EP94 Strung Out in the Attention Economy

After nine years of owning and operating a yoga center in one of the most popular neighborhoods on the planet, I was approached by a broker inquiring if I was interested in selling my business. Nine months later, I closed on a deal and handed over the keys. What I have learned in the process has given me new perspective on why owners sell and how easily it can tarnish the hearts of teachers.    

Something has happened to the way I see myself in relationship to time, and the amount of life that is being spent behind a screen. For a while, I had a handle on my use of technology and my digital life seemed empowering and mind-expanding. But, of late, things seem to devolve easily into a grey zone of succumbing to the more manipulative aspects of our systems and the mentalities that govern them.    

In the post-lineage void of the current yoga scene, conversations around safety and improving the quality of yoga teacher-training often turn to biomechanics for solutions. However, replacing one arbitrary imposition on our bodies with another does not address the real issues. Fostering safer spaces for practice, or creating any sort of positive change in our bodies, will likely require new understanding based on a broader range of possibilities and ideas.    

Pop culture continues to enjoy a glossy-eyed love affair with yoga. But many long-time practitioners and professionals are discovering that, somewhere along their journey over the last decade or so, either yoga or they have changed. As once die-hard yogis attempt to discern what, if anything, of their practice has stood up against the test of time, their relationship to yoga needs to be allowed to evolve or they’ll likely feel compelled to part ways.    

Yoga Journal has announced that it is doing a "reset" on all of its annual conferences. There will be no more Yoga Journal Conferences for the rest of 2017 while they attempt to re-imagine the model and figure out a way to make them relevant and profitable again. For those who are invested in the yoga profession, it’s not clear whether the crumbling of this institution is a canary in a coal mine or a crow outside our window.  

It’s official. I will be closing my yoga center down at the end of this year. The hipster pond that I once helped homestead a decade ago has come to a boil quicker than I could have foreseen, and the only sensible thing to do is come up with an exit plan. Contrary to the common meme though, I don’t think the ‘studio model’ is disappearing. I always knew that my time for an ending would come. I have witnessed the pattern enough to predict that an operation like mine can only keep pace with the rents for so long before getting priced out. What is surprising is how fast it happens and how hard it is to accept when the numbers turn against you. It’s easy to place blame somewhere. With myself for not running the business better. Or with the NYC real estate market for acting so seemingly against its own interests and humanity. Or with a larger economic system that is based on a grow-or-die model which precludes a healthy stasis for community-supported businesses.    

For a long time, I relished the way I could “crack” my back and neck. Just the right turn of my torso would send a ripple of clicks and releases along my spine. My idea about it was that those cracks were “unsticking” the gears of my body-machine. But there was also an underlying pattern playing itself out. Those cracks were a symbol of sorts, they represented all the breakthroughs and “tapas” I had accomplished through my many years of diligent practice. The cracks felt good, at least until they didn’t anymore.  

I grew up in the eighties. My folks moved from NY to Los Angeles and settled into the comfort of a big house, two-car garage, and three kids. We were never in want for money. My dad made millions as the vice president of a huge construction firm. I was raised to believe that there was no limit to what I could attain. The milieu of my childhood is best exemplified by a t-shirt that hung in my dad’s closet, and would sometimes be bandied around for laughs, it read: “He who dies with the most toys wins.” In the nineties, I moved from LA to NY for college and rejected the era of my upbringing as representing a glorification of the superficial. I was one of the x-generation slackers who grew up alongside the corporatization of America, whose only defense against the takeover of everyday life was feigned apathy. On some level, I felt despair over something I could not explain but, being young and without a sense of consequence, I still believed that I was entitled to more.

A number of long-time yoga teachers are deciding to stop referring to what they teach as yoga. In the past, the term yoga represented a freedom to explore and discover truths outside western cultural norms. Now that yoga has largely become a western cultural norm, fueled by the advertising prowess of a multi-billion dollar industry and challenged by scholars questioning appropriation, public perception has been shaped in ways that have made the word yoga seem limiting. However, the teachers are the only ones who hold the power to define what they do, not scholars or the industry.

The novelty of yoga has been worn down to almost nothing by a multi-billion dollar industry that cares little for its tenets, like the crumbling shreds of a shoddily made pvc mat from China. But from out of the ashes of craven images and advertising schemes, a new discipline is emerging.