Fear of Yoga

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In the 1970s and 1980s, yoga experienced slower growth, part of a natural backlash against all things hippie and a concomitant leveling off of media interest. In fact, it kind of disappeared during the Jane Fonda years, the Time of the Burn, for those who remember. Fitness freaks wanted heart-thumping aerobics, marathons, Ironman decathlons; anything but downward dog.

Fast-forward to 1993. Open your morning New York Times to page C-1. Sure enough, there is Sarah Kass introducing you, dear reader, to yoga as if it's a brand-new health fad. 'Yoga, a '60s Survivor, Is Luring New Converts' read the commanding headline. Kass found a raft of new converts, many of them young. 'It's not that yoga hasn't been there all this time,' declared Mata Ezraty, director of Yoga Works in Santa Monica, California, 'but it's like it's just been discovered.' An editor at Yoga Journal, the Berkeley-based bible of the yoga industry, noted in the piece that there had been a surge in attendance in classes and that the magazine's circulation had 'more than doubled in six years, to 70,000.'

Today, Yoga Journal is still the leading publication for yoga professionals, and it has branched off into the lucrative area of conferences and retreats. Its editor in chief, Kathryn Arnold, has presided over a tripling of the magazine's circulation while its advertising revenues have quadrupled since her watch started in 1998. YJ, as it calls itself, is now up to 350,000 subscribers, and Arnold attributes the rise to a singular event. 'The defining moment when the medical community started taking notice of yoga occurred in 1990,' Arnold told the Los Angeles Times. That year, the Times went on, the 'Lancet published the results of the California physician Dean Ornish's research indicating that lifestyle changes-including yoga-based stress management-could reverse heart disease. From then on it was onward and upward.'

It's also probably not an accident that the front-runners of the baby boom generation were lurching through their 50s at the time. In 2005, with this group poised to turn 60, Yoga Journal underwrote an expensive study that found-to the relief of YJ's marketing team-that about 16.5 million Americans were practicing yoga regularly. It makes perfect sense. What better exercise to facilitate a low-impact glide to the golden years . . . with or without spiritual attachments? There are some 78 million baby boomers living and breathing and getting older. In fact, 7,920 more of them turn 60 every day. If I were a betting man, I would lay odds that yoga is not about to disappear again for a long time to come.

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