By Ed Staskus

When the Bengali monk Vivekananda stepped up to the lectern at the World’s Colombian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, he was nervous about the speech he was going to give to an audience of more than seven thousand, a speech that would plant a new seed of yoga in America. On another stage at the same time at the same World’s Exposition, the ex-cowboy and self-styled Rattlesnake King was squeezing oil from snakes he had just killed.

He used the squeeze in his patent medicines.

Clarke Stanley, one of the most successful and colorful tonic barkers of the 19^th century, was an even bigger attraction than the exotic little brown-skinned man from India. He wasn’t nervous. He wasn’t skittish. He was charming. He claimed his Snake Oil Liniment gave immediate relief to both man and beast for everything from toothaches and sore throats to sciatica and rheumatism.

It never went rancid, either, said the Snakeman.

“Ladies and gentlemen come up close where everyone can see. It even cures squinting.” The crowd looked for their wallets and purses. Clarke Stanley looked through the wide open end of their pipe dreams. It was a fool’s paradise.

Patent medicines are as old as Daffy’s Elixir, first blended in England in 1647, and popular in the United States into the late 19th century. The alcohol-fortified and drug-laced remedies were peddled by grocerymen goldsmiths tinkers traveling salesmen. They were available for almost any ailment, including colic cuts bruises baldness boils nerve damage lame backs deafness and “those painful complaints and weaknesses so common to our female population.”

Almost all of them were concoctions fortified with alcohol and cocaine or simply thin air.

The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 led to the end of Joy to the World Pain Killer, laced with opium, Fowler’s Arsenic Solution, which was iron mixed with arsenic for heart ailments, and the wildly popular Dr. Kilmer’s Swamp Root, meant to treat something called “internal slime fever.”

The many medical advances of the 20th century and into the 21st, however, did not put an end to quackery. Empty nutritional and supplement schemes, fraudulent arthritis products, and spurious cancer clinics have led the way. In 2017 the FDA warned stem cell clinics about their cure-all claims.

“Stem cell clinics that mislead vulnerable patients into believing they are being given safe, effective treatments that are in full compliance with the law are dangerously exploiting consumers and putting their health at risk,” said FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb.

More than a hundred years ago Vivekananda, in traditional Hindu monk garb, and known as the black pagan in orange clothes, traveled across the United States on a lecture tour. He often spoke about good health giving a leg up to making it down the yellow brick road to liberation.

“He who wants to become a Bhakta must be strong, must be healthy,” he said. “Build up your health. As long as the body lives there must be strength in the body. Yoga staves off disease.”

A Bhakta is a devotee of God. Bhakti Yoga, also known as Bhakti Marga, is largely a spiritual path. It employs yoga practice and discipline to help get to where it wants to go.

Although Vivekananda always believed in yoga, he never said it was the be all and end all of body mind spirit, that it was a tonic that cured all ills. If you don’t do yoga there’s no need to stress out about it. He seems to have believed the best cure was a quiet mind, like the best cure for sleeplessness is getting a good night’s sleep.

That’s not what contemporary yoga in our marketplace world says. It says there is a remedy for every problem and the remedy is yoga. Step right up! Right here for the song and dance! There’s something for everybody!

There are “4 Yoga Poses to Cure Diabetes” and “5 Top Yoga Poses to Cure Gallstones” and “6 Effective Yoga Poses for Autism.”

There are “8 Easy Yoga Poses That Will Cure Fibromyalgia Quickly” and “9 Yoga Poses for Arthritis Relief” and “10 Yoga Poses to Heal Migraines.” Yoga has become a dime-a-dozen commodity on the midway and the magazines, on You Tube and Facebook, at the corner store.

There are yoga poses to re-grow hair, alleviate and prevent nerve pain, fight epilepsy, help you poop, treat skin problems, restore irregular periods to a timely basis, improve heart health, lower blood pressure, calm down restless leg syndrome, ease ankylosing spondylitis, overcome PTSD, relieve neck shoulder lower back hip flexor pain, and resolve anxiety disorder and build your confidence.

There is even a kind of yoga to fatten up your wallet and lots of yoga to reduce your dress size.

There is “Pranayama Yoga Cures Almost All Incurable Diseases!”

The only thing yoga doesn’t seem to be able to take care of are gunshot wounds and compound fractures. Emergency rooms are still needed for that.

Writing in The Telegraph in a recent feature article called ‘Why Yoga Cures Everything,’ Lucy Fry asked, “My big question is no longer why are so many people doing yoga. It’s why isn’t everyone?”

On the other hand, Thomas Browne, a 17^th century writer, argued against doing anything at all. “We all labor against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.”

Tara Stiles is not Thomas Browne, but she has sold many many more books than him. Thomas Browne was an English polymath influenced by the scientific revolution of Baconian enquiry. Tara Stiles is an American model turned yoga instructor. In her book “Yoga Cures: Simple Routines to Conquer More Than 50 Common Ailments and Live Pain-Free”she tackles everything from “arthritis to fibromyalgia to jiggly thighs and hangovers.”

Jiggly thighs are flabby thighs that can’t be slid into skinny jeans or look sexy in a pair of shorts. The usual remedy is to do cardio-vascular exercises that involve your legs, like walking and running, and stop eating oily fatty sugary processed foods. Or try “Yoga Cures,” on sale on Amazon, free shipping, and read it sitting around on the sofa.

“If you’ve got an ache, pain, or ‘ism, she’s got the natural answer. So dump the over-the-counter pills and pop open Yoga Cures,” recommends Kris Carr, author of her own “Crazy Sexy Diet.”

It takes one to know one.

Cure-alls are remedies that resolve all evils, cure all diseases, and restore the self. The cure for everything, the miracle panacea, is driven by a belief that the humors or the liver or the spine is the root cause of all maladies.

In the past in the West leeches and bloodletting were used to balance the four humors, while in the East needles and acupuncture were used to balance the life force. As near as today chiropractors believe something called sublaxtions block the flow of something-or-other, which when unblocked will let your body heal whatever it is that ails you. Many well-meaning but hare-brained pilgrims still believe sticking needles along chi channels makes everything better.

Cure-all approaches neglect to take into account causes of disease ranging from genetic to infectious to biochemical to traumatic to degenerative to metabolic to autoimmune, never mind all the environmental and man-made toxic things in the world.

Poison ivy grows everywhere in the United States, except Alaska and Hawaii. If you get the rash, draw hot water and find some soap, lather, rinse, repeat, wash, rinse, soak, and then go to the drug store and buy a bottle of calamine lotion. Don’t go to a yoga class. You’ll only spread the itchy poisonous stuff on your skin to others.

If you go to India, the birthplace of yoga, don’t drink the tap water. Drink bottled water instead. More than half of India’s population, more than 500 million people, practice open defecation. Most of the country’s water is contaminated by biological and chemical pollutants, which cause cholera, among other things.

Clean water and sanitation prevent cholera. No known yoga pose or sequence or mudra has any effect on its spread. It is endemic because the water is foul, not because you haven’t read “Yoga Cures.” Oral rehydration solutions, when promptly administered, treat the disease easily.

As good as yoga is as a mindset a practice and a way of life, it is not the cure for much, certainly not cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, cancers of any kind, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, asthma, or gallstones. It doesn’t matter whatever it was Bikram Choudhury ever said. He is a liar. If you’ve got stones either take a wait-and-see approach, hoping the stone dissolves or dislodges, or join the nearly one million Americans who annually get their gallbladders surgically removed.

You need a tripwire gallbladder like you need Bikram Choudhury feeding you baloney..

If you have cancer of any kind it would be best to ignore Dr. Joel Brame, a self-styled Cancer Prevention Consultant, when he professes that yoga can reverse cancerous tumors. He seems to believe that exercising in a Hot Room oxygenates the blood “creating an environment in which cancer cannot grow,” restores the immune system, and generally purifies the body, which in his world is good because cancers can only metastasize in a toxic body.

“Attend your yoga class on a regular basis and feel the magic happen!” he said.

Black magic, maybe, when hell freezes over.

Until that happens, sitting around in the waiting room, it would be worth anyone’s while to page through Timothy McCall’s “Yoga as Medicine: The Yogic Prescription for Health and Healing.” A board-certified physician who has long practiced Iyengar Yoga and has been the medical editor for Yoga Journal since 2002, he describes yoga therapy as “a systematic technology to improve the body, understand the mind, and free the spirit.”

“Yoga as Medicine” is largely a practical guide about how to use therapeutic yoga tools, from exercise to meditation, as complements and occasionally alternatives to medical care and medication. It’s about getting in tune with your body, which is what health is all about. It’s about being aware, staying aware, staying in tune with beware.

Yoga therapy doesn’t treat the disease, exactly. It treats the person who has the disease. It’s about learning ways of making and maintaining body mind spirit health.

Gary Kraftsow of the American Viniyoga Institute describes yoga therapy as a practice to help people “facing health challenges at any level manage their condition, reduce symptoms, restore balance, increase vitality, and improve attitude.”

He doesn’t blare, blare, blare on and on about cure, cure, cure. Brenda Feuerstein has pointed out that it might be more helpful if the practice was regarded as something that “may be helpful in the treatment of something, but not yoga cures.”

Well-being is often the result of practicing yoga on a consistent basis. Yoga therapy isn’t a cure for acute conditions, but it is an aid in treatment and augmenting clinical care. Georg Feuerstein believed it was a way to integrate yogic techniques and concepts with medical know-how.

The difference between Snake Oil Yoga and Therapy Yoga is that one sells what purports to work for everybody while the other teaches what is appropriate to the individual and respects the differences in different people. Snake oil men shoot magic elixir bullets. Yoga therapists try to gauge the capacity and direction of mind of the person before they draw any conclusions. They don’t quick draw. They don’t try to kill anyone with cold-blooded make-believe kindness.

Why does it matter?

In the British art critic John Berger’s TV series “Ways of Seeing,” broadcast at about the same time that today’s yoga came around the bend in the early 1970s, he argued that where when and how we are directed to look at something, to pay attention to it, determines what we see. How something is framed often makes what matters, and what doesn’t matter.

When we pay attention to snake oil salesmen we get sucked down into their wormholes. It becomes believing what you want to believe, the easy answer, one size fits all. When we practice yoga therapy there is no rabbit in the hat, just a lot of work on the mat, day after day. It’s not the easy answer. There have long been and still are plenty of mad hatters and carnival sandbaggers trying to pickpocket the out-on-a-limb with their cooked-up promises.

Don’t drink the Kool-Aid. Don’t drink the brightly colored tonic water spiked with raw profit motive. There’s no yogi genie lightning in a bottle.

Yoga never was and never was intended to be a cure-all for ill health. “We must all pay attention to your health first, but we must not forget that health is only a means to an end,“ said Vivekananda.

“If health were the end, we would be like animals. Animals rarely become unhealthy.”

How the practice of yoga can effectively help those in need is being brought to bear by men like Sat Bir Singh Khalsa, an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, not the flimflam men of the internet and cunning analytic advertising. Dr. Khalsa’s research focuses on the clinical effectiveness and psychophysiological mechanisms underlying the practice of yoga and meditation techniques.

His approach advocates yoga as a way of enhancing proprioception, the awareness of where you are in space, and interoception, the awareness of the sensations of your body in space. He believes awareness is what changes lifestyles, and since many diseases are lifestyle diseases, brings the commonness of those diseases under control.

“People change their diets,” he said. “They change their behaviors to ones that make them feel better, because now, for the first time in their lives, they’re actually feeling better.”

It is feeling better, not by staring down to the bottom of a bottle of snake oil, but rather straight ahead in cobra pose, firming the shoulders against the back, lifting through the top of the sternum. It’s not a song and dance. It’s not a skin game hustle. It’s not a bill of goods, but rather a bill of fare from the inside out. It’s a message in a bottle.

When Vivekananda stepped up to the stage at the World’s Exposition in Chicago in 1893 it was one small step for a man. Thankfully, there weren’t any drips globs greasy ointment or snake oil left behind by the Snakeman on the stairs to slip up the small man from India. Otherwise, the big step that was ultimately taken that day might never have happened.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

By Ed Staskus

I found myself tagging along to yoga in the first place because my neighbor Vera had started taking classes. Vera told me she was stiffening up. She was dropping in to the neighborhood studio because her husband Frank had taken classes for a long time.

“He said he went to yoga because he’s a counterculture kind of guy, even though yoga is a 5,000-year-old culture, and everybody does it nowadays, anyway,” said Vera. “Besides, his lower back hurt.”

Yoga never fixed his back, but Vera said he still gets on his mat every day, although mostly at home now.

I meant to start right after the New Year, but with one thing and another didn’t take my first class until the first week of February. February is the month I was born and the same month and year the Beatles first number one hit “I Want to Hold Your Hand” hit number one.

Vera picked me up and we drove to the yoga studio across the bridge in Rocky River. She didn’t hold my hand walking through the front door, not that I wasn’t nervous.

The owner of the yoga studio was teaching the beginner’s class. We all had to say our names and then tell a story. “Tell your story,” said Lindsey. I had no story. “Oh, my gosh!” I said. What story do I have? I thought. “My name is Liz Drake and Frank Glass is my friend’s husband,” I said, pointing to Vera.

Lindsey started laughing. “He’s the funniest guy I’ve ever met,” she said.

What? I thought. There are lots of funnier people than Frank, but since Lindsey was smiling up a storm I didn’t say anything. She was a good teacher, but I had no idea what was happening. I had no idea we had to go into poses. I had nothing. I didn’t know anything about yoga.

I had never done it, never seen a class, only a few minutes of it on TV. I had some idea about the mats, but no idea about the blocks and straps.

I thought it was going to be easier than what it was. You’re just stretching, right? We had to sit there, had to close our eyes, breathe, and I thought, is this what it’s going to be like? This is going to be easy. But, then you start doing poses. My God! It was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.

I didn’t realize it, but I thought everyone was there for the first time, just like me. When we told our story I should have added I had never done yoga before. I forgot to add that. I had no idea what I was doing. Lindsey would say do this, do that. She had names for all the poses. What is that? I thought. What? I looked around, trying to do it, although I felt I was goofing on everything.

Although everyone else looked like they knew what they were doing, I didn’t even know what downward dog was. It was like when my Israeli ex-boyfriend-to-be convinced me to take Hebrew lessons. He said it was a beginner’s class for people who didn’t know Hebrew, but when I got to the class everyone was speaking Hebrew.

All during the yoga class I pretended like I was on the right track. I didn’t want to look like a total beginner. Lindsey would say, now everybody do this, go into this pose, and everybody would do it. I didn’t want to look like a total beginner, but I didn’t know what I was doing.

After some classes with Lindsey I started going Sunday mornings. Gina was the teacher. The room was always filled with incense at eight in the morning and we had to do weird breathing exercises. I thought I was going to pass out. Maybe I should fake it, I thought. I’m going to pretend I’m breathing, but I’m not going to, because I’ll get dizzy, get flashbacks.

“Pull it up from your core,” she said. Where is that core? I wondered. I never understood what that kind of breathing meant. It didn’t feel natural. Gina seemed to think we had to breathe differently to do yoga.

I liked Gina, but one morning I said I felt like I was doing most of the poses left-handed.

“I don’t even know the names of them. I just look around and hope I can copy somebody.”

“Oh, no, not the D word,” said Gina.

“What? What D word?”

“Discouragement.”

Everybody in the class was so sincere, so serious. They dressed like yogi people with their yoga costumes, special clothes, while I wore a t-shirt and sweat pants. At the end of class we sat cross-legged while Gina told us to imagine drifting down a river, putting all our bad thoughts on a leaf, and then letting the leaf float away. What are you talking about? I wanted to ask.

I moved on to a Tuesday beginner’s class with Tracy. It was at night right after a hot flow class. While we waited in the lobby to go in they were coming out completely drenched. Pools of sweat water were everywhere on the wood floor when we walked into the yoga room. You had to dodge around the pools.

Tracy was good at teaching us the actual poses. She took her time, walking around to help us all, although sometimes I would be in a pose waiting and waiting for her to get to me. I learned every pose as perfectly as could be since she was into perfect alignment.

One day there was a big guy who came to Tracy’s class. He was wearing funny plastic pants. Our class was usually mostly women. Sometimes there might be a guy or two, but after one or two times you never saw them again. Before we started, the plastic pants man said, “This is easy.” Once the class began he started sweating to death. He’s never coming back, I thought.

I never saw him again.

I never sweated, although I drank a lot of water.

I liked the crazy twists, for some reason, but standing on one leg was hard. I don’t have good balance because I can only see out of one eye. Whenever we did balancing poses the picture I got was, I’m going to fall down!

By the middle of summer I was ready to move up the yoga ladder. Tracy told me I should try Monica’s’s Basic Hatha Flow class. I bought a thicker mat. It was great for my knees. Some of the poses are hard on your bones, but that’s what you have to cut your teeth on. At least, that’s what Monica said.

She was tough, almost like a man, but I went to both of her weekly evening classes for five months the rest of the year. Most teachers had a soft voice, but Monica’s was never that soft. It became my main class, even though I dragged myself there. The whole drive to the yoga studio, even though it was only a few minutes, I would complain to myself. She’s going to come and push, she’ll walk around looking for me, I thought. She would push you down, sideways, all ways.

One time she pulled me when I was in a standing pose and I fell down. I just started laughing. You don’t want to be the center of attention, but I couldn’t stop laughing.

She made us hold poses incredibly long until my legs would burn and shake. I remember my thighs burning. I couldn’t even control them.

“What’s wrong with that, that’s good,” she said, “It’s good that your legs are shaking.”

I kept going back. She was top-notch.

One day she stood behind me and pulled my shoulders.

“How does that feel?” I started laughing, thinking, are you kidding me? Go to somebody else.

It didn’t feel good. But, it was a good pain. I liked being stretched.

A small man came to class and acted like he knew everything. “I’m doing this really great, aren’t I?” he said. But, he was just jumping around, moving fast. Afterwards he asked Monica about taking a more challenging class. “You have to be careful, basics would be best for the time being,” she said.

He wouldn’t listen, even though it was Monica telling him what for.

He had heard about Ashtanga Yoga and that’s where he went. I remember thinking, OK, buddy, you’re almost twitchy in this class, sweating, crawling out of the place. The next time I heard about him was when a story went around about a newcomer to the Ashtanga Yoga class who fell and cut his head and had to get stitches.

I was laughing.

Monica was the kind of teacher you were kind of scared of. When she told us we were going to be standing on our heads, I thought we had to do it, no question about it. But, I said to myself, Oh, Jesus! I don’t even know where to start. I never stood on my head in my life. She tried to get all of us to do it, but finally said, “If you don’t feel comfortable, you can sit this one out.”

“I’m glad you said that,” I said. Until then I had been ready, even though I was scared. I just give in and do it. I found out later that standing on your head is an advanced pose.

The one advanced pose I liked was wheel, especially when Monica walked over, got her hands under my back, and pulled up. It’s so hard on your back and hands. How much can you lift yourself? I remember thinking keep your hands there, right there, that feels great.

The whole thing about yoga was that I felt great at the end of class. Otherwise, why would anyone go and do it? I felt better, felt taller, all smoothed out. You had to take the pain of doing it to feel good once it was all over. That’s why I went back week after week, even though I knew Monica was going to push, make us stay in poses until it hurt.

It was because I felt darn good afterwards.

I didn’t want to give up on it, but it was so expensive after awhile. I went for a long time, almost a year, but then I thought I could do it at home. Frank Glass was doing it at home. Vera said he practiced yoga almost every day. If he could do it I could do it, for sure.

I started, but then stopped after a few weeks.

You have to be disciplined to do yoga at home. Whenever Monica saw anybody in her class slacking off she would say, “What’s wrong with you, get going.” At home you can say I’m not doing this pose today. The next day you can say I’m tired and won’t do anything today. I finally didn’t do much for more than a month, and when spring came I started working in the yard and going for walks in the park with my fox terriers.

That was the end of yoga for me.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

By Ed Staskus

“I want to get physical, let’s get into physical, let me hear your body talk, your body talk.”   Olivia Newton-John

There have been several religious revivals in the United States. There was one while it was still British America and another one in the early 19^th century. They are called Great Awakenings, outpourings of the Holy Spirit, in other words. One sermon by Jonathan Edwards in 1741 was entitled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”.

It immediately breathed new life into godliness in the colonies.

The third Great Awakening of the second half of the 19^th century was centered on the rise of contemporary churches, missionary work, and an emphasis on social issues.

The last more-or-less Great Awakening happened in the 1950s, when among the post-war baby-booming moms and dads of an expanding confident Pax Americana there was a revival of interest in religiosity, especially among conservative denominations, sparking theological battles and the rise of politically powerful evangelicals.

The Great Decline began in the 1970s when prayer, church membership, and service attendance started to take a nosedive. Although most Americans still claim to believe in God, they largely sleep in on Sundays. Maybe that’s what some evangelicals mean when they talk about “Soul Sleep”.

At the same time that interest in the spirit was fading away in the United States, a practice centered on the spirit started gaining traction. It was the practice of yoga. It first appeared on the coastlines of the country, the most secular places in the land, but it was a new awakening.

Although yoga today has been mainstreamed manhandled merchandised into cute outfits twisting themselves into perfect poses and posting the results on social media, Yogananda, author of “Autobiography of a Yogi” and the man who brought the practice to the land of opportunity in the 1920s, thought it was something else.

“It is a profound science of unfolding the infinite potential of the human mind and soul,” he said. He thought the purpose of yoga was not asana exercise, even though health is an important component of the discipline, but rather union with the spirit, largely through meditation.

Yogananda wasn’t big on milk and honey. He didn’t necessarily believe cloud nine was going to be got to by wrapping yourself up in a lululemon heart opener knit wrap, the perfect light layer to wear to and from your practice. He might have thought they are great clothes, colorful and moisture-wicking, albeit tight-fitting for his plus-sized figure from a different fashion time.

The Great Decline was long in coming, set in motion by modern philosophy, questioning everything, modern ideas like agnosticism, deism, and evolution, and societal rebellion. Modern times have been trending to the secular for several centuries. It may not be true that when we stop believing in God we’ll believe in anything, but it is true we all believe in Wall Street and Main Street more than God nowadays.

The Decline of Awe also came into play in the steam age industrial age atomic age digital age. The heavens are full of stars photographed by Hubble. They aren’t portents of success or failure, victory or disaster, Heaven or Hell, anymore. Awe has been replaced by high camp comic drama self-promotion hurly-burly send-ups. The proof is in the pudding, in Facebook YouTube Twitter Instagram.

The four top social network amusement parks have almost 5 billion users between them. On the other hand, maybe 20 percent of Americans go to church on a regular basis, maybe less. The rest are on their cell phones. “Ask most pastors what percentage of inactive members they have, and they’ll say anything from 40 – 60 percent,” said sociologist Penny Long Marler in ‘An Up Close Look at Church Attendance in America’.

There are far more No Church-affiliated Americans than Catholic Americans or mainline Protestant Americans. Only evangelicals are holding their own, probably because they believe in a success-oriented culture. Or maybe because they got their own haunted house ogre elected to the White House.

When yoga was getting its legs under it in the 1970s and 80s many Americans said they were spiritual, but not necessarily religious. What they meant was they weren’t organized religious. Even though arena-style mega-churches were springing up, seeming to be bursting at the seams, the writing was on the wall.

Just when the spiritual was fading away, along came yoga over the horizon, a ray of sunshine. A new kind of post-religious spirituality was on the way to a studio near you, brought to you from the East, where all religions have their roots. Sooner or later, everything old becomes new again.

Vivekenanda got the ball rolling in the 1890s, Yogananda popularized Kriya Yoga in the 1920s, and Yogi Bhajan inspired a large following in the 1960s with his Yoga of Awareness. At their core the practices were all spiritual. However, the spiritual aspect of yoga was not sustainable in the 20^th century, not in a society becoming ever more secular and materialistic.

After World War Two greed rapidly outstripped need. By the turn of the new century the United States had become the most materialistic society in the history of the world. Yoga’s ethical guidelines, behaviors like non-excess, non-possessiveness, and self-discipline, were rapidly becoming irrelevant, even as the practice boomed.

Boomers and GenX’ers are less religious and spiritual than the Silent Generation. Millennials are the least religious and spiritual of any American generation. Americans are more focused on the freedom to do whatever they want more than ever before. The sense of spirit as the gospel truth has been tossed into the dustbin of history.

The problem for the bread and butter of yoga in the 1990s and 2000s was what to do. The union of the individual self and universal consciousness wasn’t going to pay the rent. In fact, being on the side of the spirit was being on the wrong side of the balance sheet.

The solution to the problem was to go back to Patanjali, who codified the system of yoga about two thousand years ago, and turn him over on his head. Modern yoga stepped up, dropped back, and threw a spiral for a touchdown. From the perspective of Head Coach Patanjali on the sidelines, the forward pass might have been thrown backwards into the wrong end zone. But, that was neither here nor there.

It was B. K. S Iyengar to the rescue.

He wrote a book all about yoga exercise, which was a blend of hatha, gymnastics, British Army calisthenics, Indian wrestling, and alignment. “Light on Yoga” was and still is a hit. “When teachers refer to the correct way to do a posture, they’re usually alluding to the alignment Mr. Iyengar instructs and expertly models in his book,” wrote ‘Yoga Journal’ in a tribute after his death.

Since then, streaming into the 21^st century, yoga has become as body conscious as it can possibly be. Five of the eight limbs of yoga have been lopped off and left for dead, leaving posture poses and breathing exercises in control. Meditation has been repurposed as mindfulness.

Mindfulness is about fully minding what’s happening, minding what you’re doing, and minding the space you’re moving through. It used to be called paying attention. The best thing about the new practice is you don’t have to sit around meditating for hours anymore.

Yoga is a practice that fills in the space between now and forever, or at least it used to. It has since expunged the forever side of things and made the now side the happening side. It was once something between the nothing that isn’t there and the nothing that is. But, times have changed. Now it’s elbow grease, and any sense of wonder is beside the point.

“I don’t believe in all that spiritual mumbo jumbo,” or words to that effect, are routinely heard in yoga studios from coast to coast. It’s like hearing not the door slamming shut, but its echo.

Yoga has become a choreographed sequence of squirming facts on a rectangular rubber mat. Nuts and bolts were once baffled by imagination, but now studio classes are full of them. Yoga used to know what facts not to bother with. Now facts are confused with reality.

When modern yoga stripped away most of the limbs of the practice it was doing what it had to do to cash in on a good thing. Physical fitness was never the purpose of yoga, but physical fitness is what most people will pay $15.00 an hour for, not instruction in the benefits of the spirit. Intangibles are not the point of gruntwork.

Who goes to a gym for enlightenment?

Before the Great Split the dichotomy was, it’s either yoga, or it’s exercise. It didn’t matter what you were doing, bicep curls or sun salutations. What mattered was the ethical motivation non-competiveness spiritual orientation and where whatever you were doing was heading. If tight buns were the goal, it was exercise. If the subtle body was the goal, it was yoga.

It doesn’t matter anymore. Yoga has become whatever you want it to be, whatever you say it is, whatever pays the best in the marketplace. Deconstructing the structural unity of the practice has become constructing the fast food drive-thru of the obvious on a bland burger bun.

When yoga studios add profit centers to their footprint – mats branded apparel props essential oils lifestyle items – it’s because they need the real McCoy to stay in business. Retail can add 20 to 30 percent to the bottom line. Trying to make money off the spiritual is like trying to give fish a bath.

Yoga businesses need to be profitable. All earnings are dependent on shoppers, since if there weren’t any shoppers there wouldn’t be any stores or studios. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the groove on the mat they’re looking for or simply looking groovy. It doesn’t matter whether shoppers want an awakening or tight buns. The customer is always right.

“The act of shopping is a form of stress release,” wrote Rebecca Kotch in ‘Managing Your Yoga Retail Space’. “Shopping within a yoga studio environment seems to be an exceptional antidote to everyday stresses,” she said.

It obviates the need for wasting your time in corpse pose, as well. It begs the question, however, whether the new yoga is yoga by another name, or is it something different altogether? Is the old yoga dead and gone? Does it matter?

“Do I believe that yoga can be imparted without being grounded in its cultural and spiritual heritage? No. Whatever that is, it isn’t yoga,” Kavita Das wrote in ‘Any Practice of Yoga That Isn’t Spiritual Isn’t Really Yoga’.

Although there is no disagreeing with the sentiment, there is no doubt Kavita Das is completely wrong. Yoga has a cultural and spiritual heritage and the practice was, within the last one hundred years, grounded in that tradition. That is not the case anymore. Yoga today is whatever most people say it is.

Even before the Great Decline the idea that we are compelled to create meaning had been crashing into the past, redefining modernity. Everybody has to create meaning for themselves and create their own outlook. Life used to be what other people said it was. Life nowadays is whatever you say it is. Hanging onto the coattails of yoga’s heritage doesn’t get it done in an age of engagement and commitment to the now.

Although it is true the present is like an egg that was laid by the past, the present is never like the past. When you’ve got the present in the driver’s seat, running the show, you control both the past and the future. What we dream up now is tomorrow’s reality.

Most yoga today is branded, delivered, and consumed in a commercial setting, and has no spiritual aspect to it. The cultural heritage of the practice has become beside the point, except for the yoga tourists who pay homage to it by going to the sub-continent on vacation. However, what they practice at the fountainhead is ironically a mostly Westernized form of the discipline.

The Great Dream of yoga used to be awareness, self-control, and higher consciousness. The way it was gotten to was by training the body and the mind. Even though teachers were helpful, neither gym nor studio memberships were necessary. The best teachers didn’t explain or demonstrate, rather they inspired. They didn’t confuse things with their names.

The next step used to be about going beyond the physical, beyond the mind, even, and straight to the spirit. Stop making sense. There’s no time for words. Feel a little more alive. Stop making sense.

Most modern practice, however, has evolved so that it’s never mind anything except the physical. Modernity has given the heave ho to thousands of years of meaning, and replaced it with the provisional, so that essence is what you make of it, once you have come into being. The physicality of existence is what matters more than anything else.

It may be reductive to do yoga as a workout, but the other paths have been largely washed away in the Great Flood of rationalism secularism commodification. Besides, yoga has been decontextualized to the point that anything goes, anyway. Who really believes in the past anymore?

Traditional yoga was an enterprise after states of insight. Modern yoga is an enterprise after health and wealth along material planes. Traditional yoga espoused detachment from physical pleasures, or at least many of them. Modern yoga is a shopping mall of physical pleasures. Traditional yoga was then and modern yoga is now.

We all dream up our own reality, although now and then it’s fine to pause in our pursuit of yoga and just do it.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

By Ed Staskus

“Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.”  E. B. White

There are about 6 million car accidents in the United States every year, which amounts to close to 16,000-or-so every day of every week of every month. Car accidents cost more than $230 billion per annum, or more than $800 for every person in the country. In the last five years the number of accidents has risen by almost a million a year.

1 in 45 American drivers experience some kind of injury-producing accident annually. Almost everyone in the country knows someone who has suffered in a car crash. Not everyone, however, knows anyone who practices yoga who’s been in a car crash.

It’s not because they don’t drive cars. Yoga might be from back in the walking and horseback days, but everyone drives cars nowadays. It’s a birthright rite of passage right of way in the modern world. It’s more likely that since they practice yoga, and the lessons learned, they are able to stay out of harm’s way more often than not.

Some of the causes of car crashes are unavoidable, whether you practice yoga or not, like design defects of the car itself, potholes and tire blowouts, animals like deer crossing in front of you, and even slippery treacherous heavy rain. Most accidents, however, have nothing to do with a moose jumping in front of your car in a rainstorm as you hit a pothole and all your tires blow out. They are usually the fault of human misbehavior.

It’s pedal to the metal. It’s burning rubber. It’s Dead Man’s Curve.

The lion’s share of mishap is the result of driving drunk, driving drug-addled, reckless driving, running red lights, and distracted driving. Driver error is by far the largest single cause of smash-ups in the United States, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. It’s gotten to the point that almost 70% of all traffic fatalities are caused by aggressive driving.

The wages of out on a limb driving, like carelessness aggressiveness tailgating turning and passing improperly violating rights of way sensation-seeking speeding road rage, are bump and grind life and death. On top of that, many drivers overestimate their own skill level behind the wheel. 90% of us believe we have above-average ability. It’s zoom zoom in your car car. But public roads are not proving grounds for bumper cars.

Going foggy mountain, making matters worse, young and old, men and women, no collar to white collar, are stopped all the time for driving under the influence. There are literally millions of DUI collars in the United States every year. No matter the source, such as spirits or various other drugs besides alcohol, drivers demonstrating impairment are arrested and charged.

Distracted driving prioritizes ordering a sausage mushroom green pepper pizza from your car while trying to find the cup holder for your Starbucks over being able to stop in a split second’s notice on a four-lane while whizzing along at 65 75 85 MPH. Even though safe driving depends on your ability to notice many things at once, it might be better to keep the deluxe pizza you’re dreaming about out of the mix.

Since driving is the most dangerous thing most people do on a daily basis, why do so many people turn into tools the minute they get behind the wheel? It’s one thing to cut in line at the supermarket. It’s another thing to cut in line on the superhighway. Two shopping carts in a catfight will end up in bruised feelings. Two SUV’s going mano a mano puts the lives of all involved at risk.

Why take the risk?

“When we’re in a car we often feel anonymous,” explained Erica Slotter, a social psychologist at Villanova University. “When we feel anonymous, we lose focus of our moral compass and are more likely to behave badly.”

Middle fingers fly fast and furious.

At even its most basic level, notwithstanding any points on the compass, yoga is good for your driving. Being stuck in a traffic jam can be a pain in the ass, but it is definitely a pain in the back. Not only are you sitting around seething, but once you get going there are acceleration forces, vehicle sway, and vibration. “Coupled with the design of the car seat itself, they can increase the chance of back problems,” said Alan Hedge, a professor of ergonomics at Cornell University.

Stop and stretch as often as you can, say most chiropractors.

Take a yoga class. All of the basic yoga exercises, from cat cow to downward facing dog to bridge pose to dolphin plank are good for your back. They stretch and lengthen your back. They strengthen your back. They help return your back to its proper alignment.

Take a yoga class once or twice a week. Consistent practice leads to better alignment overall, better posture, and better body awareness. Instead of slumping in c-curve style in the front seat, awareness of your body gained through yoga helps you maintain the natural curvature of your spine.

Twisting poses are a big part of the practice. Sitting at home, at work, and in a car stiffens up tissues, muscles, and joints. When you rotate your spine your back muscles mobilize and vertebrates decompress.

It makes reaching into the back seat easier.

Not only that, getting on the mat is good for visual acuity, such as being able to spot sudden obstacles and shifts in traffic patterns. A report in the ‘Journal of Modern Optics’ revealed that people who practiced yoga were able to detect that a flashing light was pulsing, rather than held steady, at significantly higher frequencies than control subjects. They were able to see danger ahead sooner than later.

If drugs and drink are the bane of road traffic safety, soaking up some of yoga’s lessons about on yoga off drugs might get some people to put the brakes on. Since drugs and drink are time-honored pastimes, the problem isn’t having a cocktail or a spliff now and then, but tanking up on opoids or booze or both. Fortunately, many drunk drivers get into one-car crashes and just kill themselves. Unfortunately, more than half of all fatal car accidents involve one drunk driver and one sober driver.

Drugs and drink slow you down, slow your reaction time, slow your brain down, slow the processing of sensory information, and generally impair your ability to use common sense. Mind-altering substances can be entertaining, but there’s a falling off point where they simply distort reality to no good end and lead to wild goose chases. In the end it amounts to little and ends in nothing.

Although it is true yoga requires effort to do, while popping a pill or bending an elbow is as easy as it gets, the rewards of yoga practice are there for the taking. It brings the body and brain into balance. Although there are no rules from on high that say everyone who does yoga has to be a teetotaler, it is a practice of awareness, not something for dumbing down your consciousness.

There are no hangovers after a yoga exercise meditation mindfulness class. It’s clear sailing ahead.

“It takes only one drink to get me drunk,” said George Burns. “The trouble is, I can’t remember if it’s the thirteenth or fourteenth.” When you practice enough yoga, however, you usually remember to stick to the first or second one, and you’re always aware that driving juiced or junked-up is dangerous, not just to you, but to everyone else on the road.

When did eating fiddling with the radio grooming phone calling and texting behind the wheel while merging lanes become the norms of unsafe driving? At any given time about 10% of all drivers are distracted, according to Paul Atchley of the Transportation Research Institute at the University of Kansas. It might be prudent every time you start up your car to assume there is someone out there who will be trying to kill you.

For every 11 miles driven the average driver is on their phone for a half-mile. Looking down at it for 5 seconds at 55 MPH is the same as driving the length of a football field with your eyes closed. It’s relying on luck, walking the high wire between the vital spark and disaster. Maybe you’ll score a touchdown. Maybe you’ll get sacked for a big loss.

Mental focus is a large part of yoga. It’s one of the eight limbs of the practice and is woven in and through all the other parts. There might not be any rules about drinking, but there is a rule that says pay attention and no texting while in headstand.

In yoga practice the idea of a focused gaze is called drishti. It essentially means a place to look. It is a core concept and was championed in the work of K. Pattabhi Jois and B. K. S. Iyengar, the two pioneering teachers of the twentieth century. On the yoga mat it means looking at one spot while in a balancing pose to help keep you from falling over. On another level it means paying attention to what you’re doing and being mindful of the moment.

“It appears that following yoga practice participants were better able to focus their mental resources,” said Neha Gother, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Illinois about research published in the ‘Journal of Physical Activity and Health’.

“The breathing and meditative exercises aim at calming the mind and body and keeping distracting thoughts away.”

On all levels it means being able to damp down the chatter.

In page-one yoga and day-to-day life it means concentrate your thoughts on the task at hand. ‘Look, something shiny!’ doesn’t get you anywhere. On the open road it means eyes front and hands on the wheel. Put the smart phone away in the glove box. Better yet, throw it in the trunk. Manipulating it and talking both distract the brain. Driving is itself enough of a multitasking activity, at least until we are all being chauffeured by driverless cars.

The practice of yoga and driving are both about keeping the mind body in tune. Although yoga classes always end with savasana, otherwise known as dead man’s pose, there’s no reason to race to dead man’s curve after class.

“When the light turned green, you shoulda heard the whine from my screamin’ machine, Dead Man’s Curve I can hear ‘em say, won’t come back from Dead Man’s Curve,” is how the Jan and Dean song goes. Everybody knows what happened at the hard curve in the road.

At its most elemental level yoga is about conscious breathing. The breath is what links all aspects of the practice. It redirects your focus. It imparts a sense of compassion, for yourself and others. When compassion kicks in it’s easy to drive close to the speed limit so that you’re not endangering others. It’s easy to stay sober and alert so that you aren’t making yourself a menace to society. It’s easy to let another driver merge into your lane without blowing a gasket.

But, if the screws do start coming loose, just breathe.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

By Ed Staskus

“Anarchy is the only slight glimmer of hope.”  Mick Jagger

In the 21st century yoga has flipped over onto its head. It has gone the voice on a soapbox. It has gone bully pulpit. It’s gone do-gooder.

It has lost its mind.

After more than five millennia of minding its own business, it has lately been sticking its nose into everyone else’s business. The first of the eight limbs of yoga are about giving peace a chance, don’t steal the other guy’s stuff, truthfulness, the right use of energy, and self-reliance. There isn’t a word about consciously deliberately engaging with the wider world through good deeds.

Salvation through good works is a Judeo-Christian conceit, not a yoga concept. The Epistle of James makes it plain that “faith without works is dead.” That’s the profit in doing good. In the Jewish tradition, mitzvah means doing something kind charitable beneficial from religious duty. Even the Puritan work ethic is conceptualized as a duty that benefits both the man and his society as a whole.

In the beginning yoga was about looking up at the stars. Then it became suppressing the activities of body mind and will so that the self could realize its distinction from them and find liberation. Later it became a discipline that involved meditation, breath control, and bodily exercise postures for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Now it’s connect participate get involved.

“Yoga is something we do to connect and engage with the world,” says Kate Saal, a teacher and educator at One Flow Yoga in California.

When did that happen?

It happened when yoga sprang to life in the Land of Californiacs in the 1970s, but it happened more than ever in the new millennium when Seane Corn, Hala Khouri, and Suzanne Sterling dreamed up Off the Mat Into the World. It is marketed as a bridge between yoga and community action and a broader expression of service on the planet. The organization works tirelessly to “train leaders worldwide in social change.”

Although worldwide is everywhere, and everywhere is too much to handle, the activist Seane Corn believes everyone needs to start somewhere. “What are you doing for the people in your own backyard” she asks, getting you started. It’s not just hashtag activism, either. She means make things actually happen in real life.

Off the Mat Into the World is Karma Yoga writ large for the brave new world.

Karma Yoga is doing your duty, whether “as a homemaker, carpenter, or garbage collector, with no thought for one’s own fame, privilege, or financial reward, but simply as a dedication to the Lord,” says Harold Coward, a scholar of bioethics and religious studies.

It is the “disinterested action” idea found in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, as well as in yoga. However, in the yoga tradition, it is derived from the Bhagavad Gita, an epic poem composed for the benefit of the warrior class back in the day. Its goal was to get the troops back on the battlefield for the next day’s fighting. The reasoning was simple cunning brazen.

“Set firmly in yourself, do your work, not attached to anything. Remain even minded in success, and in failure. Even mindedness is true yoga,” says Krishna with a straight face.

It’s Uncle Sam, paws on the reins, in a golden chariot.

The truth often depends on a walk around the lake, or a good nap, not necessarily blood and guts, as gods and world leaders would have it. It isn’t always what’s right, either, no matter the medals on the chest of the madman at the front. The truth isn’t always the gospel truth.

The reason we have breakfast lunch dinner and practice on our own mats is so we don’t die of true yoga.

Yoga used to have its hand on the gospel plow. Now it’s full speed ahead, two hands on the steering wheel. Instead of making you a better person, it’s make the world a better place. The small portrait of the guy or gal on the mat has been replaced by “See the big picture!”

There’s the Purple Dot Yoga Project battling domestic violence. There’s the Yoga Bridge supporting those healing from cancer. There are the Yoga Gangsters who “utilize their thoughts, words, and actions to empower humanity.” It’s a tall order, but desperate times demand desperados.

Yoga supports many causes, giving back to the community, helping those who are less fortunate, such as the St. Jude Medical Center, Advance Housing, Ronald McDonald Charities, iFred, and Prevention Works. The practice has even offered a helping hand to the Council for Prostitution Alternatives.

Searching out alternatives, however, begs the question, why is it punishable to get paid for an act that is legal if done for free?

Off the Mat Into the World has expanded yoga from transforming ourselves to transforming our neighborhoods, nation states, and the world. “Rooted in compassion and connection,” they say, “we are called to awaken to suffering and take action in response, creating a peaceful, just, and connected global community.”

Although get up stand up is yoga, getting up and standing up for a just peaceful connected global community is not necessarily yoga practice, unless you say it is and go on missions of mercy no matter what. In the past fifty years-or-so yoga has been co-opted by corporations, the military, and western culture. The latest Johnny-on-the-spot is the Good Samaritan.

What yoga has to do with the global community is moot, open to debate. What yoga has to do with a person’s essential being is an open and shut case. Yoga is more in the way of an anarchic undertaking than a recipe book of groupthink or mother knows best. The practice is not a team game, no matter how many yoga studios and retreats get us all on the same page.

Even the Boy Scouts, paradoxically, believe the same, even though they gather in troops. “Character training is to put responsibility on the individual,” said Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the scouts. Individuals have to make the effort to define values and principles for themselves, apart from man-made authority and teamwork.

Anarchists, like yogis, at least the one who used to stare up at the stars in the sky, do not believe the collective needs of the group are head and shoulders ahead of their individual interests. When you’re one of the gang, you’re in a gang. Who needs gangsters? Playing the gangster game is the same as playing the society game, just with slightly different rules.

Although anarchy has long been regarded as mayhem, nihilism, and lawlessness by the forces of law and order, it is more the case that it is a belief in the absolute freedom of the individual, regarded as a societal and political ideal. The Catholic Encyclopedia defines anarchy as “an absence of law.” That is even though, if there was ever an anarchist on the planet, Jesus was the one.

The brain wave of anarchy is that individuals aren’t made to widen the scope of society, but that society is made to widen the choice of individuals. Anarchism strives to dream up a society as efficient as possible, leaving it at that, so that society can provide individuals with the widest range of choices. Anarchy comes from the word anarchia, meaning the absence of government. Anarchists believe they don’t need policemen to make them behave.

In other words, good people don’t need laws, while bad people won’t obey them. Spend enough time on a yoga mat by yourself and you’ll become an anarchist sooner or later. If everybody got down dog there wouldn’t be any need for laws line-ups judges jails the end of the line.

The flaw of the Good Samaritan is that they, like the state, like its agents the agencies of government, like its enforcers the forces of law and order, like its arbiters the halls of justice, believe they know what is best for you. Anarchists, on the other hand, don’t stick their noses into other people’s business. They don’t make causes out of thinking they know what is best for one and all.

“God helps those who help themselves,” said the political theorist Algernon Sidney.

The same as anarchia, Sidney’s well-known phrase originated in ancient Greece, the first democracy. Athenian direct participation democracy had more in common with anarchy than any modern bourgeois democracy. It was bottom up. Today’s state is top down. Even our day-to-day sustenance is contrived as the result of trickle down. Everyone, even the rich, is trying to help you out, our leaders proclaim. Republicans and Democrats alike fight it out for the right to say the same thing.

Fight for your right to belong to the wrong party.

Yoga practice is a party of one. On the mat doesn’t have anything to do with anyone else, not your neighbor, not the brightly colored flag you wrap yourself in, and not the world.  When Off the Mat Into the World says it is getting off the mat, they mean exactly that, however much they don’t mean it. Socially conscious causes have nothing to do with yoga, which is a living current of consciousness within the individual self.

Just like yoga isn’t exercise, chaturanga and vinyasa and twisting and turning, it isn’t something you do for others, either, jetting off to third-world countries to eradicate malaria, or digging wells in sub-Saharan Africa. Yoga is who you are, or who you want to become, like the anarchist looking for freedom. It isn’t feeling good because you’ve done something, done good works, made the world a better place to live in.

It isn’t the narcissism of accomplishment. It’s about making you a better person from the inside out. It’s better to be self-made than letting somebody else cook you up.

Even though we all live out in the open, yoga is not about shifting the perspective of the world. It’s not about doing right. It’s about getting right with yourself.

It’s about focus strength stamina all together tilting at windmills toward an inner shift of perspective. It’s letting Krazy Kat Krishna go his own way. It’s missing the big picture, but hitting the bull’s-eye.

It’s not about standing on your head. It’s about standing on your own two feet.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”