Other stand-out chapters were those on the poses, cultural appropriation, white guilt and meditation. I really appreciated her thoughts about teachers and how they continue to teach us even when we are not in direct contact with them anymore. And while we have wildly different life experiences, I have been in similar positions of asking “spiritual” teachers questions they’d rather I hadn’t brought up and leaving a room feeling like an impostor, simply because I wasn’t nodding along with everyone else. It’s nice to see it expressed by someone else, it made me feel a little less insane. The fundamental nature of social media being performative, it is in very sharp opposition to the nature of yoga, which is self-reflective, so the combination ends up feeling, well, gross. She perfectly articulated why I have very mixed feelings about yoga classes, people who post their practice incessantly on Instagram and the possibility of doing a yoga teacher training myself. The entire book is wonderful, but I was especially happy to read her chapter called “Wealth and Other American Values”, and that she seems to have coined the brilliant expression “yoga industrial complex” to describe the aggressive commodification of yoga in America (I use the word in the continental sense, to include Canada). A quick glance at other reviews and at a few articles that mention this book shows that she ruffled some feathers – and I am glad she did.
If you’ve read her previous book, you know she curses, that she’s hilarious and brutally honest, and she remains so in this book as well. Just so we are clear, this is not a how-to yoga book, but rather a collection of essays about Jessamyn’s relationship to yoga and to those things that are connected to it, and about the constant balancing art that is being a human being on this fucked up planet.
), so it goes without saying that as soon as Jessamyn Stanley’s new book was available, I made sure to get a copy ASAP. I don’t use the expression “yas, queen” because as a geriatric millennial, it seems forced but if I did use it, I would have used it a lot reading this wonderful little book.
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