News from Alabama: after a 23-year ban on yoga in schools, generated by a Republican moral panic, Governor Kay Ivey signs a bill that lets kids do yoga again, but with some restrictions:“All instruction in yoga shall be limited exclusively to poses, exercises, and stretching techniques. All poses shall be limited exclusively to sitting, standing, reclining, twisting, and balancing. All poses, exercises, and stretching techniques shall have exclusively English descriptive names. Chanting, mantras, mudras, use of mandalas, induction of hypnotic states, guided imagery, and namaste greetings shall be expressly prohibited.”Those who promote yoga as a universal good will welcome this Indian art form being made more accessible for children in a State with terrible educational markers. Hindu nationalists, on the other hand, may be outraged at a secularized version of yoga, stripped not only of references to Hinduism, but of signs of any type of Indian spirituality. And a lot of white yoga progressives will look at this policy—mostly from the urban North— and worry about authenticity and appropriation.How will the children feel?In considering who wins and loses with this new development, Matthew reviews recent U.S. yoga-war history: battles between the Hindu American Foundation and Yoga Journal, the rise of Christian non-yoga-yoga “Praise Moves”, and Encinitas Union School District got sued for allegedly violating the Establishment Clause by contracting devotees of Pattabhi Jois to teach the kids yoga.It’s not a stretch to see an overlap between this theme and the medical-moral panic over vaccines. In both cases, the focus is on the imagined corruption of children, whether by poison, politics, or inner quiet.Show NotesAlabama lifts three-decade-old ban on yoga in public schools—with a catch.New study ranks Alabama as 43rd for student achievement, grade of D+12 Reasons Why Yoga is NOT Good for ChristiansHindu Group Stirs Debate in Fight for Soul of YogaHindu American Foundation: Hindu Roots of YogaShukla’s letter: Is Hindu a bad word?
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What will yoga do to our children?
An interesting story came across the transom last week.
The headline and slate was, Alabama lifts three-decade-old ban on yoga in public schools.
With a catch.
So, after a 23-year ban on the teaching of yoga in the public schools of Alabama, new legislation is opening the doors again.
And it's undoing, according to the report, quote, a 1993 Alabama Board of Education move to prohibit the practice of yoga, as well as meditation, in the state schools.
A push that was fueled by what the Montgomery Advertiser described as a moral panic among the state's right-wing conservative set.
Okay, so they're lifting this ban on yoga, but they've imposed some conditions, and here's from the text of the bill.
All instruction in yoga shall be limited exclusively to poses, exercises, and stretching techniques.
All poses shall be limited exclusively to sitting, standing, reclining, twisting, and balancing.
All poses, exercises, and stretching techniques shall have exclusively English descriptive names.
Chanting, mantras, mudras, use of mandalas, induction of hypnotic states, guided imagery, and namaste greetings shall be expressly prohibited.
So, on one hand, this story is about a red state with some of the lowest educational achievement ratings in the country loosening up, seeing the light, allowing kids to do some damn yoga, although without all of the ostensibly religious trappings.
If there are any, we'll get to that.
But on a deeper level, this story is about how a culture war over religious identity, with serious implications for geopolitics, becomes narrowed down to an obsession over the inner lives of children.
Okay, so where am I coming from with this?
I'm turning 50 this year, and when I went to an anachronistically traditional Catholic school in the 1970s and 1980s, I was taught to pray all of the prayers.
Often the prayers were performed in public, in class, at church rituals.
And I remember a lot of tension between the words and the meanings and the bodily affect one was meant to have, an affect of deference or surrender.
As a crowd control technique, it had its utility.
Teachers couldn't tell if you were having the appropriately pious feelings, but they could tell whether you had stopped goofing off, whether you were placid.
The other performative zone for prayer in my world was occupied by the nona squads.
These were older Italian or Portuguese women, often in mourning, wearing black, who would sit together in a section of the church to somberly and really, really quickly recite the rosary.
They were also stiff and resolute in their own way, but not like us boys.
It was more that their recitations were holding the rhythms of their communities together, much like their recipes held together their tables.
Their husbands had died of lung cancer, chain smoking on the construction or landscaping crews.
Their sons were out drinking.
But the rosary held them in history like a glittering fence around a perfect garden.
In the prayer instruction I received, there were a few hints that pointed to what prayer might be like in privacy.
There was this one kindly closeted gay priest who welcomed us to a retreat one time with a joke.
I hope you all brought your mirrors because we're going to do a lot of reflecting this weekend.
Sometimes you'd see the priests alone in the chapel.
I remember seeing Father Armstrong in the dingy school chapel, sitting in these slanting bars of dusty sunlight.
I remember wondering if he was lonely.
I also remember that if he went to confession, you were given prayers as penance, and those were to be done in private, of course.
I remember being haunted by the verse from St.
Matthew.
When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men.
But when you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father who is unseen.
So my take was that Jesus was saying that the inner life was private.
It had nothing to do with these buildings, or with anything a person taught you to do, or with any display.
I think that later on I took that verse into my writing life.
Before the internet, writing was an utterly cloistered process for me.
I do know one man who works like that still.
He's in his 70s.
He writes novels that are exquisitely untouched by the online world.
He has no social media accounts and never will.
Imagine that.
I wonder if I'll ever have that level of solitude again.
I remember that in the first room I rented in the Annex in Toronto, 1988, there was no plaster on the walls.
I was 17.
I had a desk and a chair made from milk crates.
I had candles at night because the lights were out.
I stayed up most of the night to write, maybe waking up with a few lines completed.
And that was my pre-internet confessional.
That's what prayer eventually became for me.
The one thing about that prayer, however, that was never in doubt, whether in the public performance or the private experience, was the content of belief.
The content was Christian mystery and doctrine.
The object of the prayer was God or Jesus or the Holy Spirit.
Once in a while, as a child, I would sit under the dome of the cathedral, alone, and give my inner voices permission to be quiet.
But I could only really do that within the container of the prayers, As though they had cut the proper grooves into my mind to make sure the blessings of God would flow inward and properly and support what I already knew to be true.
That creation was of God and so was human growth as well as trials and the triumphs that would bring us back to Him.
I can't actually remember when I became agnostic and then perhaps even atheistic.
It had to do mainly with seeing the blatant hypocrisy of clerics.
Seeing how wide a gap there was between the platitudes and the behaviors.
I remember that quite quickly, sitting in the cathedral, shifted from a glowing awe to a sense of anxiety as my piety dissolved.
That said something about the awe.
The awe had clearly been a defense against something more palpable.
And one day, the most disquieting thought occurred to me.
