Branding Yoga

About Yoga as a BRAND in the current scenario in the US.

In 2008, almost a million people in the

US were practitioners of Yoga.

Yoga Journal pegged

the industry for about

$5.7 billion

Thus, “Take Back Yoga – Bringing to light Yoga’s

Hindu Roots” was launched.

This campaign was met with an unpleasant reaction.

Yoga is thriving for it’s essence as many

practicetioners continue

to patent it under their name leading to mass

resentment.

India’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) is being formulated having 1,500 yoga poses to be prevented from patents all over the world.

This led to diverse forms

of it being practiced

nation wide.

Examples:

Bikram Yoga studios held classes at a temperature of 105 degrees

Fahrenheit. A New York City studio called Strala Yoga offered entirely exercise-focused

classes that used no Sanskrit terms.

History of Yoga

Sanskrit

The Bhagavad Gita (circa 300 B.C.E.), part of an epic known as the

Mahabharata, was a philosophical cornerstone for yoga.

The Yoga Sutras , a series o f aphorisms authored by the Ind ian

phi losopher Patanja l i , were a lso among yoga ’s most important precursors .

He preached the Ashatnga Yoga.

•Yama or restraint, • Niyama or observance, •Asana or physical exercise, •Pranayama or breathing techniques,

•Pratyhara or preparation for meditation, •Dharana or concentration, • Dhyana or meditation, •Samadhi or absorption.

Yoga was associated with quieting the mind, transcending the physical self, and attaining communion with the

divine.

Types of Yoga

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•

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Swami V ivekananda , one o f the f i rs t H indus to br ing yoga to the U .S . , represented Ind ia and spoke about

Hindu ism a t the Wor ld Par l i ament o f Re l ig ions in Chicago .

He went on becoming a sp ir i tua l leader , teaching ideas about yoga and Vedanta phi losophy , to

American students .

In 1940, Margaret Woodrow Wilson, daughter of former

President Woodrow Wilson, left the U.S. for an ashram in

Pondicherry, India.

He wrote many popular books about yoga, with titles such as Yoga for Health; his television show, also called Yoga for

Health, ran from 1961 to 1981.

In 1968, the Beatles made a highly visible trip to India to visit the ashram of Maharishi

Mahesh Yogi and studied transcendental meditation, or

TM. TM became extremely popular in the U.S. The movement claimed TM was neither Hindu nor religious, but only a concentration

technique

Prominent

authorities in

the field of Yoga.

The ones who really changed the course if it

and how.

Bikram Choudhary

•B i k r a m C h o u d h u r y w a s b o r n i n 1 9 4 6 i n C a l c u t t a , I n d i a .

•B i k r a m b e g a n h i s s t u d y o f y o g a a t a g e f o u r u n d e r h i s g u r u , B i s h n u G h o s h .

•B y a g e 1 3 , B i k r a m h a d w o n t h e N a t i o n a l I n d i a Y o g a C h a m p i o n s h i p . H e s u c c e s s f u l l y d e f e n d e d t h a t t i t l e f o r

t h e n e x t t h r e e y e a r s .

Spreading his

vision.

“When room is more hot, then I can sweat more, I can stretch more, I can push more, I can go more

deeper and deeper and inside the body, it hurts less and you never get injury”

Bikram left India in 1970.

He first went to Japan, where executing poses became much more difficult during the winters .

He began to use a space heater, although he had already noticed the effects of heat on his stretching in India.

•In 1971, he arrived in the U.S. Bikram taught at resorts and spas before opening his first studio in Los Angeles. •He taught poses from Hatha yoga. •The classroom temperature ranged between 100 and 105 degrees. Classes were 90 minutes long. Bikram gave instructors particular language to use verbatim during class

Expanding…

•1979, Bikram obtained his first copyright, for his book Bikram’s Beginning Yoga Class. He also got a trademark for his company’s name, Bikram’s Yoga College of India. •In 1994, Bikram began to offer an intensive teacher-training course, which led to a rise in the number of Bikram studios. •By 2000, Bikram’s accelerated training program was turning out about 200 teachers a year.

The Turning point

In 2002, when Bikram learned that other yoga instructors used his

methods or mixed elements from Bikram yoga with other concepts—hot yoga with music, for example—

he decided to patent the Bikram style, including the asana series and

breathing exercises.

•In 2002, he sent a cease-and-desist letter to the owners of a yoga studio in Costa Mesa, California.

•The owners were among hundreds who received cease-and-desist letters. Most of them complied with Bikram’s demands, but the Costa Mesa owners did not.

To this he quotes, “To stop them from stealing I must go to the lawyers,”

“When in Rome, I must do as the Romans do. When in America, make Bikram copyright and trademark.”

Resentment In 2003, a collective of yoga

teachers, Open Source Yoga Unity (OSYU), based in San Francisco,

California, filed suit against Bikram, claiming that his copyrights and

patents were invalid, and that yoga could not be copyrighted.

Tara Stiles

Rise of modern Yoga.

Tara Stiles was born in 1981 and grew up in rural Illinois

After graduating from high school, she moved to Chicago to study ballet, where she landed a contract with the

Ford Modeling Agency. A ballet instructor also introduced Stiles to

yoga.

Through the Ford Agency, she moved to New York in 2000.

But she disliked the New York yoga scene.

To this she quotes

Modern Yoga

In 2006, she went on several fashion shoots that involved yoga apparel, and the Ford

Agency asked her to create and post promotional yoga videos

on YouTube. She began to use Facebook to promote the yoga classes she taught out of her apartment, and offered private sessions.

Her rise.

Strala Yoga

Strala Yoga Studio

Stiles’s yoga was highly secular. She did not use

Sanskrit words for poses or chant in class.

Chopra liked her so much that he made her his personal yoga instructor sometime after she opened her studio.

“I have been doing yoga for 30 years. I have had teachers of all kinds. Taking lessons from her has been more useful to me than from anyone else,”

-Deepak chopra

Resentment

Stiles created controversy because she was “making yoga cool”

“We are basically breaking the rules, improvising, adding music; in our minds,

connecting the younger generation. In society, brands that succeed stay

relevant.” –Deepak Chopra

In 2010, Chopra and Stiles also released a yoga iPad app, “Authentic Yoga,” and

collaborated on a video.

Stiles’s book, Slim Calm Sexy Yoga, was published in the summer of 2010 and was

the number-one yoga book on Amazon.com for several months.

At the end of 2010, workout maven Jane Fonda reintroduced her fitness brand and debuted “Team

Fonda,” a group of fitness instructors with whom she launched new workout videos, including Stiles.

The difference

Despite her own growing celebrity, Stiles did not think she would patent her yoga classes, as Bikram had done.

“I mean, he doesn’t want people using his name without his certification, which I get. I think you can have a name of a studio, but it’s what goes on inside that really matters. People always ask what style I teach, and

I’m like, it’s yoga.” -Stiles

The Hindu American Foundation

Linking Yoga to Hindu Roots.

Alert.

In 2008, several members of the staff at the Hindu American

Foundation (HAF), an advocacy group for Hinduism in the U.S.,

examined editions of Yoga Journal, which had become a

popular American yoga magazine. They saw no reference to Hinduism in the magazine and

concluded that it associated Buddhism, Jainism, and

Christianity with yoga more than it did Hinduism.

The goal of the campaign

was not to convert yoga

devotees to Hinduism but

to have them acknowledge

the connection between

them.

The Uprising HAF senior director Sheetal Shah published a position paper, called “Yoga Beyond Asana: Hindu Thought in

Practice.”70 Its main tenets were that “yoga is a lot more than asana . . . and yoga in its entirety is rooted in the

Hindu philosophy,” she said. HAF began to present the paper in settings such as the 2009 Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions in Australia.

Continued.. In November 2010, the New York Times ran an article on the front page of its Sunday edition

about HAF’s “Take Back Yoga” campaign and the ongoing debate over the origins of yoga. The

debate thrust the foundation into a prominent role as the voice for the U.S.’s 2 million Hindus

In March 2011, Sheetal Shah of HAF, Tara Stiles, Dr. Edwin Bryant of Rutgers University, Dr. Virginia

Cowen of the City University of New York, and Edwin

Stern, founder of Ashtanga Yoga NY, participated in a

discussion at Princeton University called “The

Politics of Yoga.”

Topics included the definition of yoga, the commercialization of yoga, the

validity of yoga as exercise alone, and whether yoga belonged to Hinduism or

to any one tradition.

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