We posted on these a while back and finally had a chance to catch up with what’s come of the series since. The series is still taking a matter-of-fact approach to the practice which is refreshing and ultimately allows the good transformative stuff to arise naturally (you know tears, chuckles, some more tears). As far as irony goes, the unspoken theme of this week, for some reason I feel these videos actually hold irony, rather than profess it or reject it. Does that make sense? It’s as if the sentiments can embrace irony without having a stance on it.
Anyway, my brain is already starting to hurt. Here’s one about yoga and foster care:
Here’s one about teenagers, domestic violence and yoga. There’s also Eddie Stern, head of Ashtanga Yoga NY and founder/editor of Namarupa: Categories of Indian Thought, talking about how teenagers love when you let them just go to sleep. Truth:
Here’s one about kids in the juvenile system:
And, here’s one about cool-NYC-people’s favorite “‘I’ve been stabbed” healer, Abdi Assadi. Bro is no joke:
![This Naked Yoga School Video is Awesome [VIDEO]](https://thebabarazzi.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/hqdefault.jpg?resize=200%2C200)
![[The Friday Good] Gour Khepa Das Baul Singing Mad Spirit](https://thebabarazzi.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/thumb.png?resize=200%2C200)
![[NSFW (in every way)] Yoga Undressed Remains Undressed](https://thebabarazzi.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/naked1.jpg?resize=200%2C200)
The Babarazzi 
have been teaching at a DV shelter for about 10 years. my favorite class to teach.
and Assadi’s book is on my top 10 list of books for teacher trainees to read.
This is still just liberal white “do-gooders” hawking their vanity projects on behalf of the brown-skinned poor, all the while padding their own fundraising portfolios. It’s a tiresome motif that does not escape in any way the logic of the Yoga Spectacle. It’s an eyedropper’s worth of Grace that helps make the more dominant unsavory aspects of yoga commercialism seem less dominant and all-pervasive than they really are.
My biggest criticisms of the yoga world is its boundless megalomania – its inability – no abject refusal – to humbly place itself alongside an entire range of healing modalities that are just as viable a “tonic” for people suffering and in need — be it Tai Chi, massage, TM, meditation without yoga, all sorts of dance, taking a good long walk, playing a guitar, – the list of possibilities is endless.
For some, sitting in a warm tub listening to your favorite tunes, smoking a Fat Doobie and getting “blissed out” is far more therapeutic than lying on a linoleum floor under fluorescent lights and letting your head get filled with some yogini babe’s “mindful” mush.
Yoga is pretending to occupy this exclusive “space” of spiritual praxis — and meditative gravitas. Actually, it’s just a new “Orientalist” fascination in the Age of Jazzercise.
Hmmm, I kind of have to agree with your post. When the deeper aspects of yoga are presented to many who ‘take classes’, they stop and question what it is they are practicing. Vrittis, Kleshas, and Samskaras have all been glossed over for ‘exercise’. So Sad!!!!!!!!