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 Yogas
Hindu Roots was
launched.

This campaign was met with an unpleasant

reaction.

Yoga is thriving for its

essence as many
practicetioners continue
to patent it under their
name leading to mass
resentment.

Indias 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 of

aphorisms authored by the Indian
philosopher Patanjali, were also among
yogas 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

Swami Vivekananda, one of the first Hindus to bring

yoga to the U.S., represented India and spoke about
Hinduism at the World Parliament of Religions in
Chicago.

He went on becoming a spiritual leader, teaching

ideas about yoga and Vedanta philosophy, 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

Bikram Choudhury was born in 1946 in Calcutta, India.

Bikram began his study of yoga at age four under his
guru, Bishnu Ghosh.
By age 13, Bikram had won the National India Yoga
Championship. He successfully defended that title for
the next three years.

Spreading
his
vision.

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.

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

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 Bikrams Beginning Yoga Class. He also got a
trademark for his companys name, Bikrams 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, Bikrams accelerated training program
was turning out about 200 teachers a year.

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.

The Turning point

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 Bikrams 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

Stiless 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.
Stiless 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 doesnt want people using his name without his certification,
which I get. I think you can have a name of a studio, but its what goes
on inside that really matters. People always ask what style I teach, and
Im like, its 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 Worlds Religions in Australia.

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