I only did yoga for a week (each morning while on holiday in Guam) and the sweat was pouring off me, and all the other students, literally drip-drip-drip onto the mat. So your description of yoga as “non-sweaty” doesn’t at all accord with my (albeit limited) experience.
IIRC the teacher called it “Vinyasa” and “Power” yoga.
There was no woo involved, by the way.
When I see something like that, it’s hard to believe I was alive during that time. And I hope I wasn’t watching that as a ten-year-old and thinking, “Man, those people are SO cool! I want to be like that when I grow up!”
I’ve expressed my mixed feelings about yoga before. My experience is that different instructors are immersed in different levels of woo, and you just have to find the one that aligns with your personal woo, or that you can at least tolerate. Like, the only “woo” that my yoga instructor openly engages in is warning women not to do certain positions when they are on their periods. She doesn’t say why, but a quick search on the internet will provide similar warnings, with crazy explanations regarding energy flow. It only takes a little critical thinking to question why a menstruating person shouldn’t do downward facing dog, and yet a forward bend is okie-dokie. But otherwise, she’s cool. There’s another yoga instructor at my studio who I can’t stand though. She makes the class recite “ohm” at the beginning of class and encourages visualizations that make you go WTF? Her classes are packed, though. I don’t like her, but others obviously do.
I think yoga is popular because there are so many different ways of doing it. A person can not feel so guilty about their sedentary lifestyles if they keep to their an-hour-and-a-half of beginner’s Iyengar every week. This is kind of lame, but I think this is also yoga’s strength, too. A person who can’t work out for whatever reason CAN do yoga, with few excuses. If someone like me tried an aerobics class or zumba, I wouldn’t last 30 seconds. But yoga has so many levels that almost everyone can find something they can do (whether they like it is another matter). Doing something is better than staying at home, eating cheetos. So I think that’s good.
In my class, there are young people who are flexible enough to be dancers, and old men who can’t see their feet, let alone touch their toes. There are people who are perfectly healthy and others who have bad backs and knees. And yet everyone can get some benefit from the exercises. Even grouchy ole me can admit to having benefited…after I spend a lot of time thinking about it. (But most of it has been psychological–like how to deal with self-consciousness and accept imperfection.)
But yeah, I do think the practice is a little too “spiritual” sometimes. True believers work my nerves too, especially when they won’t let you admit to disliking it without maligning your personal strength. But then again, I am not spiritual and I don’t make a big deal out of tapping into my “strength”. A lot of people are like this though, so they get something from it. It seems unfair to call it a scam just because you don’t believe all the various elements of it. That’s like calling all religious beliefs a scam. You can disagree with them, but that doesn’t mean the practitioners are trying to pull one over you.
My co-worker is a Christian and was worried when her children’s teacher wanted to incorporate a little bit of yoga into the school day to help the kids focus. My co-worker had read online somewhere that each yoga pose is a way to worship the Indian gods. She convinced the teacher not to do it.
I was like, “No, it’s just a series of stretches and poses to strengthen and relax you.” I went online and looked it up and sure enough found some sites that stated that yoga was un-Christian because it worshipped Indian gods. But then one site was by a woman who made her own yoga DVD for sale…with the same poses and stretches…only in a different sequence and you thought about Scripture verses while you were doing them…for $35 (plus shipping & handling.)
Now THERE’S a scam! 
If you’ll go up to my post above (which everyone seems to have ignored), yoga definitely did begin as an integral part of Hinduism. No, it didn’t have anything to do with worshipping the Hindu gods exactly. That’s the impression of a Christian trying to impose their own system onto Hinduism. It was about meditating on Hindu ideas. The dropping of the Hindu references is a recent thing though. Yes, most of the yoga teachers is Western countries know little and care little about Hinduism and there’s essentially nothing non-physical left in their practices that’s taken from Hinduism, but let’s not pretend that it didn’t begin as a part of Hinduism.
I’ve never experienced actual woo-iness in a yoga class, although one might reasonably charge Western teachers with the expropriation of Indian cultural memes. But the nature of the practice is such that Indian music fits well with it. Additionally, yoga–even ordinary hatha yoga, when done right, is a lot more strenuous than many might think. At the end of a 90-minute class, when I feel physically spent and the instructor has us spend five minutes in corpse position, I’m not going to complain if they dim the lights a periodically beat a tiny gong. 
Exactly.
You must have been in my classes. I’m fine with this as well. We were never preached at, told to meditate, or anything other such thing.
Just thought I’d mention that a new book, The Science of Yoga by Bill Broad just came out.
I mention that because I think people have been misusing the term ‘woo’ here. Woo isn’t just references to the spiritual or mystical, but also the tendency to make big claims in the absence of, or in direct oppositon to objective fact. For example, despite repeated claims to the contrary, yoga is not good aerobic exercise.
Thanks for that info, Crawlspace.
The reviews on Amazon are all over the place for this book, much like the posts in this thread – some true believers, some total skeptics, and lots in the middle who have more questions than answers. The book even gets torn apart in a lengthy review by the author of another yoga book, who still strongly recommends that everybody read the book.
What I gather from reading only the reviews, not the book, is that the author is a well known, award-winning science author who has been practicing yoga for around 40 years … which means he may not be totally objective toward this subject. Despite the title “The Science of Yoga”, there doesn’t appear to have been much actual science done on the subject. The author seems to be making the rounds of the liberal media promoting not just his book, but his agenda of instituting government supervision of yoga instruction.
Maybe I’ll just go for a walk.
A majority of my very thoroughly western dance instructors used phrases like that. It’s often the best way to get people to understand how you’re asking them to move their body. Some teachers used it to better effect than others, of course, but there was no woo about it.
The same terms are used in teaching horseback riding. 'Feel as though a string is pulling your body up from the top of the your head." “Center your weight on your seatbones.” “Stretch your chest up and out” “take a deep breath and let it go out your heels.”
Well dur. You can’t breath through your feet. It’s just an image that directs your attention. Not everyone finds such imagery helpful, but many people do.
BTW, seat bones are just the bottom of the pelvis that bear into the seating surface when your back is straight with your weight centered on your pelvis. The medical term for this part of the pelvis is ischial tuberosities. In the sense that they are not independent bones in your ass, they do not exist. In the sense that they are a body part you can feel pressing through your flesh into a surface when you angle your pelvis in certain ways, they completely exist.
Yep, ballet instruction is chock-full of imagery like that, too, and that’s a pretty woo-free area. The “imaginary string from the top of your head to the ceiling” phrase that Hello Again mentioned is a very common way to get people to stretch their spine up, without arching their back and puffing out their chest, as you might get if you “Atten-hut!” and just “Stand up straight” sometimes gets people to point their nose upwards, which crunches the neck.
Hi DylanGillo, welcome to the SDMB. In case you missed it, this topic is nearly 9 years old, so you may not get many responses - especially as you haven’t added much to the discussion yet. If you have opinions to share you might do better by starting a new thread in our “In My Humble Opinion” forum, though you’ll probably still be asked what evidence you have to back them up. We can seem a bit of a disagreeable lot, but we’re friendly at heart!
modhat: Moved to In My Humble Opinion (IMHO) from GQ.
It is mostly looking for opinions.
Ooh, fun thread bump.
But most of us are interested in what it is in western culture today, not what it was in India a hundred years ago. And while many yoga practices incorporate some (mostly secular) meditation, there’s really not much religion in your typical US yoga studio.
My husband practices Iyengar yoga. I tried it for a while, but tended to try to hard to do the poses right, and sometimes injured myself. But… Some of the benefits of yoga:
If you need to stretch some hard-to-stretch muscle, there’s a pose for that. I overworked my quads recently (doing a non-yoga workout) and my instructor recommended i stretch them. My husband asked me a yoga pose i would never have come up with that gave me a really good quad stretch.
If you have whiplash and need to get our of bed without putting and stress on the neck muscles, there are step-by-step instructions in many yoga books.
If you want to improve your flexibility in general, yoga is a good choice. It has a focus on balance and opposition that will prevent you from “one sided” exercise.
It’s a really intense core workout.
And if you want the inner peace that you get when you are trying so hard to do something physical that you really can’t think of anything else for a while, yoga rocks.
(I mean, so does turning over soil in the garden, but you probably don’t have an instructor pushing you to keep doing that. )
As with anything else, you have a choice of books, videos (free and paid), and live classes. A good instructor will look at your body and help you adjust things that you aren’t doing right. A good instructor will also cost a lot more than some YouTube videos.
Anyway, personally, i think it’s harder to find yoga in the US that is grounded in Hindu philosophy than yoga that is purely physical.