Everyone from macho football players and movie stars swear by it.

There are designer accessories, boutique retreats and famous teachers jetting around the world on rock-star schedules, staying in five star hotels and reminding the strung out masses to inhale their particular brand of inner peace.

Yoga. Once exotic and esoteric, is not only a popular phenomenon, it’s big business.

And why not? Now you can have ripped abs and enlightenment.

But is the race to package and commercialize particular brands of yoga strangling its ancient spiritual roots?

 “Yoga will change the course of world events,” said Satyananda Saraswati of the Bihar School of Yoga, and perhaps it already has.

The proliferation of yoga in the West means that it now uneasily straddles its Indian origins and the force of modern capitalism. A designer yoga mat can set you back a few hundred dollars, while a week-long retreat in an exotic location easily pass the US$1,000 mark. Today, it would seem a new type of yoga emerges on the market and at the patent office each day. Apple yoga, Forrest yoga, Bikram yoga, are just a few of the many accompanied by a neat little TM.

Take Bikram Chowdury as the most extreme example of this tension. In 2003, he copyrighted his particular sequence of 26 postures, as well as the environment (a room heated to 42 degrees Celsius) and the exact script used to teach them.

The Open Source Yoga Unity challenged Chowdury, arguing that no one had the right to copyright a yoga pose in the public domain. The legal case was settled out of court in 2005 and while the status of the copyright remains unresolved, it has highlighted broader concerns about how yoga has been taken up by the West.

While the Indian government is establishing a database of yoga and ayurvedic practices to avoid such conflicts in the future, many teachers and sports brands continue to trademark their own particular slant on yoga.

By 2005, US patent office had granted 134 patents on yoga accessories, 150 yoga-related copyrights and 2,315 yoga trademarks, many to expatriate Indians.

Duncan Wong, who in the past has taught yoga to Madonna and Sting, has his own brand of yoga known as yogic arts. It is a synthesis of martial arts, yoga and modern dance and something he believed had to be branded out of respect for his teachers, such as Pattabhi Jois, David Life and Sharon Gannon.

“It’s necessary to brand your own form. If you have a self expression that is strong enough and valuable enough in your heart to present it as your own body of work, if you have your own body of work that is an integration of the teachings of one or more of your masters, and it is not in the exact keepings of the tradition as taught by your master. Out of respect to your master, you have to give it a different name,” said Duncan.

Shiva Rea, a renowned yoga teacher from California and also the founder of yoga trance dance and her own clothing label, Shiva Shakti, says that more yoga terms should be trademarked to protect their use in the public realm.

“I think all these 10,000 or so Sanskrit words that relate to yoga should be protected so that no one has the ability to copyright or trademark them. l have the trademark ‘Shiva Shakti’, for my own clothing line, but anyone that wants to teach a workshop on shiva shakti, or wants to have a studio called shiva shakti, or whatever, I think that’s fantastic, I would never prevent that, it belongs to everybody,” said Shiva.

Shiva notes that everyone uses the word “shakti” in India, from tailors, hairdressers to hotels, and that the commercialization of yoga terms is not exclusive to the West.

“I’m on the most liberal side of the argument,” says Shiva, “but in terms of identity and branding, you can’t imagine all the gurus with big billboards in India. This has always existed, so it is not a thing of the West. Westerners were not the first to commercialize yoga.

“I don’t think it is a western phenomenon for people to take something that is spiritual in essence and commercialize it, this has been going on for a long time,” said Shiva.

While yoga or traditional Sanskrit terms may not have been first used for financial gain in the West, the extent to which yoga has become popular in the West has many teachers worried the real messages of yoga might be in danger.

Rocky Mustafa, a former stock broker in Jakarta, says the commercialization of yoga has both positive and negative effects. One the one hand he says, yoga is becoming increasingly accessible to more people around the world, but the dangers of commercialization could draw it further away from its essence, encouraging people to focus their energy on complicated yoga postures and lithe bodies rather than the spiritual contentment the 5,000-year-old practice offers.

Rocky runs his own yoga school in Surabaya, but frequently visits Jakarta to hold private classes for stressed-out socialites and power brokers. Although it is ironic he escaped the world of finance to end up still connected to it, Rocky says his connection now takes a very different form.

“When I did business with them [the Indonesian elite] I would never touch them, but as a yoga teacher I help adjust and reposition them and they start to melt because for 24 hours a day, their life is business.

“No one touches them, not even their wives and their children, so I touch them with the heart. Yoga is universal and helps us realize the intimacy of life,” said Rocky.

The yoga he teaches focuses intricately on the muscles of the face and neck, something he believes is the secret to his age-defying face. So it’s easy to see why he is popular with the upper echelons, but he argues that even if people start practicing yoga for their body, they soon realize the benefits it has on their mind.

“The heart of yoga,” says Rocky, “will always be there for people to discover.”

While multitudes of yoga varieties continuing to spawn and perhaps become diluted in all directions, it seems that no person, teacher or brand can ever really own yoga.

The reality is that while a great majority of people will continue to be drawn to yoga to sculpt a perfect body, there will always be those who are inspired to extend their practice to a deeper level.

Uma Inder, who studied yoga on the riverbanks of a Balinese jungle for seven years, says she was initially shocked by the rapid transformation of yoga, a word that was never used 22 years ago.

Today she believes yoga is an unstoppable force.

“If any of us form an opinion, of how yoga needs to be, should be and how it was, is just going to be steamrolled by the sheer force of the movement of people towards greater health. That’s where everything starts, and that’s where we are at in the yoga movement,” said Inder.

Speaking at the Bali Spirit festival, a four-day yoga, dance and music event held in Ubud in early April, several yoga teachers were still concerned by the current trajectory of yoga as an exclusive exercise for the white middle class.

Mark Whitwell, author of Yoga of Heart and a pupil of the renowned “teacher of teachers”, Krishnamacharya, says yoga should be a practice that benefits everyone.

“My teacher would say and I agree, that yoga is not a commercial activity. It is about sincere people caring for others in their community. Yoga cannot be codified or branded as a standardized practice. Yoga should be adapted to each person according to their age and health, culture and body type and not the other way around.

There is only one brand of yoga and it is YOGA,” said Mark.

Mark hopes to see yoga evolve in a way that is accessible and available to everyone and there are seeds of this at every corner.

From yoga classes held in a Jakarta prison, to those in Haiti after the earthquake and on offer for girls that have been sex trafficked in Cambodia, its pervasiveness continues to grow.

In the US, the weakened powerhouse of the capitalist system, Shiva Rea says that during the global financial crisis the yoga spirit remained strong.

 “People had already lost their homes, their jobs and their lives, but they continued to show up for what was still flowing.”

Searching for enlightenment: Yogis take a group class at the Bali Spirit Festival, a four-day yoga, dance and music event held in Ubud, early April. Courtesy of Neal Harrison

Popular

Indonesia not affected by Southeast Asia-wide heat wave: BMKG

Residents fear for safety as Mount Ruang volcano erupts

In defense of Indonesian democracy