page_title: Yoga as exercise
section_title: Worldwide commodity
hierarchical_section_title: Yoga as exercise / History / Worldwide commodity
caption_attribution_description: people are doing yoga in jakarta
context_page_description: Yoga as exercise is a physical activity consisting mainly of postures, often connected by flowing sequences, sometimes accompanied by breathing exercises, and frequently ending with relaxation lying down or meditation. Yoga in this form has become familiar across the world, especially in America and Europe. It is derived from the postures used in the medieval spiritual discipline of Haṭha yoga, but it is generally simply called "yoga". Academics have given yoga as exercise a variety of names, including modern postural yoga and transnational anglophone yoga.
  Postures were not central in any of the older traditions of yoga; posture practice was revived in the 1920s by yoga gurus including Yogendra and Kuvalayananda, who emphasised its health benefits. The flowing sequences of Salute to the Sun were pioneered by the Rajah of Aundh, Bhawanrao Shrinivasrao Pant Pratinidhi, in the 1920s. It and many standing poses used in gymnastics were incorporated into yoga by the yoga teacher Krishnamacharya in Mysore from the 1930s to the 1950s. Several of his students went on to found influential schools of yoga: Pattabhi Jois created Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga, which in turn led to Power Yoga; B. K.
context_section_description: Three changes around the 1960s allowed yoga as exercise to become a worldwide commodity. People were for the first time able to travel freely around the world: consumers could go to the east; Indians could migrate to Europe and America; and business people and religious leaders could go where they liked to sell their wares. Secondly, people across the Western world became disillusioned with organised religion, and started to look for alternatives. And thirdly, yoga became an uncontroversial form of exercise suitable for mass consumption, unlike religious forms of modern yoga such as Siddha Yoga or Transcendental Meditation. This involved the dropping of many traditional requirements on the practice of yoga, such as giving alms, being celibate, studying the Hindu scriptures, and retreating from society.
  From the 1970s, yoga as exercise spread across many countries of the world, changing as it did so, and becoming "an integral part of (primarily) urban cultures worldwide", to the extent that the word yoga in the Western world now means the practice of asanas, typically in a class. For example, Iyengar Yoga reached South Africa in 1979 with the opening of its institute at Pietermaritzburg; its Association of South East & East Asia was founded in 2009. Yoga's spread in America was assisted by the television show Lilias, Yoga and You, hosted by Lilias Folan; it ran from 1970 to 1999. In Australia, by 2005 some 12% of the population practised yoga in a class or at home.
  The market for yoga grew, argues the scholar of religion Andrea Jain, with the creation of an "endless" variety of second-generation yoga brands, saleable products, "constructed and marketed for immediate consumption", based on earlier developments. For example, in 1997 John Friend, once a financial analyst, who had intensively studied both the postural Iyengar Yoga and the non-postural Siddha Yoga, founded Anusara Yoga. Friend likened the choice of his yoga over other brands to choosing "a fine restaurant" over "a fast-food joint"; The New York Times Magazine headed its piece on him "The Yoga Mogul", while the historian of yoga Stefanie Syman argued that Friend had "very self-consciously" created his own yoga community. For example, Friend published his own teacher training manual, held workshops, conferences, and festivals, marketed his own brand of yoga mats and water bottles, and prescribed ethical guidelines. When Friend did not live up to the brand's high standards, he apologised publicly and took steps to protect the brand, in 2012 stepping back from running it and appointing a CEO.
  Jain states that yoga is becoming "part of pop culture around the world". Alter writes that it illustrates "transnational transmutation and the blurring of consumerism, holistic health, and embodied mysticism—as well as good old-fashioned Orientalism." Singleton argues that the commodity is the yoga body itself, its "spiritual possibility" signified by the "lucent skin of the yoga model", a beautiful image endlessly sold back to the yoga-practising public "as an irresistible commodity of the holistic, perfectible self".
caption: Yoga in public, Jakarta, 2013. The participants are relaxing in Shavasana.
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