Stefanie Syman. Photo courtesy of Sara & Sarma Photography
During a little afternoon surf, I came across a blog post written by Stephanie Syman, author of The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America, with her reflections on the commoditization of yoga. Her post grazes the surface of a debate that has been raging for weeks across the blogaphere. I have yet to read her book; however, her post suggests how deeply she has researched the topic and makes me realize I am silly if I go yet another week without reading this book. I’m posting the whole thing here for your enjoyment:
With the near simultaneous release last month of “Eat Pray Love” the movie and a Toe Sox ad campaign featuring a naked woman (save her “sox”) in various yoga poses, there is no denying we’ve exhausted yoga’s commercial possibilities. No doubt new yoga tchotchkes will be produced, and at least two more yoga memoirs are set for release this fall. But these are all variations on a theme. Like “Star Wars” or Matisse, the merchandising, advertising, and profiteering of yoga has run the full gamut, from action figures to deluxe vacations to how-to-books that apply yoga to almost every human endeavor (my personal favorite: “The Yoga of Time Travel”).
Now, there’s nothing left to exploit. But before you condemn any number of culprits (shareholders, American materialism, craven gurus, cynical marketers), you better understand that this process took some time — a century in fact — and yoga’s most committed followers have hurried it along.
During World War I, a select set — including, most famously Ann Vanderbilt and her daughters — was taking daily Hatha Yoga classes at a tastefully appointed, Manhattan townhouse on 53rd Street, complete with pristine studios, yoga mats, lithe young instructors, and a café that served health-building food. India was exotic, enchanting, and magical. (And Americans were far enough away to not be terribly bothered by colonialism’s offenses.) Yoga connoted magic and mystery, and yet, according to both Indian and American teachers, the discipline was scientific. This one was of its biggest selling points.
Within another decade, yoga had become a popular literary trope. Lily Adams Beck published romantic stories such as “The Flute of Krishna” in the Atlantic Monthly as well as several novels in which Westerners found redemption through yoga. Beck later wrote The Way of Power, a memoir cum guide book. Beck, like Elizabeth Gilbert, had been transformed by yoga, and she promised her readers that they too could peer through the “looking glass” to the reality beyond our ordinary senses. Published in 1927, The Way of Power preceded Paul Brunton’s far more famous book, A Search in Secret India, by seven years.
Both Beck and, to an extent, Brunton oriented their lives around yoga and made literary careers out of the subject. No one objected to this conflation of vocation and avocation partly because they presented themselves as ambassadors of India’s spiritual treasure at a time when travel to Asia was still difficult (it took weeks to get from New York to Bombay via ship in the 1930s).
Meanwhile, Paramahansa Yogananda had set up his own organization in Los Angeles, now called The Self Realization Fellowship, which ran his tours and published post cards, calendars, and other ephemera emblazoned with his image as well as a magazine and a popular correspondence course.
It wasn’t long before yoga was used to sell something else, something completely unrelated to the discipline. At first this seemed harmless enough. An ad in Life magazine featured two slim young women in a leotards, and another holding a book about Yoga. The copy read, in part, “So you’re having a go at Yoga… All of a sudden—Tiredsville.
What do you do? You sip a chilled 7-Up.” It’s 1963, Mad Men reign, and yoga is now shorthand for an active American life. Fast forward to 1967 and yoga was being used in much the same way, but to move a very different product—LSD.
The leap from leotards to nudity or from Beck’s travel tales to Eat Pray Love, is a relatively small one. And yet it marks a paradigm shift. One reason is scale. Yoga, as we’re frequently reminded, has become a multi-billion dollar industry, and so and it’s no longer possible to imagine yoga apart from money. And to associate yoga with money is to admit that it’s subject to the motives and corruptions money always entails.
And the second, perhaps more damning, reason is that we have a much harder time forgetting anything as a culture. Up until now, Americans would periodically forget about yoga. Zen, psychedelic drugs, Arica, EST—any number of other spiritual techniques might preoccupy us for awhile, and then, these would lose their luster, and another generation of Americans would “discover” yoga. No more. The beauty and curse of the web is how readily you can retrieve the past, via Google books, YouTube, or just back issues of your favorite magazines. Yoga is here to stay as are all of its crass permutations.
Sigh. Even “pologa“? Go on, click the link. I dare you. Thoughts?
yogi, interrupted. 