So a couple of weeks ago in the San Diego Union Tribune, there was an article that talked about the hip-ness of yoga these days. Duh, I know it's hip. But the article actually went into the story enought to reveal that there's a good bit of tension in the yoga world between traditionalists and the new crowd that's doing it either just because it's hip or in order to make money off of the popularity of it.

Last week, in that same newspaper I read an article on the hip-ness of Kabbalah, a Jewish mysticism that popular folks like Madonna are into. Once again, I was already aware of this trend. But again, the article looked at various views of this new form of a very old practice and found a good bit of tension between traditionalists and the younger, more populist version of it.

In both of these cases I was reminded that the people of our generation are spiritually hungry, and looking for something. And while they are very into being hip (Pilates anyone?), and they certainly fall easily for marketing schemes, they are chasing the spiritual and experiential. It was interesting to me to read the remarks of traditionalist yoga practitioners and Jewish rabbis, and compare them to many of the things I've read withing the Christian culture. We seem to have a lot more in common with these other forms of faith and spirituality than we'd like to admit. Sadly, one of these commmonalities is that we're losing people who are very reachable every day.