Words from STRETCH co-founder Emmanuelle Rousseau
The more I spend time thinking about what yoga is to me, and where it might have come from, the more I see myself come back to the same hypothesis: yoga is a form of proto medicine that somehow survived modern science.
Yoga is an intuition.
Yoga proposes a method; a practice that many have adopted as part of their daily or weekly self-care routine, mental health check up, fitness strategy, physical and mental rehabilitation approach, etc.
Most of us don’t really know why the magic works, but we “know” it works. I once heard a group of scientists presenting results from an exhaustive study in yoga and cancer recovery research at a symposium on yoga research say just that of yoga: “we know it works”.
“It” here referring to yoga but more importantly “we” referring to the few dozen people present they assumed were all yoga practitioners. That is pretty unusual to hear at a scientific symposium. Science may be based on intuition, but what separates science from science fiction or religion is the desire to verify observations and intuitions…
When creating STRETCH, Boyd and I wanted to contribute to shifting yoga from being an intuition to being a recognized form of health care. The way to achieve this, in our minds, is by offering modern secular yoga, in English, to as many people as we can, as well as whenever we can, participate in yoga research.
I am still very much interested in why yoga works. After over 7 years of running a yoga studio, I have also become fascinated by what makes a specific yoga class/type, successful. And of course I have a lot to share on this. When running a small business, as well as having many business relationships with everyone that make up STRETCH, there are always compromises. One of the biggest compromises Boyd and I have had to face over the years is the secular aspect of the yoga we want to offer at STRETCH. Yet somehow, the pandemic helped. In having to reduce the team to a very minimal group, and with all the time we have had to reflect on the last 7 years, we have managed to get closer to our ideal yoga. Simply one that is delivered in English, and with no false or unverified scientific or spiritual claims.
Ironically, the second compromise the pandemic allowed us to reflect on and ultimately eliminate, came from an intuition. I started feeling really uncomfortable with our use of social media for marketing a few years ago. The more I heard reports in the news on the adverse effects of social media on mental health, the more it started to make no sense, for a wellness business like STRETCH, involved in mental and physical health, to use a tool – social media – that was reportedly causing more and more problems for people. Because we know “it” does. Good luck finding any serious study out there that says it doesn’t.
More than affecting our mental health, it affects our ability to concentrate. Isn’t yoga, for so many, a tool to get the body prepared and ready to sit, to meditate, to focus…? So there you have it. We took the decision, after many months of quiet reflection, to cancel our social media presence 6 months ago. Because we didn’t want to monetize our decision, we didn’t use it in our marketing, or make a huge deal of it, or any big announcement; we went quietly. And it seems, 6 months later, almost no one noticed.
Everyone we have talked to in studio since agrees that it is a brave decision, but a really good one. If anything, to me, it is an ethical decision, and every day I breathe a sigh of relief as I am no longer distracted, in my daily contemplation practice, by my discomfort via social media as a marketing tool for my small business.
I also hope to contribute, in any way small or big, to help others unplug, reconnect, and focus on real life connections.
What We Propose
The STRETCH website is updated weekly with new classes and workshops; come back often. We send at least 1 newsletter a month with upcoming events, new teachers announcements, more activities and updated schedule (request to join here).
Resources to Help You Unplug
A few interesting articles on quitting social media:
https://www.lifehack.org/846374/quitting-social-media
https://www.sclhealth.org/blog/2018/10/quitting-social-media/
https://mindful.technology/jaron-lanier-delete-social-media/
Together, we can rebuild the system, an article on the website of the Center for Humane Technology https://www.humanetech.com/rebuild
Books
Irresistible by Adam Alter
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Dr. Cal Newport
How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by artist, writer, and Stanford professor Jenny Odell
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
Videos and Documentaries
The Great Hack documentary
The Social Dilemma documentary
Living Without Social Media, a TED Talk by Dr. Cal Newport https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E7hkPZ-HTk
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