The End

This will be my last and final entry on this subject for a long long time.

Everything in life is what you make of it including the yoga business and your own yoga practice.

Everyone loves to be around people that are genuinely happy and passionate about something.

During a particularly vulnerable time in my life for many reasons, I needed something to grasp and to believe in. After beating myself up for staying too long in an abusive relationship, I needed to feel that it was possible to grow and evolve. I latched on to yoga because it had done wonders for my physical appearance (...but then again, many people lose weight when they come off a break-up).

However, I cannot say with any sort of conviction that yoga did anything for me other than add a few more muscles and take me back down from 116 pounds to 102 pounds. In so many ways, it has been tainted by my participation in the business of yoga. In fact, I still have eight classes left on a class package I bought four months ago. I didn't use them because I was practicing free elsewhere, but now (newly out of this industry...thank god!) I'm struggling to get myself to use them because if nothing else, yoga is good exercise.

Yes, there are some instructors that are the "real deal." Yogi Charu lived in a cave in India for six years meditating. You kinda gotta hand it to the guy! Most are not like him at all. They do not live the so-called "yogic lifestyle" that they instruct others to live. Maybe some of them try, but most American yoga instructors eat hamburgers, constantly place judgement on others, and have uber dramatic lives on and off the mat. They merely masque these completely human intentions for the one hour they spend working on their "core," pretending their lives are zen and that somehow slowing down their breath is going to buy them more time on this earth.

The managers of these yoga instructors are even worse. They attempt to "keep a positive vibe" when managing instructors, sales reps, and operations, but this vibe reeks of phony nonsense. I liken this "phoniness" to the camp counselors in the Adams Family. They cannot accept the cynical Adams children, Wednesday and Pugsley, so they are thrown in the happy shack. "You're not very happy today, children."


"You're not being very yogic today, Courtney!"

Blow me.

The bottom line is that yoga is a business like anything else. It's just an amazing marketing ploy for the fitness industry in the US. If you ask me, go play some sports, go to the gym, go running, hell, do some sit up and headstands at home.

Don't waste your money on yoga classes unless you like to waste money and you like to be part of sad-sack communities of people just looking for some desperate way to grasp the meaning of life.

Read a book!