Talke Talks: Namaste, ey! | nd-aktuell.de

Howdy from Texas, dear readers,

When was the last time you tried to switch off? I just last weekend when I booked a Sound Bath seminar. Under the influence of various sounds (not drugs), you are supposed to forget everything around you, even see colors, open chakras and purify auras that you cannot know whether they even exist (although some hardcore yogis try to photograph them). Of course, the venture failed in typical Talke fashion: a woman fell asleep right at the beginning of the session, before the yoga teacher had even started pounding on her small metal bowls. And then the woman in question started snoring, loudly like an old boar. The snoring frequency and duration were synchronized with the Sound Bath itself – the woman was in harmony with herself and her surroundings.

I was far from such a blissful state. Since I couldn’t concentrate on the supposed healing sounds because of the noise level, I tried all sorts of things: covering my ears, groaning a little to get the teacher’s attention, opening my eyes in the hope of making eye contact with someone, who was just as annoyed as I was. In vain: the whole room seemed to lie there with eyes closed and chakras open. I considered getting up and leaving, but that seemed too dramatic, too anti-namaste-ish. So I just laid there.

A sound bath is supposed to have a deep psychological effect and it did after a while. The snoring transported me to other times and spaces: a trip to Prague many years ago, when I had to share a room with my parents, where my father snored very loudly. I lay awake all night thinking about how much I disliked my boyfriend at the time, how unhappy I was. Then I – my current, happier, but dirty self in the Texas yoga studio – thought about how much I would like to be in Prague now, but now with my daughter, who must really like it. Eastern Europe in general, she should see that! My birthplace, Saint Petersburg… But in Russia I would be arrested immediately for my anti-war stance, like this poor Russian-American woman who wanted to visit her grandparents and has now been sentenced to twelve years in a labor camp for “espionage”, i.e. 50 dollars, which she once donated to Ukraine. Thanks for all the triggers, woman!

When I returned to the yoga studio a few days later, I heard the teacher gossiping with another student about the snorer – she had wanted to wake her up, but wasn’t sure where the grunting was coming from; the student, on the other hand, knew it. So the collective Zen state was just a show! Don’t we Western yogis all deserve some public shaming with our contrived Shaanti sentiment? After all, yoga is neither an American nor a European practice, even though philosophers, Nazis, and occultists once imported it to the West.

My German yoga teachers still tried to be “authentic” yogis. They had all been to India at least once (is that colonization or de-colonization?), were mostly vegan, and dressed “traditionally” (or is that cultural appropriation?). American yoga teachers, on the other hand, try to remain inauthentic. They dress in trendy, sporty clothes, talk enthusiastically about Western vices such as fast food and gel nails and turn up the music loudly while doing yoga (I’ve heard everything from Mozart to Lady Gaga in US yoga studios, and I think Leonard is the most appropriate Cohen’s “Hallelujah”). The highlight: We have a large Indian community in Texas! Some of our teachers are Indian, as are the students. But instead of learning from them, we collectively bow to the Americanized version of yoga. Probably because the spiritual-religious nature of yoga would scare many upper-Christian Americans. Then they would no longer be able to sleep so peacefully.