Enlighten Up!- The Movie
K and I did go to see Enlighten Up! last Saturday and we really enjoyed it. The filmmaker- a regular practitioner of yoga herself- set out to try to "prove" that yoga could transform anyone and followed this guy around the world for several months as he tried out different classes and styles of yoga. In some cases, he was completely immersed, doing yoga once or twice a day with the same teacher, at other times, it seemed it was just a drop-in into a class in New York City. In any case, what I found most interesting was how pushy the filmmaker was with the guy, insisting that perhaps he wasn't "trying hard enough" because she wasn't observing transformation in the way that she imagined it "should" occur.
I find that with any practice that has a deep impact on an individual, there is always a danger of them becoming a bit adamant with the expectation that everyone else should be able to have the same experience they had. When I was at Kripalu for Yoga Teacher Training, I met a few people who viewed yoga in a similar way to the way many people I grew up with viewed their Christian faith- as the only TRUE way to (fill in the blank- happiness? peace? enlightenment?).
Interestingly enough, (back to the movie) it seemed to me that the experience did have a deep impact on the guy, just not in the way the filmmaker had hoped. He did not continue practicing yoga after the experiment was done but he made some significant changes in his life that, to me, demonstrated that he'd definitely undergone some kind of transformation, perhaps just not as some dramatic, mind-blowing, breakthrough experience, as some might have hoped to witness. In the end, I realized that the issue was that the filmmaker had apparently hit some kind of plateau or dry spell in her own practice and was feeling the need to revive it. However, it seemed that instead of focusing on herself, she decided to make a movie about yoga, perhaps hoping that if she could watch someone else's transformation, she would be be inspired and her yoga practice then rejuvenated. Such a classic case of projection.
I highly recommend this movie, even if you're not a big yogi. K enjoyed it and he has absolutely no interest in the practice beyond the acknowledgment that my practice of it makes me a whole lot more fun to be around.