Yoga vs. Baseball

Been thinking about the functions of culture recently: the ways that the different activities and institutions, practices and philosophies that we interact with, put to use, etc., create a unified whole. Here are some thoughts:

Yoga, over the past few decades, has become a burgeoning facet of Western culture.

It's revealing, though, to think of yoga in the context of what I'll call our "cultural gestalt." Consider the representations of yoga on TV and in other media that simplify and, to a degree, codify what yoga means in the context of everything else. Many of these are ignorant, hyperbolic, or absurd — but they represent something in our cultural conscience that can't quite come to grips with yoga.

So while many Americans practice yoga, it's still got that flavor of the bizarre, and the occult. I blame the gap in people's knowledge, between the culture at large and the people who have actually learned a thing or two about yoga. Because the fact is, the most many people know about yoga comes from what they get to do on their Wii Fit, which, well, leaves a lot to be desired — and a lot to the imagination as well. And, to compound the problem, we're talking about a cultural practice that comes from people whose gods have blue skin and extra arms and elephant heads. So it doesn't take a whole lot to get your imagination working overtime, and coming up with some absurd assumptions.

We can think, then, about the way that knowledge in this case is interacting with our culture, and taking an interesting (I won't say flawed) path to a more explicable and unified cohesiveness within the cultural whole.

But is the ultimate path of yoga to be incorporated into the cultural whole at all? Will yoga ever be just as American an activity as playing baseball or, at least, eating take-out Chinese food in front of your TV?

I think there's a small but vocal group of people in the yoga community that don't really actually want to be incorporated into the American cultural whole. Some people take their enthusiasm for yoga and Hindu culture to dogmatic extremes, and speak out against the local lifestyle in favor of what seems, coming from their mouths, to be this panacea of refined and enlightened cultural praxis that, in fact, is just another complex and fraught belief system with as much danger and liability as any other — and I'm not saying anything against belief systems.

I, for one, will profess belief in the value of positive thinking. I think that any cultural practice or system should be expected to highlight its positive traits, and let the people sort out what they like and don't like through trial and selection.

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Cities with professional baseball teams have lower divorce rates than other cities; or even compared with those very same cities, but before they got a team.

What benefits can yoga claim?