Monday, April 20, 2015

The Ethics of Self-Improvement: truth in advertising from a non-dual perspective

The mythology of transformation is the cornerstone of advertising.  Offering to reduce the large and small discomforts inherent in being human, what we yogis might call dukkha, is the bread and butter of marketing.  Our dissatisfaction with ourselves and the world around us is used as a lure to entice us to buy cars, soda, shampoo, and every other product on the planet – even, sadly, yoga.  Though the philosophy of yoga indicates that each of us is entirely composed of the divine, the marketing of yoga tends to enforce the same tired illusions, or samskaras – that we are incomplete, flawed, probably even bad at the core, and that the practice of yoga (or its many accessories) can lead us toward the realization of radiance we hope to someday embody.  After all, if you thought the whole world was contained within you, what would you really need to buy?  For those working in the business of advertising our yoga classes, workshops, teacher trainings, and products, the quest to create ethical marketing can be as hard as asking our students not to round their backs in Ardha Uttanasana.  The question becomes can we entice students to give us their money without promising change?  Or is there a type of change we can promise that doesn’t stand at odds with our philosophical beliefs?

For the purpose of this paper, I will be using the viewpoint of non-dual Śaiva Tantra as the philosophical touchstone.  There are other philosophical concepts that could be referenced as “the philosophy of yoga,” but this is the one that resonates with my viewpoint and life experience and is the direction I reference when I have questions about how to proceed.  In his excellent book Tantra Illuminated, Christopher D. Wallis defines non-dual Śaiva Tantra (NŚT) in this way:

NŚT holds that one thing alone exists: the Divine, in various permutations.  To say that God alone is real is the same as saying everything exists is God.  In NŚT, to experience this divinity in and as all things is the goal of the practice. …[NŚT] is based on the teaching that all things are manifestations of the Goddess.  Therefore the body was seen not as a locus of sin and impurity, as in the pre-Tantrik tradition, but rather as a vehicle to realize divine reality.

One of the distinctions of Tantrik philosophy is its lack of a battle cry for self-improvement.  The Tantrik practitioner is not called to purify or refine herself, is not asked to participate in austerities.  Even participating in the illusion that oneself is separate from the totality is thought of as part of the divine play – a masking veil dropped by the Goddess in order to experience separateness and the eventual awakening into connection.  One may become drawn to yogic practices and holy scriptures as this play unfolds, or one may receive a direct transmission of the truth without having done any “work” at all beforehand.  However the veil begins to fall is thought of as an act of grace, not something that can be earned by devotion to practice, social standing, religious sentiment, or the like.  The practitioner does not have to earn it, and actually can’t.  

At first glance, most yoga advertising does not seem to create a conflict with the concept of an already-existing inner divinity.  There are some glaring exceptions, (such as internationally-known vinyasa teacher Sadie Nardini’s marketing for The 21 Day Yoga Body, which is touted as a “fast-acting program” to “renovate your mind, body, and spirit”), but most yoga advertising seems to use language with a fairly gentle brush.  A recent edition of Yoga Journal magazine included advertisements encouraging the reader to “Explore the Power of You” (Kripalu), “Find Your Serene” (Source Naturals), “Help People Let Go” (Mindbody), and to “Nourish Yourself” (Special K).  Yogi Tea asks “How good can you feel?” and Tom’s of Maine insists that, “We believe what’s inside matters.”  While this language doesn’t go so far as to support the realization of divinity in all things, it doesn’t contradict it either. 

But words are the smallest part of any yoga advertisement.  What really sells are the pictures, and, in yoga advertising, there are lots of pictures.  A quick perusal of any yoga advertisement reveals what’s really on offer here:  thin, young, strong, flexible, white women.  The 100-page November 2014 edition of Yoga Journal magazine included no less than 38 distinct advertising images of thin, young, strong, flexible, white women, and that’s counting paid advertising only, excluding the similar images used in the magazine’s actual stories.  In comparision, advertising presented 4 women of non-white ethnicities, 3 non-white men, and nobody fat, old, or differently abled.  A review of almost any yoga-focused magazine, website, or book will reveal a similar narrow visual focus.  Should we assume that most yogis are thin, young, strong, flexible, white women?  Many professionals in this industry with firsthand knowledge of the diversity of their student populations would argue against the truth of this assumption.  To understand the gross predominance of these images, we must remember the purpose of advertising: to convince the consumer of a need for something she doesn’t already have.

The yoga industry knows who we are, and it knows what we want.  Thinness is offered as a benefit of yoga by everyone from national registry Yoga Alliance (“weight management”), to the American Osteopathic Association (“weight reduction”), to the local yoga studio (Balanced Yoga, Columbus, OH – “weight loss and/or weight management).  The phrase “weight management” in this setting has to be understood as a euphemism for becoming thinner – one is unlikely to read this benefit as a way to gain a few or stay exactly as one is.  Yoga Alliance elucidates:

While most of the evidence for the effects of yoga on weight loss is anecdotal or experiential, yoga teachers, students, and practitioners across the country find that yoga helps to support weight loss.  Many teachers specialize in programs to promote weight management and find that even gentle yoga practices support weight loss.  People do not have to practice the most vigorous forms of yoga to lose weight.  Yoga encourages development of a positive self-image, as more attention is paid to nutrition and the body as a whole.  

With this kind of open-ended and unspecified evidence, one could easily replace the word “yoga” in the above paragraph with any sort of movement activity.  Why list this as one of the benefits of yoga?  Because everyone wants to be thinner, and yoga is what Yoga Alliance has to sell.  While thinness is used as an example here, this theme is consistent throughout all of the photographed attributes.  Advertisers know we want to be thinner, younger, stronger, and more flexible – these are easy commonalities, low-hanging fruit.  These desirable attributes also compose a cultural agreement about what it means to be beautiful.  In reality, when we attempt to sell yoga, we end up selling beauty instead.

Casting one’s lot with the quest for beauty is financially a very smart move.  The beauty industry is estimated to have garnered $426 billion dollars in sales in 2011, with numbers heading ever upward.  This industry establishes demand by creating increasingly unattainable “standards,” offering images of these extremes as a cultural norm, and then offering to sell the consumer a product or service to help her bridge the gap between the flawed self and the perfected self.  We could be talking about longer lashes and healthier hair, or tighter tummies and perkier buns, or an unwaivering Natarajasana and an effortless Bakasana.  In the world of advertising it’s all the same:  Offer an image of perfection to highlight the consumer’s inability and insecurity, and then sell, sell, sell.

What are the risks of this tactic?  Marketing like this helps us keep our yoga studios open and our classes filled.  Many yoga businessmen and women would argue that we get them in the door with the simple stuff and let the practice fill in the blanks over time.  You come in the door for handstand and we sell you inner peace.  You come for your bad back and leave aware of your connection to the divine.  Is this wrong?  In Tantra Illuminated, Wallis argues against this deception in this way:

The great master Abhinava Gupta suggests to us that if you practice yoga from the perspective that you are not good enough as you are, or that there is something wrong with you that needs fixing, then your yoga cannot fulfill is ultimate purpose because it is a practice founded on wrong understanding. …However, if you undertake the practice of yoga with the right View of self, that you already are a perfect and whole expression of the Divine and that you are doing yoga to realize and fully express what is already true, then you have empowered your practice to take you all the way.

In The Heart of the Yogi, Doug Keller expresses a similar concern when explaining the importance of the kula, or community, to one’s experience of the truth:

Good company helps us to transcend limitations, bringing greater acceptance and understanding; bad company reinforces them (sometimes making virtues of our vices), usually with greater prejudice against ‘others.’  Our spiritual wholeness or integrity depends on the consistency between inner life and outer action.  Integrity requires that we not see or think of ourselves inwardly one way and yet act outwardly in another way.

This philosophical standpoint indicates that the bait and switch of beauty for possible divine realization actually builds a barrier decreasing the likelihood of our students (and customers) ever feeling and experiencing that profound connection with all that is.  Yoga as a pathway to picture-perfect beauty is a falsehood.  Enticing students to practice on the basis of this falsehood makes a virtue of their vices by making them heroic in their attempts to improve.  Instead, we could be helping them to transcend limitations by offering the possibility, from the very first interaction, that they are already intrinsically and unmistakably perfect.

If we choose not to offer beauty as a result of yoga practice or saturate our advertisements with envy- (and purchase-) inducing images of perceived perfection, what shape will our marketing take?  What can we do to make our imagery reflect the reality of our classrooms?  I propose the following three 
guidelines:

1) Create advertising imagery that includes vast diversity. 
2) Reduce or remove all language or implication of self-improvement from advertising text. 
3) Deliberately include language that supports the idea of union with the divine or the already-realized self.

Run your advertising through the test described above: how heavily does it rely on images reflecting beauty standards of thin, young, strong, flexible, and white?  Fostering the concept that everything that exists is God/dess means allowing those outside this paradigm to see themselves as yogis as well.  Support this by presenting images of a variety of body sizes, skin tones, age ranges, and differences in ability.  Imagine what yoga advertising could look like if informed by this quote from Dr. Timothy McCall?

What yoga can do, which can make the critical difference in your health and well-being, is give you greater control of your mind and a greater understanding of the tricks it can play. This, perhaps more than anything, is what leads to life transformation.

Using language that encourages action (as we hope advertising will do) without encouraging change is tricky, but can be done.  Notice the elegance of this sentence about Baptiste Power Yoga:  “This practice is designed to reveal not just physical strength and flexibility, but also mental clarity and empowerment.” (Balanced Yoga, Columbus, OH).  The use of the word “reveal” (instead of “create” or “improve”) implies that physical strength, flexibility, and mental clarity are already within the practitioner.  The practice then becomes the tool that shows her how capable she truly is, not the tool that creates this capability.  Replenish: the Spa Co-Op (Columbus, OH) recently posted an Instagram picture of a couples yoga session that showed two men sitting across from each other in Sukasana with their hands resting on each other’s hearts.  The teacher in this image was positioned well-behind and obscured by the two practicing yogis, demonstrating the importance of the practice and stepping away from the idea of the teacher as the celebrity, the most important person in the room. 

As yoga continues to grow in popularity, our responsibility to safeguard its sacred intent becomes increasingly critical.  As teachers, business leaders, and longtime practitioners, our voices reach the widest audiences and have the longest resonance.  While engaged in the important process of creating financial wealth, let us return over and over again to the center of the work, and let the practice itself guide us into divine action.

[Yoga] involves a honing and refining that releases your true essence, as a sculptor brings out the beauty of form in a stone by slowly and carefully chipping away the rest.” –Joel Kramer, “Yoga as Self-Transformation”



Resources
Keller, Doug.  The Heart of the Yogi: The Philosophical World of Hatha Yoga.  DoYoga Productions, 2007.
Kramer, Joel.  “Yoga as Self-Transformation.”  http://www.joeldiana.com/downloads/writings/YogaAsSelfTransformation.pdf
McCall, MD, Timothy.  “Yoga as a Technology for Life Transformation.”  http://www.kripalu.org/article/179
Wallis, Christopher D.  Tantra Illuminated: The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a Timeless Tradition.  Anusara Press, 2012.
Yoga Journal, no. 269, November 2014.  Cruz Bay Publishing, Inc.

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