'Om the Bridge' yoga-thon may have been too Vancouver: Jason Proctor
Jason Proctor | CBC News | Posted: June 13, 2015 12:51 AM | Last Updated: June 13, 2015
Was closure of bridge for yoga session too much for people feeling left out of nirvana?
There was a time when yoga was seriously low-tech.
Your mother practised it in the basement in a leotard you prayed she would never wear in public. And all the equipment needed was a book full of people doing the lotus position in similar outfits.
It was the '70s. No Lululemon, no mats, no billion-dollar industry. And no Canadian politicians to sing yoga's praises: they either jogged or played hockey.
It's a mark of just how far yoga has come in popularity that B.C. Premier Christy Clark's sudden embrace of the ancient exercise form set off a firestorm of controversy that left a proposed yoga-thon on Vancouver's Burrard Bridge in tatters.
But perhaps it's not surprising given the bigger backdrop of a worldwide debate over the hijacking of a practice devoted to selflessness and healthy living by political and commercial interests.
Or the particular situation in Vancouver, where many feel increasingly left out of a nirvana full of unaffordable real estate and self-righteous 'spiritual' yuppies: leotard-wearers unite!
"Yoga's kind of tied together with this whole cluster of things that wealthy white people who can afford to live in Vancouver are engaged in," says University of B.C. Asian studies professor Edward Slingerland.
"People who don't have time to do yoga because they actually have to commute to the suburbs where they can afford to live and then are going to be delayed by a bunch of yuppies doing yoga on the Burrard Bridge: I can see them being pissed off about that."
Yoga's political postures
Clark said she decided to pull out of the event because it has "drifted towards politics — getting in the way of the spirit of community and inner reflection."
Some might say that's a bit rich coming from a politician. And her opponents might argue the premier hardly runs her government in a yogic fashion.
Clark says she discussed the practice with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the man credited with convincing the UN to adopt June 21 as International Yoga Day last year.
But Modi's aggressive promotion of yoga has also attracted controversy and accusations of politicking.
Indian Muslim and Catholic groups have complained about certain postures and the fact the day of celebration falls on a Sunday.
Minorities have complained that Modi is associating yoga with Hinduism, making them feel excluded.
One of his MPs hardly helped that cause by saying those who disagree "should drown themselves in the ocean or live in a darkened room for the rest of their lives."
Who owns yoga?
Those tensions form part of a global debate over who exactly owns yoga.
Millions of North Americans and Europeans now practice their postures in studios, gyms and ashrams. They do it hot. They do it cold. They do it nude.
Lululemon's Chip Wilson built a billion dollar empire out of yoga clothes. One of the original sponsors of the Om The Bridge event, the company's headquarters sits at the foot of the bridge in question.
But that commercialism led the American Hindu Foundation to start a Take Back Yoga campaign encouraging people to learn more about yoga's connections to ancient spirituality — as opposed to Jennifer Aniston.
It also led to complaints from people like Judith Hanson Lasater, who co-founded the Yoga Journal in her Berkeley basement in 1975.
She was appalled to see an advertisement for yoga socks featuring a female yoga instructor wearing the socks and nothing else.
"These pictures do not teach the viewer about yoga practice or themselves," she wrote. "These ads are just about selling a product."
Too Vancouver?
Michelle Goldberg recently published The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman who Helped Bring Yoga to the West.
She says yoga has become an avatar for gentrification.
"It's part of the whole complex of things that make up modern urban luxury culture," she says. "You have your yoga studios and your wine bars and your farm-to-table restaurants. Your organic spa. These are all the sort of amenities that upper-class bohemians expect."
In other words, Vancouver.
Ironically, one of the United Nations' stated goals in celebrating International Yoga Day is to build "better individual lifestyles devoid of excesses of all kinds."
That should be easy to do in a city where would-be home buyers are tweeting #don'thave1million to convey their disgust at being locked out of the housing market.
Lotusland is a wonderful place to live. But occasionally the most zen of people get snapped out of their reverie by things that are just 'too Vancouver.'
And this may have been a bridge too far.