I’ve been sitting on my feelings about The Atlantic Monthly’s take on trendy yoga culture for a couple of days now. The piece is not available online without a subscription, but here’s a chat about today’s yoga scene with author Hanna Rosin, a talented religion writer who has worked for The New Yorker, The Washington Post and Beliefnet.com.

Rosin frames her article around a chic, celebrity-infested Jivamukti studio party where Sting, wife Trudie, Russell Simmons, Uma Thurman, and other celebrities appear. Then she says: “for at least fifty years, the prophets of California’s communes have told us how much the denatured, stressed-out West needs the curative power of yoga. Now, to their great dismay, the West is listening.”

Rosin quotes good yoga sources, knows her history, and pokes only gentle fun at folks who claim their lives have been jump-started by their yoga practices. She reveals that she herself has been happily attending yoga classes for eight years. But then she tries to land a point I find really questionable.

“…yoga had to wait until now, when our spiritual hunger runs a little more shallow, to reach the American mainstream. We’re attracted to self-denying faiths of all kinds–Islam, Latin-Mass, Catholicism, traditional Judaism. But we tend to take what suits us and discard the rest. Young Muslim women choose to wear the veil in defiance of their more assimilated parents. Jewish Buddhists can meditate for hours on the souls of insects and rocks but still eat their pastrami and rye. In this atmosphere you can pick up some of the old familiar language–‘higher power,’ ‘grace’–and layer on some incense, and no one will feel confused, or threatened.”

Sigh. First, yoga isn’t a shallow fad in the way miniskirts might have been, or bling that looks cool today and stupid tomorrow. Some people might have yoga practices that ebb and wane, and Pilates is a craze that has absorbed and benefited from some of the postures. But yoga is not a fitness fad, or a spiritual fashion. I don’t see it vanishing. I suspect Christy Turlington and many tens of thousands of others will be doing yoga when they are senior citizens.

Second, yoga as practiced in many health spas and clubs may indeed be exclusively physical, and superficial as a result. The meditations and Hindu chants you’d get at a studio devoted only to yoga (where teachers connected to the Indian mothership might be employed) aren’t making it into the mainstream yet. This seems to me to be part of yoga’s ongoing process. It is a path, after all. But I don’t see how anyone could say that our spiritual hunger is more shallow today than it has been at other times in human history, or that yoga had to wait for this particularly shallow moment to thrive, or even that the Americans enjoying Hatha yoga are superficial if they’re not studying Hinduism in their spare time.

I do see how market drives might influence spiritual seekers and shoppers. I see how we pick and choose. But weren’t religious topics off-limits for instinctively liberal celebrities not so many years ago? Aren’t we delving “into” faith and whatever’s unseen in a deeper, more direct way? You’ve got to taste something before you devour it.

When people try yoga for the first time, and stretch out in that final corpse pose–more often than not–they go into a deep sleep on the studio floor. This moment, so removed from ordinary consciousness, then shifts into a feeling of joy and painful recognition that–man!–they haven’t felt this relaxed in a long, long time! People greet their physical bodies in a way that is new and profound. The realization that “I was stressed and distracted, but now I’m so calm and relaxed,” can indeed lead people to a healthier relationship to food, to family, to God. There is an “I was lost but now I’m found” quality to every yoga session–at home or in class. It’s important to also realize that a yoga practice is not a class you buy. It’s spontaneous moments caught throughout the day, pauses to reframe, stretch, breathe. Calm responses to stressful situations and abrasive people follow suit!

Can you become a more authentic person through your yoga pracitce and be better able to serve the world? Yes, and being of service is so much better than having well-toned abs or arms (though actually, Hanna, I am noticing that my triceps could use a little work).

I’ll stop here and let you guys talk. If you’ve had no exposure to yoga yet, I hope you find your way to a teacher who won’t just put you through the motions. Chime in, you more experienced yogis and yoginis. Let us hear how deep your practice goes, and what’s changed in your life since you started.