Comment from last week: “I don’t know, technology metaphors–particularly that yoga one–strike me as desperate and insecure. Yoga has its own thing going, did we really need that metaphor to grasp what she was talking about?”
Need? No. But I think that drawing the comparison to refreshing a website says something different about the function of downward facing dog than the teacher would have communicated if she had been more straightforward. People sometimes think of down dog as a resting pose, and her metaphor made me consider it as less of a static position and more of a reset.
I’m intrigued by the idea of insecure and desperate metaphors. Do you think of all metaphors as such? You could say no metaphor is ever really necessary, but they enhance language, and when done well, cause us to reexamine the familiar in a different way. Or was it just this metaphor that struck you as desperate and insecure (personification? Or do you mean the teacher seems insecure and desperate?)? I can see how it might seem like she was pandering, thinking that we would relate better to technology than to something like “Use downward dog as a way to leave the previous poses behind and start over,” (though I don’t think she was being overly pat–it sounded like something she’d just thought of).
Now that I’m thinking about it excessively, you could make the argument that down dog is like a screensaver. And I saw an amazing, possibly accidental metaphor about a screensaver the other day…but it’s not mine to share.
This week’s technology metaphor–let’s stick with the theme–also comes from a yoga teacher (different one): “Don’t panic and forget to breathe. I can see you all thinking “When is this pose going to be over?” like you’re the spinning wheel of death that you get on a frozen Mac.”
I always think of it as the spinning pie, I will say.
