• by Larry Dobrow , Featured Columnist, November 8, 2005

It was around mile 22 of Sunday's New York City Marathon when, hamstrung and hallucinating, I realized that I seriously needed a new hobby. Prompted by a chorus of voices in my head, including one approximating the clipped cadence of Judi Dench, I first considered power-walking, which I dismissed as something one does when the car won't start. Weight training came and went as a possibility, owing to my distaste for non-eating-related grunting. Tae Bo, tai chi, tidying the closets... none seemed likely to offer the mental and physical release of a multi-mile romp.

After the race, once I pried off the oxygen mask and chose a pair of crutches that picked up the warm glint of my brown eyes, I listened to a friend make the case for yoga. From the self-imposed hibernation of an ice bath, I half-heard words like "organic" and "flexibility" and "bliss." It all sounded good--but at that point, an MC Hammer/Bjork remake of "Up Where We Belong" would have sounded pretty sweet as well.

Hence yesterday I hobbled to the ol' magazine rack and snagged a copy of Yoga Journal. I went in skeptical: While I'm down with the chicks-in-leopard-print-leotards thing, yoga has always struck me as a fancy-pants euphemism for stretching--in other words, an activity one performs before legitimate physical exertion. After reading the mag, well, let's just say I'm not pricing microfiber shanti mats.

Yoga Journal feels incredibly inauthentic to me, a publication that mindlessly touts its titular subject as a panacea for the ills of the universe. On the cover of the November issue alone, the mag intimates that yoga stops weight gain and helps its devotees sleep better; inside, it seemingly credits yoga with everything from recent advances in baldness therapies to the revival of diplomatic relations with Libya. Is any/all of this true? Who the hell knows, but the magazine owes its readers at least the pretense of objectivity.

Among the primary offenders is the front-of-the-book "Om" section of blurbs. In it, the mag takes three paragraphs to suggest that overindulgence at holiday parties leaves one feeling bloated and logy (you don't say!), that online holiday shopping conserves both time and energy (no!) and that couples can meet in yoga classes (has Geraldo been notified?).

The mag's book and music reviews, which tend to demand critical capacity, are presented as if an afterthought, while a piece ostensibly surveying yoga's global reach might be summarized as "people in Kenya, Croatia and Iran like yoga." A touchy-feely recounting of a 96-hour "vision quest," on the other hand, somehow gets lumped under the heading of travel--an odd choice, given that the activity in question doesn't involve much beyond sitting in the woods and pondering one's place in the cosmos.

To its credit, Yoga Journal packages this tripe quite cleverly, illustrating a story about work-stress salves with a few New Yorker-y sketches and hopping confidently between colors and fonts; it's the rare lifestyle publication that doesn't feel the need to fill every iota of open space with some kind of graphic/design doodad. Alas, I've yapped about this before and I'll yap about it again: Like any number of publications, the magazine seems loath to include images of individuals who tip the scales at more than 120 pounds or boast non-phosphorescent skin. It's a slap in the face to those who would turn to yoga as a means of improving their physical appearance---which the magazine doesn't exactly discourage, what with the aforementioned cover line about "stop[ping] weight gain."

I admire what Yoga Journal attempts to do--offer natural, accessible solutions for any number of life's day-to-day nuisances--as well as its proud assertion that it "is printed in the United States on elemental chlorine-free paper containing 30% postconsumer waste." Ultimately, though, its humorless, precious tone and yay-for-yoga! zeal zaps both its credibility and its charm. Unless you're an unthinking yoga zombie eager to embrace the obvious, you'd be better served by scouring the Internet for your fix.