I came close to samadhi. Or maybe I was just light-headed.

“With a bottle of Ibuprofen in one hand and my iPhone in the other, I shambled from venue to venue…”

I hail from the steaming mosquito-infested Gulf Coast—a land where outdoor yoga is only a possibility for one, maybe two days out of the year.

So my arrival in the humidity-free Promised Land of northern California’s Squaw Valley for the second annual Wanderlust Festival was a welcome climatic culture shock.

After swooning over the sheer beauty of the landscape…I spent the next two days swooning over the altitude; alternating between breathless coffee swilling and throbbing wine-induced headaches. With a bottle of Ibuprofen in one hand and my iPhone in the other, I shambled from venue to venue aiding in the setup.

By day three, when I could see again, all of that hard work degenerated into unabashed people-watching, second to none. Imagine the people wandering around at your average Renaissance Faire. Now, place them in a picturesque resort village, subtract 100 or so pounds from each and you get the idea. The things I learned from people watching at Wanderlust can be distilled down to a few rules:

1. Dreadlocks on yoga hotties really grow on you.

2. If your tattoo is a yoga sutra, you should be able to chant it.

3. The surest sign of yoga divadom is oversized aviator shades with a cute straw cowboy hat.

4. Buddhist prayer beads are a great accessory for any ensemble, but go particularly well with white pants and a black thong.

5. Today’s yoga is geared towards those with good orthodontia.

All of the music acts I saw were superb, with the highlight for me being the D.J. set by Moby. Yes, Moby.

Unfortunately, I missed Moby’s phenomenal acoustic set since I was lost on a mountain trail trying to find my way down from Shirley Lake before night fell and I (nearly) had to resort to Donner party survival skills. At least most of the people still swimming in the river at that hour had been kind enough to remove all their clothes.

And then there was the yoga. Remember the yoga? Wanderlust is a yoga festival, too! I know there were a lot of great yogis and yoginis plying their trade; and I heard of some really awesome classes, but my experience was a little underwhelming with the exception of an oxygen-deprived mountaintop class. Maybe it was just the dead brain cells talking, but the view was heavenly and either I was light-headed or I came close to samadhi. But thus goes the lottery of yoga when trying new and different teachers, which was my intention.

Granted, there is some very non-yogic judgment in everything I’ve said so far. But before you write me off as a jerk, please realize that I’m one of those old fogey yogis who practiced and taught yoga before it was so cool. Call me the yoga curmudgeon if you like. From that place you might understand how I look askance at the direction I see yoga heading—from the scent of bacon wafting through the air, to the prodigious amount of alcohol consumed (mea culpa), to the apparent corporate takeover being engineered by Anusara Yoga and various “healthy” processed foods.

There is no doubt that Wanderlust 2010 was a well-organized event that had a lot going for it. I will certainly return next year. However, my inner cynic will likely observe an even larger event—a moneymaking venture designed for the privileged with enough of a veneer of green living, spirituality and happy corporate altruism to make everyone feel good about themselves.

And isn’t that why we do yoga in the first place?

~

The inimitable tweets, the photos:

Yoga Steve was born 2500 to 5000 years ago, (depending on what blog you read). Although he has lived well over 50 past lives he is still seeking some kind of meaning in this crazy world. Among those past lives he has been a caricature artist, a TV production grip, a dishwasher, an architect, a yoga teacher, a graphic artist, a writer, and a scoutmaster. Oh wait. Maybe that’s just this life.