Twisted up at yoga school

This weekend I visited a friend who's spending a few months at the Kripalu Center in Western Mass. Kripalu is a yoga center set up like a tall high school building overlooking what must be a beautiful lake (it was covered with snow while I was there).

Sometime in the last decade yuppies transformed into earthy-crunchy hippies. Products marketed as environmentally-friendly are now a status symbol, as a glance around the parking lot confirmed. The country club crowd is now a congregation of earthy-crunchy spiritual warriors and some of them pay to stay at Kripalu for a few days to take in spiritual classes, massages and yoga sessions.

My friend and host is there as a volunteer. She has a regular labor job at the Kripalu Center and in exchange shares a dormitory room with two others and gets to attend yoga classes and other Kripalu events. She said she had to pay a small sum, about $100, for her meals. She is not paid any money for her labor, but has most of her living requirements provided.

The Kripalu cafeteria was crammed with organic labels, gluten-free items, assorted sprouts and beans and little meat. There was a milk dispenser that boasted locally-produced, organic fat-free Jersey milk.

I found this confusing, because I still remember from my 4-H days that the selling point of Jersey milk is its high fat content. Making skim milk from Jersey milk is like going to Kentucky Fried Chicken and eating everything but the skin. My best guess to the label is that it's like how high-end restaurant menus make a big deal out of trivial details of an entree, like that the steak is from a particular country or the veal parmigiana is hand-breaded.

The book store at Kripalu was brimming with alternative medicine tomes, spiritual guidebooks, CDs of running water sounds and tarot cards. There was a $1,300 metal Buddha for sale and a lot of yoga gear.

I tried one of the yoga classes and found it generally enjoyable. The yoga instructor started things with a big group chant of "Om" but didn't dwell on New Age beliefs during the workout, which was a plus. She was good at reminding everyone not to push themselves beyond their safe limits and broad casted a gentle demeanor.

The Kripalu crowd showed one another a very warm, accepting manner. I was also glad to see that they had a limit on how much New Age, artsy pretension they could tolerate. My host and a few of her friends snuck out of an art film 10 minutes after it started. The film showed the artist naked and dimly-lit while making slow sweeping gestures over instrumental music. It was also terrible and a chore to watch.

What surprised me most was that the human element was so strong in this place of spiritual growth. Resident volunteers had spats with their roommates, there was gossip and romantic squabbles. Instead of a Tibetan monastery, the social scene can best be understood as a college where everyone majors in Eastern philosophy.

If there's one piece of wisdom I walked away with, is that people with different philosophies still think and behave pretty much the same way. From deeply religious societies to the secular world, all people believe peace, love and kindness are good things. People interact with each other in a universal way. We seek the acceptance of others, but do not give our own acceptance freely.

I enjoyed my visit to Kripalu. I didn't encounter the wall-to-wall New Age extravaganza I was expecting, but there was plenty of it around. If yoga classes in a giant public school building with no ringing cell phones is your thing, then Kripalu is right up your alley.