Para Darin Somma, who teaches a traditional Vinyasa yoga at Capitol Hill Yoga and at 18th and Yoga , is concerned about the "shallowness" of commercialized yoga. He has seen yoga magazines with articles about yoga and sex, yoga and washboard stomachs, yoga and Madonna, he laments. "They had nothing about the deeper study of yoga."
That deeper study is "self-realization," says Yoga Journal's Macy, suggesting that six-pack abs probably don't qualify as spiritual.
Yoga never went mainstream, says Beth Shaw, here leading stretching exercises during the DCAC conference. "That's why we've invented things that are fun."
(Katherine Frey For The Washington Post)
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Traditional yoga emphasizes relaxation and restoration of the spirit, says Bob Patrick, president of the Mid-Atlantic Yoga Association, in Silver Spring: "This requires that the practice include elements of stillness, easy, relaxed breathing, and attention to what the body is actually doing. . . . This would be difficult to achieve in a program that is exclusively a workout."
Another concern is whether fitness instructors-turned-yoga teachers are qualified. "Are they educated in the yoga tradition or are they just educated in fitness and trying to make yoga fit into their fitness world?" asks Hansa Knox, president of Yoga Alliance, a Reading, Pa.-based organization whose mission is to make yoga teaching a certified profession.
Yoga Alliance doesn't certify YogaFit's weekend-trained instructors who study 18 hours, but it does YogaFit's 200-hour-trained instructors.
At the fitness conference, Richmond yoga teacher Ram Bhagat teaches a class called Soul Yoga "to remind people to connect with the essence of yoga -- to unite the mind, body, spirit and soul." Without that, "people are just getting an appetizer," he says.
Lauren Eirk, the Yoga-Pilates-Resist-a-Ball instructor at the conference, says she has practiced traditional Ashtanga yoga for years, but today: "If I go into a class and say, 'Ardha baddha padma pascimottanasana,' they're going to go 'What?' "
And YogaFit's Shaw, also trained in traditional yoga, has little patience for criticism of the fusion workouts. "Yes, they sneer, they scorn, they snort," she says. "To be honest with you, some of the most rigid people I've seen in my life are yoga people."
Spirituality is an individual thing, she says. "To me one of the most spiritual of experiences is just to be in a state of calm and clarity of the mind. The oneness of spirituality is what we're all looking for, and that we can get through this practice. So is it spiritual? Yes."
In other words, YogaButt, designed to improve the most unenlightened of derrieres, may not be quite what the yoga masters of old India had in mind, but who's to say self-realization can't start with a firm behind?
