Dahn We Now Our Creepy Yoga?
Dahn Yoga does not appear to be yoga in the commonly understood sense of the work. It claims to be based on Korean arts and the active component of the classes is Tai Chi. I don’t know how cultish they are, but if you’re expecting traditional yoga poses and philosophies, you might be disappointed.
On the spectrum of “Agressive, wants to “help” you, takes a lot of your money” (a 10- Scientology is here) to “Just there to help, authentic tradition of healing” (a 1- trad. medicine, for instance, or non-fundie, non-evangelical Christianity) I’d say Dahn Yoga is about a 5. They don’t want to take all your cash or brainwash you, they’ve got some good ideas and some funny ideas, they are a little aggressive with their marketing, but they’re not really a scam. And yeah, you can just go for the yoga. You’re suspicious, so they wouldn’t get very far with any kind of “recruitment” anyway.
There’s a Dahn Yoga across the street from where I work. I went to check it out last year because I thought it would be nice to pop in there for lunchtime classes or right before or after work. But it’s not at all a traditional yoga studio. The man who showed me around said that he would “tell me what I needed” as far as a yoga “program.” It was all very weird and creepy, and I couldn’t wait to get out of there.
I had a roommate a few years back who got sucked into the Dahn vortex for a little while. It does appear to be moderately cultish on the standard Korean “dear leader” model. It’s a community, as much as anything else, but it’s a hierarchical community, where beliefs move from the top down and money moves from the bottom up. All that said, I’d agree with comments from others that it’s not one of the more malignant manifestations of this structure.
