Situating ‘Mainstream’ Yoga

Abstract

Yoga has become a highly visible commodity over recent decades, often promoted through images of sculpted bodies on exotic beaches and perfect Instagram homes. This paper explores the less glamorous everyday yoga class—more village hall than Bali beach—describing exploratory surveys and focus groups with teachers from two major British yoga organizations. These teachers offer widely accessed presentations of modern postural yoga and therefore play an important role in how yoga is conceived and continues to evolve. While boutique studios now account for 20% of class locations, the majority of classes still take place in community centres, gyms, church and village halls, schools and workplaces. This suggests that for the moment yoga in Britain remains deeply embedded in community settings. The paper concludes that despite yoga’s association with secularized health and wellness most teachers attribute a strong spiritual dimension to the practice. However, in the personal ways yoga is imagined, life history and local context appear as important, if not more important, than yoga lineages and yoga philosophy.