Diamond Dallas Page, Consumerism, Hinduphobia
The new book Positively Unstoppable: The Art of Owning It is a long-form promotion of Diamond Dallas Page Yoga (DDPY), a former pro-wrestler’s self-branded health and fitness regime. ‘Yoga’ here “ain’t your momma’s yoga”, as a DDPY slogan goes (one of many; “don’t think it, ink it” (make lists and otherwise write things down to help stop repetitive negative and inhibiting thoughts, focusing on the “positive”) and “live life at 90%” (taking charge of the 90% of life you can control) are two of the more popular). It isn’t yoga at all, except in the sense that there are “yoga poses” coupled with diaphragmatic breathing as part of a strength and cardio workout routine.
Page’s autobiography is scattered through the book: his dysfunctional parents, escapades, manly daring-do (“Guess what I was doing ten minutes later? Driving that tank like a fuckin’ madman. What a hell of an experience!”), his prodigious pro-wrestling career eventually causing the spinal injury that lead to his following yoga videos, and how he reworked, branded, and sold his innovations, always using “yoga” despite an entirely tenuous connection to it. He writes compelling success stories like helping his friend and then pro-wrestling colleague Jake “The Snake” Roberts deal with drug addictions, and Arthur Boorman, a USA Army paratrooper disabled like Page by his profession, and whose recovery and weight loss using DDPY went viral and boosted DDPY into popularity.
There are many amazing pages-long personal testimonies, mostly about weight-loss, but also about regaining a sense of control over their lives, leaving abusive relationships, and otherwise gaining and engaging in confidence. Though there is little of talk of failure (and while the footer of every page of the DDPY website has the disclaimer “*RESULTS NOT TYPICAL OR GUARANTEED”), these stories are delightful and inspiring. They are there to motivate, not guarantee success, and discuss years of efforts. And like the final chapter with weekly schedules utilizing his app, are also there to sell his program, and fit very well into the trophy-getting that is the subtext of the DDPY system, perhaps not incidentally why the subtitle of the book is ‘The Art of Owning It’. That is, goal-setting is made into an object, and as these goal-objects are obtained, they become “owned ” and trophies, and feed into a cycle of objectification and personal satisfaction based on this “wealth.”
Such ‘having’ is contra, if not in opposition, to yoga, which is understood as a process developed in South Asia for understanding the underlying nature of reality, and liberation. Yoga has nothing to do with the DDPY process, but Page still uses the word. If Page’s ego was ‘checked’ he would not be calling this “yoga.”
Objectification and the accompanying thieving and hype is normal in capitalism, and as it is the system of thought we live in there is nothing surprising about DDPY. Nor is the hubris and unapologetic, perhaps unknowing misuse of the word “yoga,” for which Page has no regard for; he learned “yoga” from watching Bryan Kest video tapes, because while in slow recovery from his spinal injury,
My wife Kimberly had been getting into yoga … She pointed out that you don’t have to hum or chant … [Kest] just struck me as a very cool man’s man, not your typical yogi.
That is, Page had imagined a yogi to be a certain woowoo-feminine something (“Women and Scrawny New-Age Girlie Men” as on the back of his first “yoga” book discussed below), but in seeing if not an ideal version himself, at least someone who didn’t challenge his personal conceptions at all, he was able to “do” yoga, to move his body in a certain way, while his self-conceptions remained fixed. Yoga as a spiritual, psychological, ethical system, let alone India, Indians, or Indian thought, are all irrelevant to Page, effectively non-entities.
He integrated these “poses” and movements he imitated from these videos into his workouts, added sustained flexing (which he calls “Dynamic Resistance”), monitored his heart-rate, and then collaborated with Craig Aaron (a sports-chiropractor who also has zero interest in yoga except as a product; admittedly his DVD “Extreme Yoga for the Warrior Athlete” has a look of nauseous absurdity and I might enjoy it). They produced “Yoga For Regular Guys” which Page accounts in Positively Unstoppable:
… Our catch phrase was, “Most yogis are very Namaste. Yoga for Regular Guys is very T&A.” I did that to hook guys, because if you look through the book , it’s got photos of hot women doing yoga with average dudes. We were really tongue-in-cheek as we developed the book.
At the time, I believe there were 18 million Americans who practiced yoga. I knew that if I stepped into that Namaste world, I might never reach my full potential audience. My identity was the professional wrestler who took on all the moves of yoga, but I was still very much Diamond Dallas Page. I was not a traditional yogi, by any stretch, and I sure as hell didn’t want to pretend I was. If my brand was going to make it in the yoga world, I know I was going to have to become sort of the anti-yogi yogi. The bad boy of yoga — but not really.
I still wanted to be me, because I wanted to attract all the people out there who were like I used to be: people who wouldn't be caught dead doing yoga. So I decided, “Fuck it, I’m going to go all the way over to the other side of the tracks.” So Namaste became T&A. Although, it turned out that a lot of women dug the program, so that “T&A” conveniently came to stand for, “Tone and Attitude.”
If you look at that book, you’ll see that it contains a lot of fun, little sexual innuendo without being too sexual, and reader recognized that we had fun with it. We didn’t take the yoga “philosophy” so seriously, but we took the workout very seriously. A lot of people who thought it was going to be a bullshit book were surprised to see that it has real substance, even though we were approaching yoga in a completely different way from how they’d ever seen it before.
If he regrets his dismissiveness, co-option, and sexualization of thousands of years of truth-seeking in the name of “from how they’d ever seen it before” it is not expressed. Instead he touts the success of “Yoga For Regular Guys” and how it gave him credibility to do more work with the military (he had made workout video in Saddam Hussein’s palace in 2003, some two years before the book was released). It is fair to say he appreciates modern colonialist endeavors.
It is in the context of modern colonialism that the term ‘hinduphobia’ is popularized, to discuss how western-trained academics seemingly use their scholarship, “to portray Hindu culture and therefore Indian culture as pathological, exotic and abusive,” as argued in Invading the Sacred (available as a free PDF (3.9MB); the lead co-author Aditi Banjeree talks about it at length here). It is this sense of ‘hindu’ as “Indian culture” that I understand ‘hinduphobia,’ thinking more of the original use of ‘hindu’ as a geographic name rather than marking a nebulous religion.
(See for instance arguments that buddhism is hindu, that regional-ethnic syncretism is and has for thousands of years been rife in India (PDF), and, thanks to a court case, India’s legal definition of hinduism which begins with “Acceptance of the Vedas with reverence as the highest authority” (which some take as the only marker), yet also includes tolerance and acceptance of nuance and variety in praxis and philosophy, the six traditional schools of hindu thought, and yet ends “not being tied-down to any definite set of philosophic concepts”.)
Hinduphobia can take many forms but with Page and so many others who use ‘yoga’ only to sell a brand, it is being fearful in an indirect way: erasure — creating social distance where “the other” is kept away even if they are near; out of mind, out of sight. That ‘yoga ’ as we use it today in the west is one of the six traditional schools, let alone that ‘yoga’ is a regional term used by jains, buddhists, etc., may never have occurred to them. In this sense, we cannot properly call Page (or others) “hinduphobes” — ‘hindu’ may never have been part of their vocabulary; they are part of a system of power and social status whose participation is proven by their not needing to acknowledge such a system exists in the first place. As DiAngelo writes in White Fragility on how “whiteness” maintains social status,
Whiteness rests upon a foundational premise: the definition of whites as the norm or standard for human, and people of color as a deviation from that norm. Whiteness is not acknowledged by white people, and the white reference point is assumed to be universal and is imposed on everyone. White people find it very difficult to think about whiteness as a specific state of being that could have an impact on one’s life and perceptions.
Except for Boorman, the cast in Positively Unstoppable is white, and race is never mentioned, very common in western yoga businesses especially in the early 2000s, and which is becoming a subject of increasing discussion. Page then, was very normal to ignore, or not even think about yoga’s “‘philosophy’” and instead celebrate braggadocious manliness, casual misogyny, and military violence in chuckles, because these too are non-issues for him, while ahiṃsa, perhaps the most popular term associated with yoga, will never be a part of the DDP brand (and though his dietary advice strongly advises cutting out pesticides, of the recipes he lists, 4 are vegan white the remaining 12 have variously egg, fish, turkey, chicken, bison, or cow flesh; his other dietary advice is to go gluten- and dairy-free, and do food combining).
Page and others have ‘yoga’ in their titles because it is a sales pitch, a modern form of Orientalism where the foreign is exotic and a ‘good’ and needn’t be understood except as an object to be bought, as a goal and trophy. They excuse it with variations of “we’re getting people to the mat who wouldn’t otherwise!!” but what they mean is “I’m improving my revenue streams” as there is no ‘yoga’ on those mats, and all the successes, physical and psychological, happened without yoga; the word for them exists for marketing only.
Page advises “changing your mindset” so he can easily change his own narrative and scripts and while acknowledge his debt to the video poses, drop “yoga” from his sales pitch. Some have rightly set aside the term because it doesn’t fit. Whatever they are selling, in dropping the ‘yoga’ that isn’t there, it becomes more honest. Page could have called his routine ‘Exercise for Schmoes,’ but he chose “yoga” because for him Indians are beneath notice, and you cannot rip off who or what isn’t there. He chose to be another appropriator and liar, continuing the real fake performance art and fantasy pro-wrestling built on; in using “yoga” his “positivity” is not just built on a very straightforward lie, but on negating thousands of years of culture and history.
