Sunday, I read Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. Quite a few people I know have read it and when I was in the bookstore I flipped through the first few pages to get a sense of his cadence to see if it’s a voice I can read.
Have you read this yet? His first few pages are about Charles Bukowski! A book on personal growth and we just dive into the deep end of a questionable figure who could care less, right on page one!
I mean, the f-word is on the cover so I guess I’m the idiot, right?
As I’m reading, I’m starting to pick up on his points and cant help but to see how they overlap yoga philosophy. We just had a workshop on sankalpa, and this entire book is essentially walking you though the process of how to examine your own. Instead of saying sankalpa, he was saying values.
Manson told the story of the Buddha and how he came to be.
Manson talked a lot about the risk of expelling energy on too many things and things that are not good for you (brahmacharya).
Manson highlighted pieces of Samkhya philosophy (this predates the word yoga).
It was pretty amazing to be reading this book and seeing the parallels of Eastern practices speckled with the f-word and occasional poop joke. What he is doing is making it palatable for householders and people who might bypass yoga and meditation as a viable option for themselves but find credibility with the guy who swears on the cover of his book.
To me this says that society is pivoting, but not away from yoga, away from things that are fake. Exhausting are the days of photoshop and the ‘perfect’ yoga body. Of being ‘Zen’ or ‘blissed out’ and pretending to know what that means. The tide is turning away from the fake yoga that is only happy, peaceful and for the young. The interesting things happen when we allow our humanity in. That’s when the conversation really gets rolling and where the real work is!
Let’s keep this going,
~Carmen