The Rise of Yoga - Test 2

C1 Advanced · Multiple Matching · C1 Advanced Trainer 2, Cambridge University Press

You are going to read an article about yoga. For questions 1–10, choose from the sections (A–D). The sections may be chosen more than once.

A decade ago, I was commissioned to interview an up-and-coming yoga entrepreneur whose particular brand of yoga involved 26 poses in a humid, heated room with mirrors and carpets. When I visited the man’s studio and caught the stretch and the robotic instructions from a mic’d-up teacher, I thought: ‘This will never take off!’ I had been doing a relatively gentle form of yoga for several years, but had never managed to get beyond beginners’ level. I had come to assume that was all I was capable of, but somehow had never stopped completely. Halfway through the interview, the yoga businessman looked at me and said: ‘You’re overweight. You should join my classes. It would transform your life.’ ‘What!?’ was all I could splutter in response to this breach in interview etiquette. For years after that interview, I would walk past that man’s expanding chain of studios and think: ‘How could someone like that become so successful?’ At the same time, I wondered if he’d had a point – was it possible to completely change your body shape by doing his yoga? And should this even be an aspiration?

These days, yoga has morphed from being an exercise you might do once a week in a gym to a way of life, and physical and spiritual ideal to aspire to. About 40 million people are estimated to practise yoga in the US and the global yoga market is worth over $80bn. It’s not just the studios, yoga mats and clothing have become must-have items in certain places. In my area of Sydney, upmarket yoga studios have colonised the high street. Most people seem to have stopped wearing proper clothes. Unless you are around the bus stops in time for the morning commute, you see people dressed almost exclusively in exercise gear – yoga pants, vest tops and hoodies, flip-flops in the summer, trainers in winter. Rich targets for satirists, these ‘devotees’ cycle around the neighbourhood, with rolled-up yoga mats on their backs, in search of organic fruit and vegetables. Ludicrous as they are in some ways, though, it would be dishonest not to disclose that I once secretly yearned to be one of them and to have what they had.

In many respects, yoga is the perfect pastime for our age – the meditative elements give us the opportunity to find peace and stillness in a time of increasingly hectic and crowded information, the instructional bits give us moral lessons, while the stretchy, bendy, sweaty physical ‘stuff’ is a great way of countering hours a day spent hunched over a computer. Early last year, putting to the back of my mind any qualms I had about the ethics of how a 5,000-year-old spiritual discipline has been turned into a profit-making machine, I left my old class and joined an intensive programme to become ‘a modern yogi’. This meant attending classes six times a week, meditating daily, keeping a journal and taking part in weekly meetings that are part tutorial on mindfulness and part group therapy. I stuck with it and found things started to shift. My body felt looser, more pliant. Physically it was tough, and it took a month to really get my fitness level moving, but gradually I was able to keep up with the most athletic classes and my skin and hair seemed to glow.

I then started thinking about what I was doing – about the nature of yoga and how so many people pour energy into their bodies when perhaps they should be trying to pour energy into the people and politics around them. Self-care is great – but what if there’s no energy left to care about anyone else? I wrote in my journal, I went to the Monday night tutorials, I meditated, I drank juices, I did all the right things to become a modern yogi. I was on the way to joining the ranks of the chilled-out people I saw every day around me. I was almost there before I started wondering – is this really what I wanted to be? The answer was, of course, no. I kept at it for about two months before the narcissism of the whole enterprise got to me. There were other things, it turned out, that I had to do.

The rise of yoga

Yoga has become a big business in certain parts of the world. Australian journalist Maggie Curren reports on her own experiences of the ancient discipline.

express unease about the inward-looking nature of yoga

describe being surprised by certain behaviour

refer to a sense of envy

mention suppressing concerns about the commercial exploitation of yoga

provide an explanation for giving up yoga

mention accepting her own perceived limitations

acknowledge the benefits that yoga brought her

indicate an aspect of yoga that can be seen as humorous

mention being proved wrong

offer an explanation for yoga’s growing appeal

Available as a free printable PDF worksheet with an optional answer key.

More C1 Advanced Multiple Matching practice · All C1 Advanced practice