chrysler’s doing yoga now?

So I was talking to a friend and yoga student the other day, and he mentioned yoga journal’s latest issue, which of course includes many pages of earnest yogis doing great poses. my friend mentioned a few particular pages that dismayed him because the poses were not part of a normal editorial section. these poses were paid for by chrysler.

this car-sponsored spread of yoga poses teaches us something about poses, to be sure, but to my friend’s point in a letter he wrote to the editors of this fast-changing magazine, it may teach us more about the necessity of something else: a dialog between the people who consider themselves students (surely we’re more than “enthusiasts?”) of this deeply internal practice, and the western media channeling millions of dollars to advertise its benefits.

what do you think? go buy a yoga journal and give aimmedia.com, its owner, more money and attention, so that we can talk sincerely about whether it’s ok for yoga journal to take money from a huge car company when it didn’t need to. to be sure, wholefoods and vegetarian times are two great entities benefiting from yoga journal’s rise, so a rising tide lifts all ships? or all cars?

january 22

Dear [yoga journal] Editors,

I just bought the February 2008 issue of Yoga Journal — my first in a while. I was really looking forward to reading it. But picking up the magazine and opening it was like bumping into a friend one hasn’t seen in a long time and having your breath taken away by how far along their cancer is — your magazine is simply being overrun, inch by inch, with ever more inappropriate advertising.

I’m sure you get lots of letters like mine, and have many answers to my objection — where do you draw the line; it’s all in the name of getting the good word out about yoga; and so on. I’m sure it’s very easy to dismiss letters like mine, and very hard to turn down Chrysler.

But please, somewhere in the back of your minds, at least register that one reader has given up on you. I know we’re all caught up in the ugly contradictions of capitalism; I know none of our hands is clean. Still, even so, when I see that your editorial staff has decided to produce an “article” in the YJ house style that is actually an ad for automobiles — automobiles! — I’m unable to read the rest of the magazine. I hope your hard-working writers will
accept my apologies.

Yours,

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 27th, 2008 at 2:15 pm and is filed under the boundless perspective, reading, yoga and business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.