Yoga, New York Style: The Jivamukti Yoga Centre
this article appeared in Yoga magazine, March 2003
‘Madonna goes there.’ So said my coolest friend of the Jivamukti yoga centre in Manhattan. So, when stranded there for a week, with the luxury of free time in the crisp New York days, I decide to take in some classes. After all, who am I to argue with such credentials. Dressed in a tatty t-shirt and the leggings I was planning to sleep in, I head downtown.
Up an unpromising staircase, the door opens into a small and perfectly-formed space, dominated by a long counter behind which skulks a spotty girl. I engage her in conversation but we clearly have different approaches. I think I am asking perfectly reasonable questions about class sizes, dress and price. She clearly thinks that I am unreasonably, perhaps laughably, demanding top secret information, so unwilling is she to enlighten me. I do my best to check the aggressive tone already absorbed from two days in New York and decide to leave her alone with a final simple query about whether I would need a jumper or something for the relaxation part of the class. ‘Well,’ begins Spotty, ‘I think it gets pretty warm. I mean whenever I’ve had to interrupt class to give a message or something, I open the door and it’s like, so warm,’ she starts to get excited at this point, ‘I mean, all your auras are flying in my face?’ I reel back with a muttered thanks, appaled at this image. And intrigued. My aura, as far as I am aware, has never conspired to fly off and bump anyone on the nose. In fact, I’m pretty sure it has always stayed very close to my body, shining in a peaceful and, well, auric way. I walk past the counter and into the centre proper, hoping all the time my aura is not loitering at the counter having a go at Spotty.
In the little shop which forms the entrance to the centre, New Yorkers are doing what they like best of all, shopping. Be this soul purchases or merely material, these women are gliding around the small space (here is one place in Manhattan where no-one rushes. Outward signs of enlightenment are a low sing-song voice and a determinedly slow walk), clutching an array of Jivamukti clothing, holding their chakratees to their chests while rifling through racks and pulling out drawstring pants in the unmistakable manner of those hellbent on a bargain. Well, there aren’t many to be found here. Despite the centre’s assertion that ‘the products have been carefully selected to inform, support and enrich all aspects of your yoga practice’, this obviously doesn’t include the health of one’s wallet: most of the clothing hovers around the $70 price mark while a scrap of a sleeveless t-shirt (or rather, a chakratee) which I mistook for a bandanna starts at $20. But clothes aren’t all; there are video tapes, CDs, books and all sorts of what we used to call ‘hippy shit’: incense, beads, bindis, candles, essential oil products, Om watches and brightly-coloured deity posters. The piÅce de resistance, though, is the ‘mantra clock’, a kitsch alarm clock which wakes you by chanting the mantra of your choice. ‘Wake up and remember your Divine nature!’ exclaims the blurb without a hint of irony. I recall about a decade ago in London when friends would come back from the beaches of Goa (in the days before package holidays and local police clamp-downs on trance parties) with such items, all trying to outdo each other in ‘spiritual kitsch’, days when you would visit Wong Singh Jones on the Portobello Road (now replaced by a designer coffee shop) and laugh at such novelty pieces. It feels strangely dislocating to find New Yorkers embracing such crap so earnestly.
The lack of irony has always put me off such places. I respect people’s beliefs and admire commitment to a way of life, and I even find the enthusiasm with which converts embrace a new set of rules charming and bordering on the innocent. What I cannot understand is why adopting a spiritual practice seems so often to mean losing one’s sense of humour. If you are going to believe in God, or some form of creation and creator, then surely a quick glance around the created world would be enough to convince anyone that God has the best laugh of all. And since New York City has always been the place with the best sense of humour in the US, it is discouraging to think that those lovely tough, neurotic, fast, rude and darkly comic New Yorkers are in danger of not seeing the funny side of a mantra speaking alarm clock.
Their literature mentions that both Sting and Willem Defoe are clients here. Perhaps I am alone in feeling uncomfortable with such blatant celeb-displays. Perhaps it is the difference between a London sensibility and a New Yorkone, but I can’t help thinking that the worth of a yoga centre depends on the quality of the teaching and the suitability of the space, not who goes there. And the space is very nice:just after the shop there is a special wall down which trickles water and up which shine lights, while the rest of the walls are painted in shades of purple. Certainly it is small, but well-arranged. The prices are not, however, so soothing: spiritual insight comes at a price of $15 a class and for better spiritual development, In-Class Private (ie having a teacher purely for concentrating on just you while you take a public class) and 1-On-1 private classes start at $75 an hour. By the way, ‘spiritual insight’ and ‘better spiritual development’ are their words, not mine. And to see spiritual development openly linked with price paid made my heart go out to all those spiritually-hungry folks out there. How they pay and pay.
It’s comforting to know that only those with money can attain spiritual enlightenment. Particularly tempting to think of Nirvana as being populated by such luminaries as Madonna: will there be a VIP room or will we all be allowed to be in bliss together? Will we have to listen to her tuneless chanting for eternity? Or will William Orbit be on hand to twiddle the right celestial sonic knobs? Indeed, is celebrity itself a form of higher consciousness?
With such questions circling in my mind, Ifind the studio for the class. With some difficulty I squeeze into a tiny space in the corner of the small room high above the flow of the Manhattan traffic. The teacher bounces in, a younger version of Mary Tyler-Moore with shorn hair and an improbably wide smile. It soon become clear why: as she led us through the various postures and weaved through the forest of legs, she told us, again and again, at the sort of volume reserved for training soldiers, that she was ‘in ecstasy. And I want EVERYONE to be in ecstasy.’ Or a variation on the theme: ‘yoga brings you to ecstasy. Iwant to share this ecstasy that I have found’. So for all this enthusiasm, it is unfortunate that during the relaxation at the end of the class, when we are all somewhere on our way to our own Nirvanas, she mistakenly turns the chanting music designed to bring us gently back to top volume. We all plummet gracelessly down to earth. ‘Sorry,’ she shouts and smiles broadly, sharing her ecstasy. I file out of the class, down the corridor, past the trickling wall, the shop with its artfully shot calendars of the emaciated owners twisted into difficult postures (peacock pose for April, anyone?) and Spotty Girl who is engaged in animated conversation with Ecstasy Teacher. I throw a watery smile at them as I turn out of the door. They both look away.