Is Ice Cube Appropriate in Yoga Class?

Here at TWEDP, we strive to educate our readers. In that spirit, we present the following comment that regular reader and yoga teacher extrordinare Andrea M. left on our FB wall:

“Seriously considered it as an option for rock your asana but then retracted last minute for fear of offending the tribe, who might not appreciate its eloquence.”

The “it” in question?

Now, I don’t know what kind of world Andrea lives in, but a world in which one cannot play Ice Cube freely in every situation is one in which the Taliban has already won.

But in MY world, the Taliban has not won!

In this world, Barack Obama jumped out a helicopter from 1,000 feet with no parachute, killed 17 Taliban nutjob guards using the ancient art of shadowboxing, and ripped Osama Bin Laden’s heart from his chest with his bare hands.

Barack Obama did not defend our freedom just to see us give us the very freedom that drove his vengeance.

So, for my country, I give you

A Spirited Argument To Play Ice Cube’s “Today Was a Good Day” in Yoga Class

Lyrics are in italics. Passionate ranting in regular font.  From the start, I should make it clear that I will concentrate on only those lyrics relevant to the practice of yoga.  Lots of rappers say lots of stuff.

Just waking up in the morning gotta thank God

I should be able to stop after this one line. Ice Cube's entire purpose in writing this song was to express gratitude. Here, he expresses gratitude for the new born day with a terse eloquence that the Dali Lama himself can appreciate, if not match. Gratitude may not be one of the four brahmavihāras towards which Master Patanjali points us, but gratitude is an extremely important virtue in yoga. If I'm not mistaken, the current sign in the front of the world's greatest yoga studio ever is one word, and it isn't "Shelly" (yet).

That sign says gratitude.

No barking from the dog, no smog
And momma cooked a breakfast with no hog

So what is Ice Cube grateful for? First, he is grateful for a clean environment. We yogis like the environment. You may have seen us driving our hybrids to yoga and eating expensive but pesticide-free organic food. We also like non violence, not just to fellow people but to animals as well. The masters are pretty clear that one fully devoted to yoga will give up meat entirely. Surely the masters would approve of Osage Jackson's refusal to touch that swine.

I got my grub on, but didn't pig out

Moderation. Ice Cube understands that gluttony disrupts equanimity, so he eats only what he needs to sustain himself.

Called up the homies and I'm askin y'all
Which park, are y'all playin basketball?

Physical activity is one of the eight limbs of yoga. Cube understands that a sharp body leads to a sharp mind, which is necessary for the meditation needed to achieve the highest states.

Plus nobody I know got killed in South Central L.A.
Today was a good day

First and foremost, Cube is grateful for life. Every day that you and your peoples all wake up is a good day. It's like Tibetan Buddhism in a Raiders hat and black Wranglers.

The Lakers beat the Supersonics

So a natural body of water defeated a sound only produced by a gas-guzzling, man-made artifice? Again, yogis love nature.

In conclusion, Ice Cube is a Zen prophet for the new era. TWEDP strongly endorses the playing of "Today Was a Good Day," "Black Korea," and other Cube classics in any and all yoga classes.

The Smartest Animals, featuring Phillies talk

One of the things I have learned in the first months of TWEDP is that fewer people read stuff on the weekend.  I need to get better at accounting for that fact in my writing, because the two posts I wrote this weekend are, in my opinion, among the best I've done so far.  So I'm going to cop out a bit today and ask that if you're looking to read some of that raw, uncut Shelly, check Saturday's entry about how to change the world or Sunday's entry about what Tara Stiles means for yoga.

Oh, and the Phillies signed Juan Pierre.

I'm not mad.  It's a minor league deal.  If he makes the team, he pinch runs, pinch hits when all other options are gone, and starts maybe 30 games.

Most importantly, the Phillies needed to address the scrapiness deficit facing their team and Major League Baseball.  For the Phillies, you can't just let the veteran know-how of Raul Ibanez leave and expect your team to remember how to play the right way.  Adding Pierre to the outfield rotation ensures that we have a guy who will teach all these fancy-pants high priced stars how to run hard and put their pants on one leg at a time.  The Phillies have also done a great service to Major League Baseball and BBWWA, which is reeling after the loss of its sweet, sweet prince.

Whatever.  You don't care about that, and neither does Takao.  You're just waiting for me to link to the greatest Fire Joe Morgan post in history.

Wish granted.

Dolphins on the Delaware, y'all!!

Tara Stiles: An Outsider's Perspective

For the uninitiated, Tara Stiles is one of yoga's It Girls.  She hangs with Deepak Chopra.  Her story is written up in the New York Times.  Now she's balling out with Ryan Reynolds in car commercials.

And Tara Stiles does not care what you think about her.

Let me clarify.  Stiles has been the subject of a huge amount of controversy within the yoga community.  Now, some of that criticism comes from, if I may be blunt, the type of women whose sole mission in life seems to be to hate on any woman who dares to be too young, too pretty, and too thin.

The flipside is, some of that criticism is legitimate worrying about what happens when yoga meets capitalism.  I am not all that thrilled that Stiles models some of the packaging for her products on The South Beach Diet.  The dieting culture in this country is really, really awful.  That Stiles is tying her brand to it makes her part of a really big problem.  And regardless of how Stiles came about her particular body type, it isn't and shouldn't be a legitimate aspiration for most women.

(Tangent: it's also not the body type guys want, for whatever that's worth.)

However, that's not what I find most interesting about Stiles.  What's most interesting is that Stiles is the first yoga celebrity I can remember who is building her career and brand with a complete disregard for the yoga establishment.  Stiles is undoubtedly more famous and popular than other rising stars of yoga like Kathryn Budig or Elena Bower, yet it's Budig and Bower who are on the covers of Yoga Journal and headlining conferences.  I haven't heard of Stiles touring around the world offering workshops.  I haven't heard any hardcore yogas talking about the amazing class they took at Strala, her studio.

Instead, Stiles seems to be about yoga for the non yogi.  She eschews chanting in her workshops.  She helps normal, everyday people meet the goals they want to meet, like weight loss.  She offers a class called "Yoga for a Hangover."

My purpose in writing this post is not to judge Stiles.  If you want to construct her trial, just Google her name, and you'll hear plenty of people praise and crucify her.  Besides, Stiles has probably forgotten more yoga than I ever knew.  She lived on an ashram, for God's sake.

My point is, regardless of what one thinks of her strategy, Stiles represents an interesting development for yoga in the West.  The people who built the yoga culture in the United States focused on building a tribe of people who would be committed to following yogic ideals and support them with their dollars.  Put another way, even Rodney Yee, undisputed king of the yoga DVD,  wanted his DVDs to lead viewers to class, where they would learn more about the history of yoga and start down the path that countless others have trod over the past four thousand years.  That insularity made everyone very, very rich.  Yoga is now an eight billion dollar a year industry, and I would wager that most money comes from people like me who consider yoga to be a central part of their lives.

Stiles is not Rodney Yee.  Publicly, at least, she doesn't care about the yogic tradition, and she sure doesn't care about the tribe.  She shows that it is now possible to have yoga for the masses in the West.  Her yoga seems to ask for no deep commitment and promises the practitioner no great spiritual breakthroughs.  And her yoga seems to say, you can be a housewife who watches Oprah and still do my yoga.  You don't have to be part of the tribe.  You don't have to wear hemp.  You can take showers.

So Stiles, to me, is ultimately more about the growth of the yoga business than anything else.  The yoga business seems to be no longer dependent on a subculture of true believers.  As if we needed anymore proof, Stiles' runaway popularity shows that yoga has penetrated the culture on the deepest possible level.  Yoga is part of the Spectacle, and we can sell yoga the same way we sell hamburgers.

How to Change the World

Anyone working in the nonprofit or foundation worlds can tell you about the emphasis on proof.  The people with the money necessary to make good things happen want to see evidence that the program they're funding makes a difference, usually in terms of measurable outcomes like higher standardized test scores for kids or rates of employment for adults.  And that's all great.  I'm a quantitative researcher, and I want to see proof of effectiveness too, especially because contemporary statistics provides us with a dizzying array of tools that allow us to measure and isolate effects of various factors.

And yet...

I just read this wonderful Washington Post article about ReWired for Life, the program started by Sonja Sohn, aka Kima from The Wire.  When Sohn started this program, she didn't have a solid research base that informed her approach.  Hell, it's not even clear that she had an approach, beyond a vague notion that the remedial class from Season 4 seemed promising.

What she does have, though, is a commitment to making a difference and the knowledge that the people she wants to help need to be equal partners in the endeavour. Educators know that the single most important step to helping anyone is getting him or her to buy in.  Once they're invested, once they care, you can get somewhere.  Incredibly difficult challenges will still arise, but if the person cares, the two of you can work through it together.  The two of you can figure out where s/he went wrong and how to avoid similar problems in the future.

The foundation of any effective program of uplift has to be a desire to engage.  Engagement is incredibly difficult because real engagement is a two-way process.  If you want to help people, you have to allow them to have a voice in how they want to be helped, and you have to be open to those times when they're going to help you.  Your program is absolutely going to change from what you intended.

I wonder if our focus on measurable impact gets in the way of engagement.  I kind of doubt whether Sohn's program will show statistically significant outcomes, at least in its first few years.  She's working with a very small sample size, and the kids in ReWired are the highest of high risk.  Maybe her biggest "obstacle" to demonstrating her program works is that, right now, she has a purposefully flexible program that changes to meet the needs of her partners, the kids she's trying to help.

Can a flexible program measure its impact in a way that will satisfy people obsessed with the bottom line?  Will enough donors recognize that ReWired for Life and programs like it represent our best chance at truly effective philanthropy and give them the chance to offer the people who need uplift a voice?

I really hope so, because, sh!t, reading about ReWired for Life gave me a great deal of hope.  Big ups, Kima Greggs.

Compassion: The Word of the Day

Actually, compassion is tied for Word of the Day status with "soy."  The homie Sprows just came up with the greatest sequel title ever: "Latte 2: You Soy Crazy."

But I digress.

It's been a trying few days.  I'm near the completion of an article, and anyone who's written anything for submission knows that those moments before you hand it are sheer terror.  Added to the general upheaval of my life right now, this article is kicking my a$$.  I'm tired a lot.  It's kind of tough to talk to people for very long.  I want to fill a swimming pool with Glenlivet and reincarnate Hunter S. Thompson to baptize me and wash/anesthetize my sins away.

After trying a bunch of different strategies today to deal with all my stuff, I finally decided that I was going to try to worry about the troubles of others for a while.  I'm working on compassion without expectation of immediate reward.  Of course, I hope unselfishly concerning myself with the well being of others plants those good karmic seeds that will send angels my way to help me out, but it's karma's job to worry about the return on my investment, not mine.  I'm interested in trying to help people just for it's own sake.

So if you see a bald guy walking down the street looking dazed and friendly in Chapel Thrill, know that he's just repeating a one-word mantra and looking for people to help.  If you need someone to help you move this weekend, you're in luck.  Holla.

This Post Includes You

Blogger makes it very easy to obsess over how many people are reading your blog.  You get day-by-day and post-by-post counts of how many people are reading.

Those of who know me know that I think I'm quite clever.  When I looked at my first round of post counts, it looked like the most popular posts had "yoga" in the title.  So earlier this week, I made sure to squeeze yoga into the post title.  This proved unsuccessful at spurring the masses to click.

So then I gave it another look.  It turns out the most popular posts were those with titles that seem the most approachable.  Big, pompous words didn't work.

I should have known better, since I spend a good part of my time telling undergraduates to take big words and jargon out of their papers.  All those words do is put up barriers between you and your audience.  The key to good writing is to express complex ideas completely but in the simplest possible terms.

Also, I think pictures matter.  So here's a man pretending to be a hobo.  His clothes are way too new, and his features far too unforked, for him to be the real deal.

Early Bonus Scotchtime Manichean Madness

Note: I cheated a little and wrote this last night, while drinking scotch to numb the damage my idiot dentist wrought.  Warning given.

I believe Lovecraft.

Who I haven't even read yet.

But mean to.

(Once I found out that one-sentence paragraphs annoyed Takao, I dedicated my life to them.)

Anyway, I believe H.P. Lovecraft.  The universe is big and huge and scary and doesn't care about us even a little.  We are scared and alone and can't possibly comprehend the forces that are not aligned against us, but are completely indifferent towards us.

And yet.

And yet.


I believe Morrison.

As a species, we are destined to evolve and transcend.  We are all united, and united we will breach the walls of the possible, and it will be glorious beyond any words, and it is already happening.

You are a light.

Don't waste it.