Lauren Imparato, a former finance worker, begins a yoga class in her SoHo loft by singing arbitrary religious phrases in Sanskrit and asking us to imagine a “perfect blue light” building within us.
She then cranks up her latest playlist, a mix of Jackson 5, Frank Sinatra and Notorious B.IG., while hustling us from one pose to another as if it were a fierce game of Twister played within a 30-second time limit.
The class description calls it “athletic yoga.” Other studios refer to it as “power yoga.”I think it’s blasphemy.
The environment in the room is heavy, everyone is peering under legs and between arms to see who is bending deeper or opening wider and the competition feels as uncomfortably constricting as the headband on the girl next to me.
As she sees me get into pigeon pose, she immediately accelerates into mermaid. Although her form is wrong, her pose is advanced. That means she’s winning yoga, right?
Imparato is one of many Westerners who became a self-proclaimed yogi (the correct term for women who study yoga actually being “yogini” denotes this as the first of many misconceptions). After seven years working in finance, the 2008 economic crisis spurred Imparato to leave her position as Vice President at Morgan Stanley to launch I.AM.YOU., a lifestyle company and yoga studio in her SoHo loft, in the spring of 2009.
She felt there was no refuge in “hard working urbanities,” and that our “aching bodies” need proper nourishment, according to her company’s website.
But the way in which Imparato understands and applies these words are so Western that I cannot say she is actually practicing yoga.
Yoga is an ancient practice, which Imparato and those like her have failed to truly appreciate.
The word yoga itself, often incorrectly translated as “to yoke,” actually means the noun, “teaching,” something studied for years, understood over time and a way of life that infiltrates your mentality. It is not an activity that you can conquer.
Yoga is not about the poses – not really. It is about discipline. Yoga, as part of my Hindu faith, is taught in order to help us learn awareness. It is as much a part of my belief as lent is for Catholics. When it’s sensationalized, exoticized and misused, it is an actual offense to myself and others like me, having practiced yoga for seven years religiously and for medical reasons. The sanctity of it is lost in translation.
Today, anyone can take a 200-hour training and become a certified yoga instructor. This gives them the privilege to call themselves yogis and to preach a lesson that, more often than not, they do not truly understand.
This is not to say that I don’t appreciate “athletic yoga” – I very much do. But I will not count this as a part of my yogic study because it explicitly contrasts the texts and teachings. It tells me to turn my awareness outward rather than inward. It makes me get into poses I am not ready for. It lets me forget that my breath is the most important part of my action.
Until Imparato turns off her iTunes and begins to be more generous with her teachings, to understand the truth rather than to preach her interpretation, I will not classify her practice as yoga, nor herself as a yogini.
Note: The article referred to on Bloomberg is titled “Princeton Grad Quits Morgan Stanley to Teach Yoga to Bankers” by Katya Kazakina, published on August 12, 2009.
