There is in short a dialectic (Wikipedia link) tension between these two values as the yoga discourse continuously transforms use-value into symbolic-value and vice versa. We shall see how this tension became an engine for the metamorphosis of yoga through the ages. We will also see as society changed throughout history that yoga as discourse and as a cultural field had to change and adapt accordingly or become extinct. The field had to re-position itself in relation to society. We will also see how new social groups continuously tried to infiltrate and dominate this cultural field and in this way re-defined the objects in the field.
I wrote a letter asking to stay for the month of Yoga poses everyday October I had heard from friends that it was a good month, weatherwise and waited to Yoga poses everyday hear back. When I learned that I had not been accepted due to a lack of space, I decided to keep my plan but travel around India, rather than stay in one place. That summer I traveled a lot, as some do when they graduate from college, even if they are thirty years old. I spent a month in Africa, where I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro and safaried in the Masai Mara, before heading home by way of Florence, where I stopped to spend a week at a yoga retreat hosted by two of my yoga teachers from New York, Sharon Gannon and David Life of the Jivamukti Yoga Center.
It was here that I met and made friends with my future guides to India, Shyam and Tulsi. Shyam and Tulsi live half the year in India and the other half in Woodstock, New York. He is a sharp and exuberant American and selfdescribed pundit, and she is a regal Canadian who first met Shyam in India, where they later married, the year prior to our introduction.
