Nick Rosen pulls back his faith in Enlighten UP!Force-fed yoga
By Don Simpson
I participated in my first yoga class 15 years ago and I have practiced yoga intermittently ever since. If I have learned one thing about yoga, it is that it means different things to different people. Heck, yoga means different things to me on any given day! Sometimes I utilize yoga for physical strength and agility, other times to clear my mind and relax, and occasionally yoga is my portal to reach a higher level of consciousness. It depends on what I need at the time, and no one can force me to use yoga in a way that I am not prepared or willing to use it.
With her new documentary, Enlighten Up!, Kate Churchill set forth to learn more about the potentials of yoga -- a multi-billion dollar industry in the U.S., practiced by tens of millions of Americans -- more precisely, the potential of spiritual enlightenment. To do so, Churchill chose a yoga virgin (29 year-old journalist, Nick Rosen) as her guinea pig.
A true man of science, Rosen proves a tough sell on the spiritual aspects of yoga. In such a forced and impersonal setting – under constant surveillance of an unblinking eye and a director who becomes more and more frustrated every day of the shoot – who can blame him?
Over six months of yoga immersion, Rosen appreciates the physical, and occasionally even the mental, benefits of yoga while consistently remaining skeptical of anything resembling spiritual enlightenment. Churchill and crew follow Rosen across the United States and all the way to India as Rosen searches for a yogi that can convince him that true enlightenment does exist; but think about it, if the indisputable truth of enlightenment that Rosen is searching for did exist…well…let’s just say the world would be a much different place. Essentially, Rosen is looking for the impossible and of course he never finds it.
What Rosen does discover is a hodgepodge of infamous yogis (including Norman Allen, Alan Finger, Dharma Mittra, Diamond Dallas Page, Pattabhi Jois, Dr. Madan Kataria, and B.K.S. Iyengar), many of whom provide the much needed comic relief of the film. If there is anything to learn from Enlighten Up!, it is that most yogis can be extremely entertaining and accommodating.
I doubt Enlighten Up! will convince anyone to try yoga for the first time; but forever questioning and changing yoga practitioners like myself, it does provide comfort that we are not the only ones. It seems that only a handful of the yogis have truly fine tuned and cemented their yogic path, knowing precisely what yoga means to them and how they want to utilize it.
For the rest of the yoga practitioners of the world, we will just remain a bunch of wandering souls just trying to make sense of yoga until one day enlightenment smacks us upside the head.
