Newslinks
The John Friend/New York Times Kerfuffle
- John Friend (via nytimes)
Last weekend, the New York Times Magazine ran a mega-piece on John Friend, the founder of Anusara yoga. Some people thought it was glowing. Others found it off-base and needlessly negative. Now John Friend is out with a rebuttal. In his words, "I believe that there were several instances in the article in which information was twisted in order to make the article sensational and juicy." Here are a few of the points he refudiates:
- Anusara yoga is primarily designed as a business to make a lot of money.
- Anusara yoga has watered down the tradition of yoga.
- I ‘trash talk’ other yoga styles, and I have bad feelings with Iyengar Yoga.
- Anusara yoga is essentially Iyengar yoga.
- Anusara yoga is a cult around John Friend.
All false, says Friend. Though he doesn't completely blame The Times. As he most humbly states, "I certainly understand that no article will ever be able to convey the full truth or greatness of Anusara yoga."
He closes his note with an offer: "If you have never practiced Anusara yoga before, then tell your local Anusara yoga teacher that you read this blog, and I will cover your first class as a gift. Then you can make your own opinion." Read the full rebuttal on his website.
Friend is not alone in his rebuttaling. Elena Brower weighed in earlier this week in a comment on YogaDork (scroll down if you click through): "Anusara is a path of SERVICE; doing what we love, lighting people up, and watching them go about their lives with more integrity, calm and openness due to their practice. It’s not that exciting, from a journalistic point of view, so Ms. Swartz had to go ahead and fabricate the bits about the hotel room keys, the hilarious cult comment and even the bit about teachers proselytizing. I get it."
Anusara lovers, believers in the integrity of journalist Mimi Swartz, your thoughts?
- Charity D.'s blog
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Comments
Well, as someone who has practiced Anusara for close to ten years and is actually an Anusara-inspired teacher (though I really don't teach any more at all), I can tell you that we are trained to see the good in our students first and foremost. What is beautiful about their pose? What is working in terms of their alignment, attitude or action? Only then do we make suggestions as to how to better align the student.
Personally, however, I have found it extremely difficult to see the good in this article. I am a long-time Times reader and I devour the magazine every Sunday, but in my humble opinion the article was nothing short of a hatchet job. What this yoga does for people, by teaching them that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with them, and that by aligning the body, mind and heart, you align with your highest good off the mat as well, is nothing short of extraordinary.
I am not one to cut people much slack in general and have little patience for diva behavior, and I can tell you this: John is genuinely one of the kindest and most generous people I have ever met. His goals for Anusara and yoga in general are the goals of a path of service. Calling him the Yoga Mogul, and accusing him of being in it for the money, is so far off base it's almost laughable (e.g., where else would a CEO who makes roughly $100,000 a year be accused of being amorally-in-it-for-the-money?! I mean, PLEASE. Why aren't we having that conversation about folks like, say, Tony Hayward???). And my experience of Anusara yoga in general has been that it is about the empowerment of the individual and the community, not about the empowerment/enrichment of John Friend. John is emphatically not my guru. I respect what he has to offer. He is a tremendously gifted teacher. But what I have learned from Anusara yoga, and the spiritual traditions with which it aligns, is the the only guru I need is myself.
The yoga blogs have been on fire about this article, as have the Facebook status updates of all of those of us who teach or practice Anusara. Many, many people feel that this article was more than a little unfair, and more than a little twisted in the direction of the salacious for absolutely no explicable reason other than to make the article more marketable. My big sadness about it personally is that it stands to reason that the article itself, with all of its biases and untruths and misleading characterizations, may turn some people who have yet to experience Anusara away from a practice that honestly makes the world (yours individually, and the world in general) a better place. Whatever Mimi Schwartz was up to with this article certainly wasn't that.
Submitted by joesgirl on 07.29.10 at 09:52.
So beautifully expressed & written, joesgirl.
One of the most essential concepts that John emphasizes is each individual's "optimal blueprint." He clearly defines this as having the self-knowledge and self-sufficiency to judge what is best for one's own body, heart, & mind. In my 8 & 1/2 years as an Anusara Teacher, he has never wavered from this emphasis and always been there for me if I needed to talk to him about something, yet has NEVER once told me what to do or how to live my life. Do his students love him? Yes, we do. Why? Because he is a true teacher. He facilitates our own individual processes of learning about ourselves.
Submitted by Susanna Harwood... on 07.30.10 at 02:56.