Please see my recent article in Elephant Journal:

First It Was “Yobo”, Now There is Ratra (Radical Traditional) Yoga

which is about the spirited debates we’ve had on the YJ Community and elsewhere about what is and what isn’t real Yoga.

I think you’ll enjoy it, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

According to the ancient Yoga sages

Questioning the meaning of life

While living

Is like questioning the meaning of a roller coaster

In the middle of a roller coaster ride

Or like questioning the meaning of love

In the middle of lovemaking.

Who cares when something is so amazing?

The amazement IS the meaning.

The amazement IS the ultimate reality.

The amazement IS the life-force of the universe

All around us and within us

Far beyond our ability

To absorb or comprehend.

The amazement IS what some call God

And the ancient sages called Brahman.

In the midst of the ups and downs

Of life and love

Just relax, breathe deeply 

And experience the infinite thrill

of the amazing ride.

My wife Jane does a Yoga routine with a Jason Crandell DVD almost every morning before I even wake up. She’s does it purely for the exercise and relaxation. She couldn’t care less about all my philosophizing and spiritualizing (except that she’s happy for me that I’ve found something I love so much). I don’t think she’s ever read “Yoga Demystified” or “Yoga in America.”

It’s partly Jane that makes me jump to the defense of what many in the Yoga blogging community deride as “just workout Yoga”. I embrace diversity because we have both extreme ends of the Yoga spectrum right here in my home–Yoga as workout and Yoga as ancient spirituality.

Jane doesn’t need Yoga spirituality because she already embodies all its ideals without even calling it spirituality, much less Yoga. I would call Jane an extreme karma Yogini who would never describe herself that way, partly because she wouldn’t have any idea what I was talking about. She is ALWAYS helping other people and making their lives better, just by being herself. It’s just the way she thinks and acts.

She lives in the present, cooks like an Ayurvedist, and is the a natural practioner of all the yamas and niyamas, without even knowing or caring what they are.

Everyday Jane goes out to Milwaukee schools, including some of the toughest schools in the city, and inspires teachers to get excited about their profession again, and to become the best they can be, all for the benefit of the kids they serve.

I practice Yoga partly so I can learn to be as karmic and egoless as Jane already is.

Once in a while I see something in the Yoga blogosphere that no one should miss.

Such is the case with this blog post from YogaDork.  Just trust me!

http://www.yogadork.com/2009/10/16/because-its-friday-earth-looks-pretty-small-from-mars-pic-plus-monty-python-the-flaming-lips-videos/

I particularly enjoyed the Monty Python clip.

What is it like to see the world

Through the eyes of a famous painter?

Suppose you are Monet or Van Gogh

Or Rembrandt or Picasso.

For the next fifteen minutes

Look at every scene passing in front of your eyes

As the frame for your next masterpiece.

Can you see twenty-five different paintings

In the same simple country haystack?

Look at the rich array of details that emerge

From scenes you didn’t even notice before.

How vivid do the colors become 

Or even the countless colorless subtle shades of grey

When you need to match them to your palette?

How infinitely fascinating is any scene

When you need to interpret

Every line and shape and texture and nuance

With your charcol or brush?

How convincingly does this reflect

The startling infinite fascinating wonder

Of the workaday universe itself?

I just wrote this long comment on a blog in Elephant Journal .  The blog referred to a couple of Deepak Chopra’s books as “New Age Quackery”:

“Ageless Body/Timeless Mind” is actually an excellent book. But it’s excellent because the inside doesn’t begin to match the promise of the cover and title. So your derision of the title is entirely justified.

Chopra is a real puzzle. If you look at the actual content of his work, he is a modern sage of the Upanishads (one of the three main ancient Yoga texts, along with the Bhagavad Gita and Yoga Sutra). He comes across the same way in his presentations, which are just dripping in the one-with-the-universe message of the Upanishads and Gita.

“Ageless Body/Timeless Mind” is actually a well thought-out and deeply inspirational update of the philosophy of the ancient Yoga sages. “Timeless Mind” makes perfect sense in this context, because according to Yoga philosophy we are all part of the ocean already, not just a wave, and since the ocean (the universe) is timeless, so are we.

When you get inside the book “ageless body” means not living forever, but rather the fact that our molecules all turn into other things and continue on, with a lot of detail from modern quantum physics, and the fact that we might someday figure out how to arrest aging. Certainly not what’s implied by the cover.

I believe Chopra is, in fact, a modern Yoga sage, carrying on the central message of the ancient sages in a modern context. But he either creates or allows a marketing effort that can make him look like a quack.

I like his writing so much I’m willing to put up with the silly upfront hype. The books I’ve read so far are really terrific and not at all quackery.

I would love to hear other opinions about this, because I’ve only read a few of his many books.

For a quick summary of what I mean by ancient Yoga philosophy, see: “What Is It That Brings Us Happiness?”

For more on Chopra and others as modern sages of ancient Yoga philosophy, see Pure Yoga by Another Name

I have to tell you a very funny story. At least I hope you’ll think it’s funny!

See, I decide I want to know more about Buddhism. 

So first I read several books and a bunch of stuff on the web. Need more.

I go talk to my Zen Buddhist priest neighbor, but he’s hard to talk to because he’s very into making no effort, and talking about Buddhism is an effort, and everything is illusory anyway, so why talk about it.

Then I decide to go to the source, the Dhammapada, becauses Eknath Easwaran’s Upanishads is wonderful, and if he likes the Dhammapada, that’s for me.

But the Dhammapada leaves me flat. I have notes all over the margins saying, This could be Ben Franklin–do good things, don’t do bad things, be earnest, spend time with good people, don’t spend time with bad people, master all your thoughts, never be angry, etc.

What have you got against Ben Franklin, you ask. Nothing, I say. I like Ben Franklin. I’m just looking for something a little more, shall we say, transcendental.

So next I go to my online friend Linda for advice. She is very helpful with perspective and further reading suggestions. 

Linda also recommends I connect with her Buddhist teacher through Facebook. He has the very musical and evocative name Lama Surya Das.

I pull up his profile on Facebook, and what do you think is the first thing I see, right at the very top of Lama Surya Das’ Facebook page?

A quote from Ben Frankin! 

“Contentment makes poor men rich; discontentment makes rich men poor.” 

I’m still in stitches.

Yoga and Buddhism both have a long history of debating the big issues like the origins of the universe, whether or not there is a God, and if there is a God, whether God is personal or impersonal.

The Buddha himself disdained these sorts of metaphysical discussions, and focused entirely on the practical path to achieve happiness, as described in the Dhammapada. He reportedly refused to answer the question about whether there is a God, both because it is unanswerable and irrelevant to his spiritual system.

The Yoga Sutra is similar in its approach. It simply ignores these questions about the origin of the universe and the existence of God (except a brief suggestion to “meditate on your personal God”) in favor of a very practical step-by-step system, not unlike the Buddha’s.

The Bhagavad Gita and Upanishads, on the other hand, deal with these issues by saying that Brahman or God or the Supreme Life Force, whatever you want to call it, is UNKNOWABLE and UNFATHOMABLE, but what we do know for sure, just from simple Yogic observation is that this thing, whatever it is, is infinitely wondrous, encompasses absolutely everything, including all of us, and compels us to behave in a certain dharma-driven way.

This seems both true and deeply satisfying to me, and that’s why the Bhagavad Gita and Upanishads are my ultimate spiritual beacons.

What do you think?

P.S. I’ve written more about this at “God” or ”Reason”–Is There Really Any Difference?

Over on the “it’s all yoga, baby” blog we’re having a spirited in-depth debate about the commercialization of Yoga, and when it ceases to be Yoga.  It’s very similar to the great debates we’ve had right here on the same topic.

The immediate trigger for this debate was the sponsorship of Rainbeau Mars by adidas and the “adidas yoga” session at the Yoga Journal Conference in Estes Park, Colorado.

In the process of thinking about it, I came up with a startling idea. We are talking in this blog about the term “Yoga” being used where some people feel it doesn’t belong.

How do we deal with the huge movements that are almost pure Yoga philosophy, but which don’t choose to use the term “Yoga” to describe themselves?

I’ll give three examples here, Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle, and Eknath Easwaran, but there are many more.

I know Chopra pretty well, having read some of his books, seen his website, and watched his lectures on TV. Most of Chopra’s teachings come directly out of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita.

If you ignore his huge celebrity following and just look at his work, you could argue that Chopra is the modern sage of pure original Yoga, predating even asana and hatha. One of Chopra’s most recent books is a modern interpretation of reincarnation. And he wrote the book Rod Stryker uses in his teacher training for Ayurveda.

I’m less familiar with Tolle. He is certainly less engaging and convincing than Chopra as a speaker. But his teachings about nondualism also seem to also emanate directly out of the Upanishads and the Gita.

Easwaran was one of the world’s foremost translators of the Upanishads and the Gita. But he saw them as too universal to be restricted to the term Yoga, so to bring their message to the world he created a meditation center with little reference to Yoga, and he brought in meditation sources from a variety of religions. His web site doesn’t call itself a Yoga site, but his teachings and philosophy are pure pre-asana Yoga.

I don’t know what to do with this insight. What do you think? Here we have non-Yoga movements that are rapidly spreading Yogic meditation and spirituality with no association with asana at all, and very little explicit reference to Yoga!

I guess it makes me even less worried about the diversity of Yoga. Perhaps these movements and those like them will help offset the stretching of the definition of Yoga on the asana side of the spectrum.