This morning, I woke up at 4 am to attend a Kudalini yoga class at Raise Your Kundlini, in Las Vegas. Don't worry, I had a good reason for doing this. Now, I have some mild quibbles with Kundalini as a yoga style (for me personally, not in general): there's a bit too much chanting for my taste, the ballistic stretching sometimes feels a bit stressful, and I usually prefer a bit more sweating. But none of that mattered; I had a really great time and felt very happy that I'd gotten up to go. And the reason is something that I'd like to chat about, both in this post and more in the future: Community. Now, community is one of those loose, soft words that often gets misused. Game developers want to build community. Products want a community. Everyone wants community. But that's not just because community is vague; it's also because it's extremely important. It's arguable what being a human is all about. Think about the last product or service you really enjoyed and took advantage of repetitively. Chances are there was some sort of community involved; maybe a barista you liked, or fellow students, or just folks you commonly saw at a workout class or the gym. We lack community these days; the true community of friends and family and close relatives. So we try to replace it with sometimes ersatz communities: collections of people we barely know that surround products, or places of business. If we're lucky, those communities develop some authenticity, and we form genuine emotional attachments. This community, at RYK, for example, felt very genuine. There was a real common interest in spirituality, and a feeling that the people attending really knew and cared about each other. There were also all the standard trappings: common rituals (such as chants), common dress (all white in this case). And it is a business. It obviously benefits them for people to feel attached because they sign up for more classes. But I never got that cynical I'm-in-it-for-the-money feeling. The man who owns the place seems to genuinely care about what he's doing for it's own sake, and that authenticity is incredibly important in this modern world where so much seems so transient or phony.
I'll have more to say about the subject of community, but for now, it's enough that I really enjoyed this morning.
