We woke up this Tuesday morning to yoga in the headlines of not one, but two (!) major news outlets: The New York Times and Forbes Magazine.
The New York Times piece was a lengthy feature article on the Wanderlust Yoga & Music Festival which took place this past weekend (and about which we liveblogged with five informative from-the-scene dispatches! Hooray for Drishti being on top of the newsworthy scene! 
) The NYT article is titled “Say Namaste! Party By Night, Downward Dog By Day” and includes a great slideshow of snapshots from the yoga and music scenes at Wanderlust, and it also discusses the interesting dynamic created by the meshing of a “yoga crowd” with a “music crowd”. According to the article, over 4,000 people attended Wanderlust, hailing mostly from California and the Southwest. In the financial realm, the festival’s organizers came close to breaking even, which is quite an accomplishment for an event’s first staging. We’re intrigued to see what next year’s incarnation of Wanderlust will have to offer. We’re sure the ideas and brainstorming sessions are already flowing…
The second appearance of yoga in the major mainstream news today was an interesting piece in Forbes Magazine on the controversial cult-like organization Dahn Yoga. This organization, which is currently being sued by over twenty ex-members for psychological manipulation and fraud, has until now been covered only by local news stations and super-informed yoga blogs like Yoga Dork and our very own Drishti Blog. In our first post about Dahn Yoga here on our blog, we gave this organization our weighty “Questionably Calling Something Yoga” label. Dahn Yoga may be many things to many people (a cult, a money-making scheme, a spiritual organization, etc.), but the one thing it most certainly not is yoga:
Shipley, now 25, is one of 27 former Dahn practitioners who filed suit in Arizona in May claiming the group subjected them to psychological manipulation and fraudulently induced them to spend thousands of dollars on Dahn yoga classes and retreats in Sedona, Ariz. and other places. The punishing techniques, they say, included forced isolation from friends and families, exercises like bowing 3,000 times all night long without breaks, disciplining members by sticking their heads in the toilet and making them lick other members’ feet, and having them hold certain poses, like the push-up position, for 20 to 30 minutes at a time. On top of those charges, the suit alleges that Ilchi Lee, the 57-year-old Korean founder of Dahn and its spiritual leader, sexually preyed on young female disciples.
Enough said!
[Forbes]
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