As of last night, GLBL YOGA has decided to cancel their gigantic August 16th entertainment yoga event in Central Park. This on the same day our most recent critique of the event went up and was gaining all that frightening (for us) traction. Not saying there was a direct connection, but…you know…. You never really know….

From the site:


Unfortunately, we have decided to postpone the GLBL YOGA event scheduled for August 16, 2012 in New York.

The mission and the overall concept of GLBL YOGA were embraced with great excitement and enthusiasm. However, our experiment with crowd-funding the event did not meet our ambitious expectations. As a result, we’re going to take some time to rethink our strategy and model, and we will return with renewed purpose in the summer of 2013.

We deeply believe that GLBL YOGA can be a tremendous catalyst, using the power of yoga to foster unity and community around the world. We’re grateful for your support, and we look forward to seeing you next summer.

In the meantime, we will be providing a full refund to all donors. Thank you and namaste.

So, still with four days and $660,000 to go, the plug has been pulled, and along with it, all the negative comments on the site.

Something to consider when thinking about future events: Happenings and events of any significance usually have a large element of anarchistic chaos to them. Don’t make it so precious. It’s a party. We LOVE parties.

Let the yoga just happen among the chaos.

Yoga during the Woodstock Festival. 1969.

Also, stop using the word “community” as if it’s something you’re going to help create. People do that much better on their own.


  1. Yay!
    You nailed it. I couldn’t agree more that for these sorts of events to work, there is, as you say, an element of anarchistic chaos. I wrote exactly about these groups events and why they fail:

  2. Thaddeus

    Oh…what a bummer…I just stumbled upon an extra 750,000 dollars yesterday and I was going to send it to them. Oh, well. I guess I’ll have to actually do something good with the money instead.

  3. I like the “do your own thing” ethos of that Woodstock yoga pic…

  4. Yoga Dude



    Thank you for sharing your words.

  5. I feel like “we” sort of put an end to this crazy event…know what I mean?….and for some weird reason I feel kind of guilty… and excited, too. You know that old question: “Do you REALLY want your dreams to come true” ? Is that an old question? Sweet dreams. Don’t let the bedbugs bite. x Al

  6. Greenpoint

    I don’t think its a coincidence…the deeper parts of the yoga community are becoming more vocal, waking up if you will, to the distortion and hijacking of the practice and yoga in general by what drove us to it (the practice/yoga) in the first place…this site, and your articles and insights, have and are acting as a sort of relief valve to those frustrations….do not stop, it’s all fairly important really

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  8. helen@

    why is there no outrage towards wanderlust and other yoga fests?

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  10. gross

    helen, have you read the site?

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  12. Brian

    Thank heavens the event has been cancelled. Now all those starving mothers in Somalia will be fed, local studios’ businesses will thrive, and the soul of yoga has been snatched back from the clutches of doom. It’s like the world is better over night.

    Or, as usual, it’s business as usual. Ho hum.

    • Brian, I like the way you think. You mention 5 results you believe will come from the cancellation of the GLBL event. I am not as optimistic as you are. Here are my thoughts about your thoughts.
      1. I fear that “all those starving mothers in Somalia” will NOT be fed. I worry that, tragically, they will continue to starve along with a lot of other people who are starving right here and now in America. But it is possible that one or two people decided to donate $ to help fight poverty and famine INSTEAD of to the sound stage for the event. So maybe one or two people will actually be fed instead of many thousands getting to do yoga together. But probably not ALL of the starving mothers, as you suggested.
      2. I, for one, know that my studio will absolutely NOT thrive from the lack of the GLBL event–I only have room for 8 people and most of my students have no idea there was even going to be an “event” and if even if they did know about it they most likely would have instead come to their little class in my bedroom anyway because I touch them a lot and I don’t think Rodney and Coleen could have reached them from the expensive sound stage. So I’ll keep struggling with or without the largest yoga class in the universe happening.
      3. As for the “soul of yoga” you mention being “snatched back from the clutches of doom”…. come on, crazy man! Yoga doesn’t have a soul–it IS soul–the immortal essence of a living thing… but maybe you are saying the soul has a soul? I like that idea and I agree. Yoking to the center of the center. So that even a Bindu point has a center point within itself–the essential nature of essential nature. I get it…But no doom clutches can make their way into that, know what I mean? Probably not even those doom clutches of American Imperialism and the capitalist “free market”. That’s supposed to be the whole point of total absorption (Dhyana) — once you get those right and left halves dissolved and there is nothing left but the atman sutra and the convergence of the eyeballs right into the belly of the brain (third eye–maybe around the pituitary gland?) and that one eye looks down the plumb line into the seat of the mind (shall we call that Anahata Chakra? Or just where the various geometric lines converge at the middle point of the chest cavity creating a porthole of sorts?) …Well, nothing can fuck with that. Certainly not a turn-table, a sound stage, some hot yoga teachers, and a sea of rubber/hemp mats with bodies exercising on them.
      4. Can the world get better overnight? I like the idea. Can we watch a flower grow? I guess it depends on relativity. Like our world may appear slightly better between sunset and sunrise with no GLBL on the GReat Lawn but maybe for someone else the world got worse? How big is “The World”?
      5. Business as usual? Yes, for the free-market economy, yes. Yes for Wall Street. Oh, yes, I agree. “Ho hum”? Not for me. For me it’s more like: “Holy shit!” XXX

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