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There might have been a time, say, 70 years ago, when it would have been cool or for a bourgeois American man to be seeking "union with God" - - one definition of "yoga" -- on a questionably priced blue rubber roll-up mat.

But not today.

Two yoga doofuses showed up in a Super Bowl ad last month. On the field, the Oakland Raiders' yoga adept Bill Romanowski -- best known for spitting on an opponent on national television -- tried in vain to stanch the Tampa Bay tide. Itinerant hipster Geoff Dyer slyly exploits the yoga craze in his new book, "Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It." Instead of practicing yoga, Dyer writes about losing his sunglasses and about watching porno in his hotel room while on a magazine assignment in Detroit.

A supple Yoga Lady showed up on the cover of the Jan. 20 issue of Time magazine. Maybe 20 million Americans practice yoga; does John Ashcroft know about this?

By way of personal disclosure, I should admit that I am not seeking inner peace, although, to paraphrase Mario Cuomo, I would not reject it were it thrust upon me. I attend yoga classes in the hopes of achieving better balance inside a rowing shell, where my bell-shaped physique contributes to a lack of stability. I realize that this is more than you wanted to know.

As it happens, a lot of yogis aren't seeking inner peace, either. Paul Keegan's hilarious recent article in Business 2.0 magazine, titled "Yogis Behaving Badly," documents the "mad dash to own a slice of divinity" that has characterized the yoga business in America. The No. 1 yoga bad boy is Bikram Choudhury of Beverly Hills, the Richard Simmons of the yoga world, who turns his studio thermostat up to as high as 105 degrees for his "hot yoga" practice.

Choudhury is best known for teaching Michael Jackson and Madonna, for running his mouth ("I'm beyond Superman") and for trademarking asanas, or yoga poses, which is a very un-yogic thing to do.

We have certainly come a long way since Swami Vivekananda ("The paragon of Vedantists" -- William James) introduced yoga practice in North America, at Chicago's World Parliament of Religions in 1893. Back then, many teachers taught for free. No longer. "Yoga has become cutthroat, Mafia-like," a teacher told Keegan. "Many of these people are the biggest thieves, bullies and sex addicts -- all of it under the veil of spirituality."

A friend introduced me to the delightful Kshatriya message board at pub42.ezboard.com/fyoga84291frm5, where the self-appointed Savonarolas of swami-tude hunt down and expose purported "yoga criminals" or "yoga crims." Said deviationists seem to be men and women callous enough to advertise their services as yoga experts and who -- their accusers claim -- are prone to exaggerate their proximity to the hot yogi of the moment.

Next door, as it were, is an Internet message board devoted to mixed relationships between yoga practitioners and non-yogis. ("Dating a non-yogi.") That's the kind of relationship I am in, I guess. One man confesses that he has been cheating on his wife, doing "it behind her back. Of course this involves a little lying. 'I need to get to work super early' or 'I have to work late' or catch a quick class during the lunch hour." What he is doing is yoga.

Let me tell you my favorite yoga story. Back when independent video stores still existed, one set up shop about a mile from my house. The front door featured a sign promising free rentals to students who brought in report cards with A's. The back of the store was given over to pornography. Maybe the store owners were run out of town. Maybe grade inflation ran them out of business. Whatever the case, the space has been taken over by a Bikram Choudhury franchise, steamy windows and all. A leading cultural indicator if ever I saw one.

So there's the selling point. Yoga: It's like pornography but generally healthier. Yes, I am aware that there is a whole yoga-and-sex thing out there, as well as a whole yoga-and-abstinence thing, practiced by Mohandas Gandhi, among others. Apropos of that, I have learned that my strain of yoga encourages sexual relations only when the man has been breathing through what adepts call the nighttime, or left, nostril. Fodder for another column, perhaps?

(courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle)


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Sexy Yoga Lesson - video powered by ToxicJunction.com

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