It's kind of like the word "hacking", which to the mass market refers to the activity of taping two batteries together with an LED or making proper use of placebos.
Sucks, right?
You either need to adhere to things in their true spirit or just do some thing else.
Also the title in this article is highly misleading. Yoga won't wreck your body.
Rather it will take you a level higher. Like the Buddha! It will let you ponder on the deepest meaning of your existence.
Its very sad that its being marketed in America this way. Some time back I read somewhere that meditation is being marketed as 'hallucination'. That is by taking narcotics and dangerous intoxicants!
This is really sad.
So those people whose bodies were wrecked doing yoga - and several specific examples were given in the article - I assume they weren't doing yoga? Sounds like the Fallacy of the True Scotsman to me.
Those Christians who steal, they aren't really Christians, right? Those Jews who let men and women mix in the synagogue, do they "adhere to things in their true spirit"?
And so on. Those who claim that there is a true way walk a dangerous path.
Exactly. As pointed out by the OC, Yoga is about ridding the ego and assuming awareness. "those people" were not practicing that at all, but rather the exact opposite. They were pushing themselves to do things they were not ready to do in the spirit of ego (or "I should be able to do this by now.").
>Those who claim that there is a true way walk a dangerous path.
This is true, however I believe it to be misapplied in this case. You could also say "That person eating an orange, how can you say he is not eating an apple? Is there not more than one way to eat an apple?"
When you say "apple", virtually no one will think "citrus fruit, orange color" etc. We generally agree on what an apple and orange are.
If you say "yoga", however, and 80% of the people listening to you think of flexibility/twisting/poses/etc., you can't say "you're all wrong; I'm more expert than you".
It's frustrating when words and concepts are diminished and twisted in the process of greater adoption, but it's very common.
The reason people do yoga (as it's most often done in the US) is because it appears to: "lower your blood pressure, make chemicals that act as antidepressants, even improve your sex life."
Once you take out the "as most often practiced in the US" then the entire article is of course null and void. But since it's premised on differences between the US and India, like how Americans more often sit on chairs than on the floor, that's of course to be expected.
If you use another definition for "yoga", then you take away the bad parts, but then you also take away the attributed good parts. How do you know that the "pure" form of yoga is better at lowering blood pressure, etc. than the US form of the same? What's the cost benefit analysis?
As the essay rightly points out, yoga as it's taught in the US rarely includes the negatives. Apparently from various others in this thread, there are no negatives for yoga done right. Is this because every injury is attributed to not doing it right, or to the lack of good statistics on the matter? I presume both.
This article was much more along those lines than the example you gave here. It often uses the term "yoga exercise" or "position", etc. and to state the specific action which caused an injury, or in the case of bikram yoga, to state a physical negative effect that it can have on the body.
In other words, it's what 80% of the population uses, and stated in such a way that the other 20% can tell exactly which of the many definitions of "yoga" the author means.
Not that I entirely disagree with you. I have no problem with observing a group performing such acts and pretending to define themselves within the collective for a group in which their activities really do not apply. I can certainly agree with saying "Fine, let them be." Until those activities begin to reflect badly upon the real collective, and then you must come out and explicitly distinguish between the real and the imaginative.
The author of the NYT article appears cognizant of the differences in different yoga forms, and of its history in the US and in India. This article uses proper usage of one of the many accepted meanings for "yoga", in a way that's understood by the readers and by domain experts.
Were real hackers to complain in my scenario, then to them I say "you've lost." They don't get to decide language, and real black-hat hackers embrace the term for themselves while many proficient white-hack hackers do not. People in the 1990s tried to introduce the term "cracker" as a substitute but that didn't take. The war is lost. Embrace (or accept) the white hat/black hat spectrum and get over it.
To yoga people who care about the precise term, just start saying the specific kind of yoga you mean. And don't call it "true" or "real" yoga.
About liking it or not -- well, I don't like it, I care deeply about clarity of communication, and I despise how many debates on subjects like evolution, abortion, and all things political are derailed by (sometimes intentional) muddling of words' definitions.
So certainly, if you can convince everyone to re-adopt the original, more useful definition, then you have won and I salute you. Certainly you have the right to try -- sometimes it's very important to try and wrestle words back from the brink of uselessness.
But if you can't, then you are the odd one out. If everyone says "hacker" and means "someone who does stuff I don't like using computers", when you use the word with another meaning in mind, you are failing to communicate.
And the dictionaries will eventually start putting "archaic" after your definition.
In my world, if you tell someone you're "hacking", they assume you're breaking into a bank, or changing your grades in the school computer.