Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
Yogaworks has opened a new studio in New York, at the corner of Broadway and Grand Street. It’s got bamboo floors, showers with impressive pressure, electronically-locking lockers and walls painted in restful Ralph Lauren colors. The only thing missing? People. On the two days we went there there were few students. What’s wrong with this yoga picture?
Disclosure: I’m not going to rag on Yogaworks too badly. They gave us two free classes. But I think the empty studios are symptomatic of a pricing and marketing approach that is not working. For you non-yogis, bear with me, because this will become a metaphor for monetizing the web, particularly web journalism. (Metaphors, like yoga positions, can be bent a lot.) Ready? Ok, take a deep breath and let it out slowly.
The new Yogaworks in New York is built on a gym membership pricing plan. They want you to pay a monthly fee plus initiation, just like Crunch Gym or Spectrum. It’s a common model in NY and I suppose the Yogaworks brain trust figures they’ll grab some gym rats seeking to convert their sweat into salvation. But it’s old school.
They don’t want walk-ins – they just want your money. Up front. I’m supposed to be hearing “Om” when I walk into a studio, but at Yogaworks Soho I hear “pay me now.”
In Santa Monica, several new studios have opened within blocks of each other. YogaCo, Bhakti Yoga Shala and Yogis Anonymous work on a different pricing plan. You pay what you want. No membership, no set fee. Walk-ins are ok. You may not get a fancy shower (actually at YogaCo, you do) but you get a sense of connection with the teacher because you are paying him or her directly. They’re not working for a corporation; it’s a collective. Donation-based yoga is an old model from India, and truth be told, the teachers don’t profit unless they get bodies on the mats. That’s because they rent the space from the studio owner, and the students are reimbursing the teacher for that rental. More students, you profit. Less, you’re in the hole. It’s a problem similar to that faced by online journalists and other content providers. Hey, what’s that sound you’re hearing? It’s the creaky gears of my metaphor turning.
Think about all that’s free to the user on the web: Google, Twitter, Facebook. Successful? Google had $21.9 billion in revenue last year. Facebook, with 300 million users, just turned profitable. Twitter? Get back to you on that. Point is, free access works on the web and it can be monetized. Free services like Pandora and last.fm have ads, but you can pay to get rid of them.
Walter Isaacson, a smart fellow, has advocated the subscription model for online newspaper content. But you lock off access, you lock out users and you get the empty studio syndrome.
My metaphor is flawed, of course. Netflix is a successful subscription model with a low price point, and yoga teachers don’t make enough money unless their classes are packed. Imagine, however, if they tried some of the web’s dumber ideas to generate cash? How about pop up ads projected on the wall during class? Or the teacher who casually mentions that she loves Manduka brand mats? Weaving ads into content is even happening on Twitter. The next Tweet you read may be a plug, which is beyond irritating. Just thinking about it, I might have to do a yoga class to calm down.
All the same, I’d rather buy my yoga salvation like music on iTunes – pay as I go, no subliminal ads, no subscriptions.
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Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
I went to yoga the other night. The room was filled with so many acolytes their yoga mats were about a micron apart. It was like boarding the subway in NYC during rush hour and getting an intimate view of your neighbor’s armpit. Only in yoga it’s more exciting because the people are half naked and their sweat flies on you when they flail. That class lasted about 45 seconds for me. I had to leave. I don’t do flailing.
After suffering from downward dog withdrawal and getting a $61 parking ticket (“And things were going so well!”) I had plenty of time to reflect on the valuable lessons learned. This is kind of a game we play, trying to extract a valuable life lesson from every event no matter how annoying. (“A bee stung me on the ass. What valuable lesson can be extracted from that?”)
Why was I annoyed enough to bail out of that class? Well, for one thing, I have issues
with sweaty strangers violating my personal space. But I also don’t like cults of personality.
Some people actually come to a yoga class for the yoga, but a male teacher can become popular and female students will don the appropriate Lululemon yoga gear and crowd into his classes, never admitting out loud that they have a crush on him. Movie stars get people to buy tickets, usually not directors or scripts. Cults of personality. Charisma is king. 
But Arnold Schwarzenegger’s charisma isn’t enough to run this state, and charismatic people like Tony Robbins or Suze Orman can seem to me to be style over substance.
Let’s face it, though, charisma is a powerful force – maybe even a hit of life force. It can draw people in, pay the bills, get your message across and your cause followed.
I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.
–Groucho Marx
Groucho aside, most people want to be members of something. They like leaders to help them join the tribe. Yoga people are their own tribe, and Vegas gamblers, and Michael Jackson fans. In Seth Godin’s book Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, he describes how connecting with others is a powerful tool for shaping consumer desire and even changing the world. He and others have pointed out that your tribe has nothing to do with geography, your religion or blood type. It can be fellow Facebook users, Syrah lovers, devotees of Nike running shoes or iPods. In a fragmented world we look to tribal leaders. Charismatic leaders, like Steve Jobs of Apple, can really drive a consumer brand into becoming a movement. There’s that word again: charisma. Maybe it’s the mojo in leadership. Maybe, despite myself, I’m going to extract a lesson out of that crowded subway car of a yoga class.
Thing is, there’s more yoga being done because of charismatic teachers. Apple has inspired a generation of designs that matter. Charismatic social entrepreneurs like Jacqueline Novogratz fund the businesses of the poor by first listening and then building supportive communities around local entrepreneurs. Charisma, backed up with a plan, can really change the world. Ok, I get it. Just stay out of my space in yoga class.
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Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
It can be a good thing to learn from the past. (“Must remember to look behind when backing up car.”) It can be a good thing to look around the room and mentally rewind everything you see to its source. (“Where did that bag of Tostitos come from and would I want to see how they were made?”) The past is embedded everywhere.
The novelist William Faulkner once said, “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.”
But what if the past wasn’t serving you – would you be able to unlearn it? Let’s see.
As part of pre-production for a documentary series we’re working on, I recently went to see a researcher named John D. Riley. At his Zero Point Research lab, I sat in front of a Lifestream Generator, a device pumping out millions of volts of DC electrical energy. 
If you’ve ever seen a Tesla coil, you’ll get an idea of what this is like. He told me that as the energy passed through me I’d experience where I was emotionally blocked. Well, I sure was feeling something around my neck and left shoulder – it jerked up and back, pulled by an unseen force. In that very second, an indelible image burst on the movie screen in my mind. I saw my 40-year-old father pulling my arm as I, at age 10, tried to run away. Was this some of my past somehow embedded in me, now released? Faulkner had it right. The past wasn’t even past. I was carrying some of it around in my shoulder.
Lots of people wanting to heal themselves are looking to reprogram the embedded past. 
Go to a yoga class and see if twisting your torso will release mental crud and create more space. Maybe a hypno-therapist can rewire your mind. Maybe an acupuncturist can get life force flowing in a more balanced pattern. Stored memory is powerful, whether it involves language, images, or even body postures. Manipulating it might be the key to healing on both the macro and micro levels… perhaps right down to the level of individual cells.
That’s the focus of some promising research at Children’s Hospital Boston that suggests we will be able to press reset on a cell’s developmental clock. If disease scarred your heart or damaged your nerves or knocked out your immune system, scientists could reboot. In successful experiments, they’ve already reverted ordinary skin cells to their embryonic state. Called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) these cells can become whatever kind of cell required – blood cells, brain cells, lung cells or heart cells. That means the body would have a chance to start over. The cell’s “memory” of being sick would be erased.
Emotionally positive memories play a role in healing, but even negative memories have their usefulness. If you happen to remember that snakes with a triangular head are poisonous, you might think to back away when you see one. Still, the prospect of rewinding time, being able to reprogram ourselves, or rebooting a sick cell makes me believe that we have a shot of taking charge of our past in order to shape the future.
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This week’s Newsweek cover article is a slap at Oprah Winfrey for crazy talk about complementary and integrative medicine. Oprah does cover some fringe stuff that is wacky and sometimes wrong. But I think she’s right to do it. Here’s why.
The history of medicine is smeared with snake oil. It was once believed that drinking oil – not olive oil, but the black stuff that comes out of the ground – had healthy properties. Even today, some swear that drinking apple cider vinegar helps digestion and whacks infections, but it may actually damage tooth enamel and sear the esophagus.
Newsweek slaps Oprah for going out on a slippery snake oil limb, promoting people like Suzanne Somers and her aggressive program of hormone replacement therapy. Somers, 62, takes 60 vitamins and supplements and also gives herself a shot of estrogen directly into her vagina. Newsweek portrays her as laughable, but I agree with Oprah – Somers might be a pioneer. Self-experimenters have often advanced science. 
At the age of 22, Sir Isaac Newton nearly blinded himself by staring at the sun in a mirror because he wanted to study the after-images it left on his retinas. 
Australian physician Barry James Marshall swallowed some foul-smelling bacterial crud to show that Helicobacter pylori caused ulcers. Sir Issac ended up with marks on his eyelids; but Marshall ended up with a 2005 Nobel Prize for linking the bacterial crud, H. pylori, to ulcers. I’m not saying Suzanne Somers is going to surprise us with a treatise on gravity, but she has courage.
“Everyone was against me, but I knew I was right.” — Barry James Marshall
The line between courage and dumbness, however, can be slim. Jenny McCarthy, another frequent Oprah guest, believes that her son Evan contracted autism because he received a measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccination. So far researchers haven’t found a link between vaccinations and autism. We do know, as Newsweek points out, that the vaccinations have saved the lives of thousands of children who otherwise might have died.
Facts like that don’t seem to change McCarthy’s belief. “My science is named Evan, and he’s at home. That’s my science.”
Speaking of belief, look at “The Secret.” Oprah led the charge for it, and it has some good stuff, reminding us that we are all fields of energy in a larger field of energy. But it also stated that all diseases can be cured by the power of thought alone. That’s going too far. Even super-Secret supporter Oprah had to caution a guest on her show who had breast cancer and who was thinking of forgoing surgery against the advice of her doctors. Said Oprah, “I don’t think that you should ignore all of the advantages of medical science, and try to, through your own mind now because you saw a Secret tape, heal yourself.”
Yet Oprah knows people can heal themselves with Qi Gong, meditation, yoga, acupuncture. She’s not afraid to promote this “new” medicine, a medicine that is actually old, embracing the best of East and West.
Newsweek is going backward, contributing to the backlash against new medicine. Oprah is going forward by supporting medical pioneers. While looking into the sun, drinking crud or shooting up in the vagina may not seem so brilliant, breakthroughs come from acts of courage or folly and sometimes both.
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
A change of pace this week as I continue thinking about Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind and relate it to my own experiences in India this past winter.
Daniel Pink believes that left brain tasks requiring logic, analysis and speedy thinking will be either outsourced to smart and inexpensive labor in India or performed by tireless computers. He advises everyone who wants to get or keep their job to start pumping up their right brain processes – the creative, nonlinear stuff – in order to make themselves indispensable. I have no doubt that he’s right, but when I was over in India I saw little evidence of its linear left brain.
In Rishikesh, India’s yoga center, I was expecting a serene place filled with people whose feet only rarely touched the ground. What I found instead was a narrow bridge called Lakshman Jula alive with humanity and aggressive monkeys. The sacred Ganges was like Times Square, so packed it was with bathers, boats and garbage.
It wasn’t long before the chaotic nature of the place started to close in on me. After my wife got sick (suspicious masala chai we think) I was craving left-brain linearity. I wanted to get some of that in an American hotel near the airport. I’d like to pause for a moment to remark that I work in television for a living, so I have an intimate understanding of chaos and even outright insanity. What made me crack in India?
On the way to the airport in our air-conditioned car we saw motorcycles carrying more passengers than you’d think gravity would permit, and all manner of cargo – wood, entire trees, cooking oil, chairs, more people. I was expecting India to give me something of a balance between spirituality and left-brain IT computer geeks. Instead I got wood smoke, rickshaws and cows. I got noise, loud music, suspicious food and drink and people just trying to survive who hoped I would finance them.
I found little calm on the trip until we got to Mumbai, a jumpy, jangly city of 13 million people. In a temple dedicated to Ganesha, the Hindu god of success, and also in another dedicated to the goddess of prosperity Lakshmi, something happened. I felt that I grasped the spiritual world I had been seeking.
There are seeker/spiritual right-brained friends of mine who tell me that since I was expecting chaos and bad food in India, that’s what I got. Therefore, I created that universe. But I found that in Mumbai, the place that was closest to the cities I know, Los Angeles and New York, I was able to connect with both left and right brain. Too far to the logical side of things and there’s no access to intuition. Too far to the right, too much chaos. I found the balance in Mumbai, if only for a day.
If you’d like to see a slightly different video slideshow version of this story, you’ll find it on Lonely Planet’s website. Stay curious and see you next Thursday.
