I graduated from high school in 1972, sort of the tail end of the Age of Aquarius, and one of my my class mates, Ned Fielden, did yoga. But Ned was the only one, and I'm not even sure how he figured out what yoga was or how to do it. Yoga was part of the 60s, but it was low on the priority list, far behind sex, drugs and rock and roll.
The only other yoga practitioner I met for the next ten years was Don Noel, the legendary politics reporter for the Hartford Times and WFSB. Noel did yoga in the hallway during interminable hearings and gubernatorial ditherings, when blood supply to one's head was scarce. Believe me, in the cigarettes and coffee culture of the press in those days, Don stood out.
And then, one day around Y2K, yoga was suddenly mainstream. So mainstream that I practiced it very seriously for five years. But what is it? Has America changed it?
