Down, Dog, Down! Yoga Wars

yogaA cool school in California has added yoga to the physical education curriculum. Some basic stretching, relaxing, stress-releasing poses. Yoga works great for kids — just as it does for millions of adults. Yes, sure, some yoga practitioners take it one step further and add a spiritual component, but that’s entirely up to the individual, and most people simply choose to get the health benefits.

But that’s not cutting it for one Jennifer Sedlock of Carlsbad, California. She’s outraged that her children are exposed to — gasp! fitness — and so, Mrs. Sedlock is suing. Actually, no. She’s not bitching about the stretching, she claims the little yogis are being indoctrinated into weird Indian cults and mysticism, shiva and vishnu and all that, sprouting arms and reincarnating at the dinner table. Something like that. She’s claiming violation of the separation of church and state and has lawyered up to make her case.

Jennifer is quite a body of work. A glorified motivational speaker, she gives corporate lectures on reaching goals in life and being happy… too bad, then, that she herself is apparently such a miserable human being.

But more interestingly — once you scrape the surface a bit — you find out what Jennifer is really all about. Yep. All Jesus all the time. Half her talks are about faith and success. Your personality type and prayer. Your kids’ personalities and faith. She’s also one of the leaders of the Coastline Church, an ultra-fundie little shop of horrors, one that under “parenting resources” has the audacity to offer a link to James Dobson’s Focus on the Family — an extreme cult of religious intolerance that the Southern Poverty Law Center has monitored closely for its homophobic tirades over the years. 

Still, we should perhaps cut Jennifer some slack — she’s originally from Oklahoma after all. But apart from that, this appears to be pretty much a grade-A dick move by a born-again mom who evidently needs something to get bent out of shape over to fulfill her otherwise empty life guided by her imaginary sky friend. Shame about her kids — they probably enjoyed the bi-weekly yoga as a way to relax and detox from their uptight finger-wagging family.