From Slate, via Metafilter, a fascinating article:

The Hostile New-Age Takeover of Yoga

There's Nothing Worse Than Narcissism Posing As Humility

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against yoga—or Eastern disciplines in general. In fact, I've done tai chi exercises for many years.

No, it's the commodification and rhetorical dumbing-down of yoga culture that gets to me. The way something that once was—and still can be—pure and purifying has been larded with mystical schlock. Once a counterweight to our sweaty striving for ego gratification, yoga has become an unctuous adjunct to it.

There is the exploitative and ever-proliferating "yoga media." The advent of yoga fashion (the yoga mat, the yoga-mat carrier, and yoga-class ensembles). And worst of all, the yoga rhetoric, that soothing syrupy "yoga-speak" that we all know and loathe.

It all adds up to what a friend recently called the "hostile New Age takeover of yoga." "New Age" culture being those scented-candle shrines to self-worship, the love-oneself lit of The Secret, the "applied kinesiology"-type medical and metaphysical quackery used to support a vast array of alternative-this or alternative-that magical-thinking workshops and spa weekends. At its best, it's harmless mental self-massage. At its worst, it's the kind of thinking that blames cancer victims for their disease because they didn't "manifest" enough positive vibes.

...

 Hard to know if this belongs in Alternative Medicine or Anti-Intellectualism, but it's Assault on Reason alright. Eastern philosophy reduced to commodity form and then marketed ruthlessly to dippy women (sorry, ladies, it is mostly women). This relentless tide of New Age "alternative spirituality" schlock brings out the secular Savonarola in me. It's a tsunami of corrosive goo, dissolving everything in its path. These simpleminded fools could produce merchandise for asceticism and not see the problem. Live more simply, you fools.

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