Ancient yoga

Corepower yoga - Not my cup of tea, might be yours, point stands.

I wanted to give this assignment another go, as my last iteration mostly evolved into an ADHD hyper-focused tangent on the factual stability of Ancient Yoga before the Upanishads. This time, we will endeavour to stay on track.

Very simply, Ancient yoga could be up to 5000 years old. It is an ancient Indian spiritual practice that has truly stood the test of time. Not like a Singer sewing machine or your grandmother's butter knives, I’m talking all of modern, ancient, proto, and prehistory—yoga has truly stood the test of all human history.

This is where it gets a bit weird for me, it has been an ancient Indian and modern Indian practice forever (literally), of its 5000-year history, it has spent 131 years here in the west, arriving in 1893 in Chicago at the Chicago World Trade Fair. Yoga gained its popularity much later in the 1960s in the hippie and flower power movements, meaning that we, the late-to-the-spiritual-party white people, have been practising Yoga on a wide scale for approximately 60 years.

That’s 1.2% of its historical timeline. Smol.

So I’m going to start quite negative, then come back in with some positives, so bear with me, I'll get back round to yoga being great, let me just belly ache about capitalism and over commercialisation first.

Here’s where I struggle to be objective or even complimentary in my cataloguing of events. For context, I am many things: a mystic, a Yogi, but also a businessperson, and I go to the Spring fair, one of the largest trade fairs here in the UK. Quite simply, things are taken there to sell, sure,e commodities and products, but also culture and practices, still today.

Yoga was brought to the West to sell, and oh boy has it sold. What we have now is a global 107 billion dollar market that has an average year on year growth of 9.4% and this is the thing about multi Billion dollar industries, they have to change, adapt innovate and create to continue this kind of growth, that’s why Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp, its why X will become a payment system like PayPal, if you don’t grow the investors lose money and big fat angry men with gammon red faces cannot stand to lose money.

Here's an example: In America one of the main players in the industry is Core Power Yoga, owned, formerly by Niki Leondakis but later, after its massive explosion on to the main stage of Yoga, was bought by none other than TSG Consumer Partners, a private equity form based in the US with a manged fund of over 20 billion USD. Core power yoga was able to dominate this industry by stripping Yoga of its roots, its history and presenting it as a quick way to get abs and get laid.

I personally don’t believe that traditional Yoga, meaning full bodied yoga that includes the spiritual work and Pranayama - Yoga rooted in kindness, self-discovery and relaxation, that also incorporates respect to who and where it came form – could ever reach this staggering size and success (where financial income is incorrectly used as a metric for success). Proper Yoga is niche, and to find people interested in working on more than their body is quite rare, so some large businesses have had to bastardise yoga to make it more accessible to the mass market. These large companies have stripped it of its roots and sold it as a commodity.

My point is this, on a global scale, yoga is a product, owned and driven by multi-billion-pound corporations that can see full well its FINANCIAL value. I’m going to say it as few times as possible, but – Are corporations and hedge funds profiting off Indian culture and history while stripping away the “India and culture” from yoga and making it a multibillion-pound industry, classed as cultural appropriation? Yes, unequivocally, and without a doubt. It’s hundreds of thousands of white western people sold the idea of doing bastardised asana, while holding branded weights, drinking a Nitro cold brew, all while using the term “woo-woo” to describe people who might dare to make spiritual inquiry and dream of a more centred self.

Does this mean that doing yoga in the West is Cultural appropriation? Absolutely not. Sure, my personal experience of yoga has been quite varied, from the commercial to the disjointed and fringe. But the yoga community that I’m involved with are beautiful; practised by people who understand that it is borrowed, people who understand that we’re lucky to have it in our lives, regardless of whether it’s our own personal roots.

Commercial classes too, the people that attend them are doing nothing inherently wrong, sure they’re being sold to by a large corporation that is selling a surface exercise variant of Indian culture, but in the current state of the world, we’re all being sold something from somewhere and none of it is really ok.

“There is no ethical consumption under late-stage capitalism” hits home here, everything is not great in the world when it comes to money and products. This quote is something I think about a lot, its not attributed to someone, its just a fact, a statement that simply is.

As a consumer, it is our job to learn about what we’re doing, and the truth is, if some of the practitioners who attend commercialised classes, wearing designer leggings with a Stanley Cup. If they accidentally find themselves, and migrate to a grassroots yoga studio, and become a student, not of some clean white modern ab-centred studio, but of themselves, then this is a massive win, and steps towards a future where the human race as a whole can think and feel for itself again.

We can’t change the way the world works all at once, but people becoming self-aware and independent will always be a step towards long-term meaningful change, and if “cheap throw-away fashion yoga” can funnel people back to themselves, maybe it a big win in a difficult environment.

I'll finish here as I’ve run out of space again. But I'll leave you with this:

None of this essay is an ego issue, I don’t think I’m better than people who go to Yoga at Core Power Yoga. I think that studios like Moonstone and Magic, The Loft and Holistic House are better than Core Power Yoga. There's no snobbery here, only an observation on what is wholesome and what is not. The key is this, all grassroots yoga needs to understand that a lot of future customers will come from mainstream and commercial yoga, so its important to openly dislike the companies and organisations that are sterilising Yoga, but also be so welcoming and understanding of the people who go, because whether they do find yoga and themselves, or even if they do just get abs and get laid more, maybe that what they needed at that point in their life to be ok, and that's ok too.