Commercialisation of yoga

The commercialisation of yoga is the process of converting the practice of yoga as exercise from a personal activity conducted for reasons such as exercise and spiritual wholeness to a source of profit for businesses. These businesses are sometimes called the yoga industry, selling yoga classes, yoga teacher training, equipment such as yoga mats, clothing including yoga pants, yoga holidays, and other goods intended to appeal to yoga practitioners. The businesses support sales with specific advertising.

Free-market capitalism has made yoga into a sizeable global business, with sales of yoga clothing at $31 billion by 2018, and yoga tourism worth $181 billion in 2022. Scholars of yoga have argued that the feeling among yoga practitioners that it is largely unconnected to religion has left yoga open to neoliberalism. Yoga teachers may distrust the market and its values, but are trapped by the gig economy into serving the market, and often work under precarious conditions. Meanwhile, spiritual consumers buy products that support existing structures in society.

Context

Yoga is an ancient meditational spiritual practice from India. For yoga as exercise, its goal, detachment from the self or kaivalya, was replaced by the self-affirming goals of good health, reduced stress, and physical flexibility when, in the early 20th century, it was transformed through Western influences and a process of innovation in India. Around the 1960s, the practice was transformed further by three global changes: Westerners were able to travel to India, and Indians were able to migrate to the West; people in the West became disillusioned with organised religion, and started to look for alternatives such as with yoga; and yoga became an uncontroversial form of exercise suitable for mass consumption.