Yoga Journal

I bought my first copy of Yoga Journal this month because Dawn has a cover story on forgiveness which is just lovely. But enough about that.

This post is about my first encounter with Yoga Journal, a magazine that many people have recently told me how much they love. My lack of encounters with Yoga Journal thus far has to do, I think, with my general lack of interest in self-help, which also relates to the fact that I never read parenting magazines, except in the pediatrician's office, where I'd rather read Parenting than Redbook, though really I'd rather read People. Basically, for me, there is a distinction between the things I do and the things I read, though the exception would be food writing, which I am quite interested in, though then again, with food, I might be more interested in the writing than in the eating, which would reinforce the doing/reading dichotomy (if you didn't follow that, I was trying to say that I don't feel the need to read about things I do...you know, this argument totally doesn't work, because I also like to read about travel, sometimes, so maybe it does come down to a broad definition of self-help/learning/informational writing that doesn't interest me, but I am no longer interested in this paragraph, so I will go on).

I could say really obvious things about Yoga Journal like "who knew there were so many yoga products?!" and "my, that thread of self-satisfied narcissism is practically a scarf" (trying to work with the thread metaphor there, but I'm not sure there's a viable image to substitute for Really Big Thread).

But what I really want to talk about, and this may go back to the self-help/learning/informational thing, is reading about yoga poses. For my birthday, I asked for yoga cards, and I got them, and I flipped through them, and I got really excited, and then I never used them. Why? Because I can't figure out how I'm supposed to read a card, or, especially, a sequence of cards, while I'm doing yoga. Do I read them first and then do my yoga really fast so I can remember? Or do I lay them out next to my mat and have to keep turning to look at them while I'm doing my yoga?

Same thing with these long articles about bow pose and backbend. Do I read them and gain new understanding and then go do yoga with a tranformed capacity? Do I fold the magazine open and put them next to my mat so I can refer to them mid-practice? But there's an awful lot of small print there, and it feels really un-yoga to be reading in the middle of yoga.

Seriously, I totally don't get it.

Perhaps the dirty little secret of Yoga Journal is that everyone is really reading it for the fancy yoga stuff, not the detailed instructions on poses.

Or maybe everyone else is just more enlightened than I am.

Edited to add: I just realized what I was talking about in that paragraph I lost interest in: how-to, I have no interest in how-to.