There's no place like OM

Having arrived to California, signing up in a yoga centre seemed inevitable. I took a 10-class pass and tried six different teachers. Yoga in LA is quite unlike yoga in London. Here are my conclusions:

Thank you (not) for the music - almost all the teachers arrive with their ipods and play music throughout the class. It ranges between new age chanting with electronic drums in the background, sanskrit mantras in an American accent - all the way to James Blunt "You're Beautiful", which really felt like an aerobic class. Most horrible is music during the final relaxation pose, shavasna - it's the "corpse pose", damnit, and corpses don't have i-pods.

Chanting - all classes involved at least three OMs in the beginning and end, but some went further to chant long mantras. I am not especially fond of chanting, especially in a language I do not understand. I did notice however that my OMs in the end of the class were far deeper and longer than the ones in the beginning. I guess I got into it.

Yoga and capitalism - how can a system of thought and activity preaching wholeness, equanimity, and detachment from the material life, be so popular in the motherland of greed? On the face of it there is a contradiction there. One teacher described her former life as a TV producer and how now she found peace in her body, escaping the race of ambition and achievements. But I think that on some level there is no contradiction. The new-age super-individualistic focus on self-fulfillment sits well with both Yoga and late capitalism. As one yoga teacher said at the end of the class: love yourself, so others can love you as well.

You can see that I found much to object to, but still I had to admit at the end of each and every class that the teachers were professional and excellent. Anyone doing yoga knows that the class depends on the teacher, and all of them maintained good flow and attention to the students.