Review of Enlighten Up! (2008) by Kris M — 28 Jun 2009

I must be easy to please this summer. I'm not nearly as critical as I used to be. Really though, I was laughing at this until they finally took it off shore. And I know why. It's the same reason I've loathed every yoga class I've ever taken. Yes,I love yoga. I like that it makes me do strange things with my body and that it makes me feel good, but the instructors (save one who was just filling in that day) have all been annoying to various degrees of intensity. Basically they are people who received training, found some deep satisfaction and their own enlightenment and felt compelled to share it...all of it, enlightenment,hippy dippy, phony, raised octave speech patterns and all. The problem is, not everyone's enlightenment is...everyone's enlightenment so, yes, I resist jumping someone else's spiritual plane-or train and end up hating the class. I'll have mine and you keep yours, please. Just show me the correct pose, how to get there without damaging myself and tell me when and how the heck to breath, forget the chanting crap and I'll sort the inner meaning for myself...much as Nick did. I really related to this guy.

As I said, once the show got off the NA continent I started hearing other things,less rehearsed things about what yoga is or isn't and really got sucked into Nick's journey...which he correctly pointed out should have been Kate's on her own because she sure didn't get what she was looking for through him. Which makes me wonder why she did do this with someone else as the subject because I don't think she started out being very objective at all. It almost seemed like she was expecting a real aha, the curtain retracts and the light of awareness streams forth moment, or that she thought Nick might prove to be more resoundingly skeptical than he was and it would just be all about him. But what she got was probably better. A truth of sorts, the one that illustrates that everyone takes their own journey and that spirituality has sod all to do with religion or disciplines or beliefs. It just is and it is unique to everyone. It doesn't take a movie to tell us all that but, since I live deep in the heart of organized religionland sometimes I find it comforting to feel not so alone in my lack of doctrinal discipline.