Well folks we knew it was coming. We American yoga folk couldn’t just leave well enough alone. In really 50 years , we have managed to bastardize a time old lineage, passed down verbally from guru to student, one on one and now… we can even agree what yoga is.

Instead of time honored tradition we have online courses to become a yoga teacher. Instead of reading the classic yoga texts we are using blogs as cliff notes thinking someone else is smarter and we’ll just use their info. We have wannabe’s everywhere, folks who think Sanskrit is “just a waste to learn”, and even the Chopra Center had an add on my linked in page offering to boost my business…is there anything left about yoga that isn’t about money? (Hence the profits not prophets).

Yoga is about quieting the mind to look at yourself. And not by doing it gazing into a mirror asking who is the fairest of them all….nor is real yoga about aiming to be the next contortionist on some magazine cover,or being a spokesyogababe. Those are fine in other contexts of modern society but they really aren’t yoga.

Read, discover, see how it resonates within you, practice, read more, practice more, learn. Repeat for the next 50 years.

So I befriended a new “big name” yoga rockstar on Facebook to see what they were about. What I find instead of anything of real substance is that they are now hanging with other major teachers at a couple major yoga venues deciding if they should both teaching anything other than just asana.

Seriously? First of all let me point out the only folks who are impressed by these folks are not really yogic, yogis or yoginis. And if you don’t like yoga (real yoga) you are just a bunch of posers!

Secondly, they have not paid their dues! If indeed they have paid any attention they would understand that poses are not real yoga. Clearly they have no idea that teaching yoga without the other stuff is like reading the cliff notes versions of all the classic books, or seeing a cartoon remake of a classic movie, or the elevator music versions of the classic rock….

If you want to short change yoga or make it more American by dumbing it down, I don’t want to be your friend.