In a creative effort to raise money, Washington State has decided to slap a 9% sales tax on every yoga class, reports King5 news. They can justify the tax by classifying yoga as physical fitness and you can just imagine what yoga studio owners have to say about that. “Yoga is not mere physical fitness, dear Mr. Tax Collector, come in and let us show you….”
Not only do people now have to pay 9% extra, but some studios are being required to pay back taxes on this initiative. Fun! Try finding an extra $10,000 hanging around at a small or mid-sized yoga studio.
The very cool Anne Phyfe Palmer, owner and director of 8 Limbs Yoga Centers of Seattle, says yoga centers are trying to come to an agreement with the Dept of Novel Tax Ideas. Clearly someone in the picture is not clued in to the higher aims of the practice.
This video of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, explaining her experience of having a stroke, rocked my world last week. Not only is she a great presenter (watch all the way til the end for some potent stuff), but her insight explains what happens to our brains during that ecstatic feeling that sometimes comes with meditation (or when you hang out with a flaky friend who also happens to be uncannily tuned in). Turns out that left brain (verbal, analytical) and right brain (sensual, process-oriented) stuff is pretty profound.
Taylor is a brain scientist from the Midwest which makes her insights even more profound—her training and cultural background make her a straight-shooter. She’s not given to hyperbole; she looks for reasonable theories.
The NYTimes, my hometown paper, which appears perhaps a little too much on this blog, reported last week on the much-deserving organization, Urban Zen.
The initiative is forward looking (read article here). As the Times says, “the Karan-Beth Israel project will have a celebrated donor turn a hospital into a testing ground for a trendy, medically controversial notion: that yoga, meditation and aromatherapy can enhance regimens of chemotherapy and radiation.”
“Karan” is of course Donna Karan the fashion designer, whose husband passed away of cancer in 2001, and whose colleague and friend passed away this past September.
Her organization, Urban Zen, wants to bring otherworldly kinds of healing to very sick people. Rodney Yee and his wife Colleen Saidman will oversee the 15 teachers who will bring yoga to cancer patients. Karan pays their salaries.
We’ve all heard a story or two of yoga miracles and cancer miracles. Mind over matter, positive thinking over negative diagnosis, the power of practice, can all be powerfully healing impulses. As well, a deep resolve to be in tune with change, rather than resist it—as the late Iyengar yoga teacher, Mary Dunn, wrote in her online cancer-journal— can make one’s situation easier to accept, and sometimes even, sweeter.
There will be skeptics to this Urban Zen project, but with any luck there will also be many beneficiaries.
The piece looks at the influences of yoga on psychology and vice versa–how psychotherapists are using yoga techniques in their practices, as well as how more yoga teachers are getting degrees in Western psychology in order to better help their students. It’s a new trend!
The piece s running in CE’s 5 magazines: GAIA (NY), Conscious Choice, (Chicago & Seattle), Whole Life Times (Los Angeles), and Common Ground (San Francisco). It’s the same article, but with a different sidebar for each city. (NY: there is no link yet but you can pick up the print copy at a yoga studio.)
One of the most remarkable things about Jonathan Demme’s film, “Rachel Getting Married,” is the deliberate, multi-ethnic array of people who comprise the wedding party and family friends. The soundtrack not only reflects this UN-style gathering, but co-mingles and cross-pollinates world sounds as many types of musicians group for spontaneous jams over the wedding weekend.
(image: Sony Pictures Classics)
We’re left to guess that Sidney, the groom, a musician, experiments with world sounds, and so his like-minded friends can’t help but jam and experiment during their Connecticut weekend with the happy couple. But it wasn’t completely clear why the bride and her maids decided to dress in saris.
One song on the soundtrack is titled “New York Style Yoga” (it’s actually a track from Black Bombay, and—guilty as charged—I’ve used it in my own yoga classes) and it fits right into this scene.
It’s as if we’ll all know what this joyful mix means, and need no further explanation. We’ll know that every marrying couple wants world musicians to make our party pump; that every bride wants yards of gold-bordered silk to frame her quasi-Indian lifestyle (a Hindi-Connecticutian?), that yoga is so known, so done, and so much a part of our lives that we don’t even have to explain that most of the women at the wedding, and some of the men, (probably; we assume) practice yoga. (That might explain the saris.)
Don’t you do yoga? Doesn’t everyone we know? Here comes the bride, and Om Namah Shivaya.
Yoga teacher and model, Tara Stiles, designs a Palin-specific routine for facing off terrorists, viewing Russia, hunting wolves, and handling the stressful campaigning weeks ahead.
“Be the best maverick you can be with the warrior poses.”
The New York Times reports on some semi-recent trends in yoga classes—Acro Yoga, Aerial Yoga, and something called Core Fusion Sport. A little behind the times, but if it’s in the Times, you know the trend is now at last truly visible.
This Huffington Post article tells us who is doing yoga in corporate America, which is interesting. Newcomers include William H. Gross, the Chief Investment Officer of Pimco, Edwin Catmull, the head of Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Animation Studios, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, new anchor Katie Couric.
Still, even if their main concern is the goal and not the process, powerful people tend to seek powerful ways to keep their assets–their brains and minds–in peak condition. It’s not so much of a stretch that they, too, would appreciate yoga’s revitalizing tonic. We’ve been hearing about celebrities doing yoga since day 1 of the current yoga craze (late 90s). Now it’s time to hear more from the other power brokers.
The writer, Kyle Jarrard, and his wife travel to a yoga ashram in Pondicherry, India, to study with Ajit who has taught yoga with extensively, passionately, in France and India for many years. The article profiles the town (and its French-named streets), its inhabitants, the ashram, and the writer’s own journey.
Leslie Kaminoff, New York-based yoga teacher, e-Sutra blog author, and director of The Breathing Project in Manhattan, explains why he has decided to stop calling himself a yoga therapist. His article in October’s International Journal of Yoga Therapy meditates on the same topic. Instead, he will call himself a “yoga educator.”
“This does not in any way mean that I intend to stop doing my job,” says Kaminoff.
“In retrospect, I realize that from the moment I taught my first group âsana class until the present day, I’ve always had the same job. I’ve just been doing it more effectively by learning how to better tailor the teachings to individual needs. I used to unquestioningly assume that my education in anatomy, biomechanics, bodywork, physical rehabilitation, and philosophy granted me the right to call myself a therapist. But, in fact, it just turned me into a highly-educated Yoga teacher.”
- 1967, Beatles study Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
- 1968, Beatles don't get along with Maharishi; write "Sexy Sadie" about the guru
- 1987, Iyengar Yoga Association of Greater New York established
- 1993, Jivamukti Yoga Center est, 2nd Ave, NY
- 2003, Bikram Yoga Championships in US
Washington State to Tax Yoga
(image: Sony Pictures Classics)
