it can be an extended fifth-grade fantasy to acquire magic powers and evade mortality. (The third book of Pantajali’s Yoga Sutras is entirely devoted to detailing the magic powers or siddhis available to an adept.) It is big tent, and the only thing for certain is the more certain someone gets about yoga, the wronger it goes.
    Given this multiplicity of meaning, and in order to put the modernyoga experience in context, it is helpful to go back to first principles and look at the intellectual cauldron where yogic ideas first evolved.
    Yoga , the word, first bounced off the tongues of nomads on the wagon trail. The Sanskrit verb yuj, from which our noun yoga derives, refers to the act of hitching or joining “a wheeled conveyance to a draft animal,” analogous in sound and meaning to English word yoke. Yoga, in this practical sense, was integral to their civilization. These proto-Sanskrit speakers were in the midst of a