Yahoo! Ashtanga Yoga discussion group - a partial index of messages

This is a selective index of some of the more interesting messages from the Yahoo! Ashtanga Yoga discussion group. There's a more detailed explanation and disclaimer at the bottom of the page.

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There's a lot a lot of useful and interesting information in the Yahoo! Ashtanga Yoga message board, but Yahoo! in their vast wisdom don't see fit to provide us with any kind of search facility. It's hard to wade back through thousands of messages with nothing better to go on than “oh, I think so-and-so said something about that in, let me see, probably round about May”. A lot of what's there is completely ephemeral gossip (nothing wrong with that) or things that are only relevant for a short time (“I'm going to Wisconsin in June, is there a class I can visit there?”) - nothing wrong with that either. But our best attempts at pearls of eternal wisdom can get lost in there too, never to be seen again.

So until enough people complain to Yahoo! and get them to give us message searching, here's a kind of partial and idiosyncratic index to “Yahoo! Ashtanga: the early days” from the very beginning up to about the end of January 2000. I've done a nostalgic trawl through the archives and noted messages that I found particularly interesting or useful for whatever reason. I might, if I ever feel the inclination, extend it a bit - although since the monthly number of messages (like everything else on the Web) is growing exponentially I'll probably never get fully up to date. And of course, this is a completely unscientific exercise and my criteria for what is of lasting interest:

• can't possibly be exactly the same as anybody else's
• vary from minute to minute
• are biased towards things I wrote
• … and things other people wrote that I agree with
• and might piss off people who think I've deliberately ignored and devalued their pearls of eternal wisdom

... but never mind. This list is something I created purely for personal reference. It has no connection whatsoever with Yahoo! Inc. or with Betty Lai, the founder of the Yahoo! Ashtanga Yoga Club.

Alan Little

History

9th September 2002
Updated the links to point to the new version of yahoo groups (which does now have a search facility, although I haven't tried it to see if it's any good). That's it, folks. I don't read the yahoo group regularly any more and won't be updating this page again, but I hope it's still of some use for the older messages.

6th December 2001
Added a few recent messages concerning The Mysore Experience.

5th September 2001
Added a lot of older stuff from around the time of Pattabhi Jois' workshop last year in New York.

27th August 2001
Message #9552 by missy_pinky is an all-time yahoo ashtanga classic. Everybody should read it and think hard about it.
Some other recent stuff added.
Some quite recent messages - 8100 to 8499 if I recall correctly - were temporarily deleted and then restored. Apparently this was an accident at yahoo and not deliberate censorship, but it does make me wonder again about one of the issues I wrote about earlier - namely that, if anybody thinks this stuff is potentially of any lasting value, then it is a big risk to trust the only copy of it to the competence, goodwill and commercial survival prospects of one company.

30th June 2001
Added a few new things.
Checked to see if many of the older messages in the index had been deleted, but only found a couple. These are marked in the list.

17th April 2001
Extended coverage of old messages to June last year, plus some things from the last few months.
Found an interesting little piece about “The Natural Life Cycle of Mailing Lists”, which makes sense to me based on my various online discussion experiences, of which the yahoo yoga list is the one I've been most heavily involved with in recent years.
I don't think I'm going to bother going through the stuff from the second half of last year, when as I recall there was a vast amount of stuff posted, much of which was either abuse or gossip. (Other peoples' perceptions might be different from mine, of course, and things have quietened down again somewhat). So that's it for now.

23rd January 2001
Some folks have set up a new ashtanga message board on EZboards which has a much better user interface than yahoo, including searching. Lots of people are still using yahoo though, and there's still no sign of a search facility there. This page had over 200 visits in November and December, so I think it's still worth maintaining it.
So, some new stuff: now covers the first 1,000 messages (and getting scarily close to the great explosion of message numbers in July, at which point I'll probably give up) plus more recent ones. Also now available sorted by author or subject as well as message number.

9th December 2000
Extended to early May 2000, plus some more recent stuff from the last few weeks. There is a rumour of the arrival of a search facility early next year, though, which might make this whole exercise redundant.

5th November 2000
Extended to April 2000. Thanks to Greg Turner for making this page far more useful - message numbers are now links to the messages.
Also wrote a long contemplation, “Reinventing the FAQ”, on what I'm trying to achieve by maintaining this index and whether it's really worthwhile. Time will tell whether enough people find the index useful to justify putting any more effort into it.

31st October 2000
Original version up to January 2000