Re: The downside of yoga

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As a brand, Lulu seems to have annoyed as many people as it has outfitted, both for the cultlike intensity of its followers and for its blithely ironic model of charging people good money to pursue an essentially ascetic practice. Even if it isn’t really, truly a cult, there are aspects of the corporation that certainly ring with a cultlike air. Want to work on the floor? You’re not in retail, you’re an “educator.” Want to be in charge of the “educators”? Then you’re a “key leader.” Work as a “key leader? for a few years, and you can jump to the next level, “store manager” (okay, that’s not such a weird one). Once you’ve worked at Lululemon for a year, you’re entitled to a free trip to the Landmark Forum, a corporate descendant of the est movement, which caused a stir in the seventies.

The Forum* is always getting annoyed that some people brand it a cult, but after a few decades of aggrievement, perhaps it would be better for the Forum to embrace and thus defuse the term—“We’re here, we’re a cult, get used to it,” etc. The Forum, as its website says, “is specifically designed to bring about positive and permanent shifts in the quality of your life”—in just three days. It’s an institutionalized self-help program, geared to people who feel weighed down by something in their past, which is to say, pretty much everybody.