The mythology of transformation is the cornerstone of
advertising. Offering to reduce the
large and small discomforts inherent in being human, what we yogis might call dukkha, is the bread and butter of
marketing. Our dissatisfaction with
ourselves and the world around us is used as a lure to entice us to buy cars,
soda, shampoo, and every other product on the planet – even, sadly, yoga. Though the philosophy of yoga indicates that
each of us is entirely composed of the divine, the marketing of yoga tends to
enforce the same tired illusions, or samskaras
– that we are incomplete, flawed, probably even bad at the core, and that the
practice of yoga (or its many accessories) can lead us toward the realization
of radiance we hope to someday embody.
After all, if you thought the whole world was contained within you, what
would you really need to buy? For those
working in the business of advertising our yoga classes, workshops, teacher
trainings, and products, the quest to create ethical marketing can be as hard
as asking our students not to round their backs in Ardha Uttanasana. The question becomes can we entice students
to give us their money without promising change? Or is there a type of change we can promise
that doesn’t stand at odds with our philosophical beliefs?
For the purpose of this paper, I will be using the viewpoint of
non-dual Śaiva Tantra as the philosophical touchstone. There are other philosophical concepts that
could be referenced as “the philosophy of yoga,” but this is the one that
resonates with my viewpoint and life experience and is the direction I
reference when I have questions about how to proceed. In his excellent book Tantra Illuminated,
Christopher D. Wallis defines non-dual Śaiva Tantra (NŚT) in this way:
NŚT holds
that one thing alone exists: the Divine, in various permutations. To say that God alone is real is the same as
saying everything exists is God. In NŚT,
to experience this divinity in and as all things is the goal of the practice.
…[NŚT] is based on the teaching that all things are manifestations of the
Goddess. Therefore the body was seen not
as a locus of sin and impurity, as in the pre-Tantrik tradition, but rather as
a vehicle to realize divine reality.
One of the distinctions of Tantrik philosophy is its lack of a
battle cry for self-improvement. The
Tantrik practitioner is not called to purify or refine herself, is not asked to
participate in austerities. Even
participating in the illusion that oneself is separate from the totality is
thought of as part of the divine play – a masking veil dropped by the Goddess
in order to experience separateness and the eventual awakening into
connection. One may become drawn to
yogic practices and holy scriptures as this play unfolds, or one may receive a
direct transmission of the truth without having done any “work” at all
beforehand. However the veil begins to
fall is thought of as an act of grace, not something that can be earned by
devotion to practice, social standing, religious sentiment, or the like. The practitioner does not have to earn it,
and actually can’t.
At first glance, most yoga advertising does not seem to create a
conflict with the concept of an already-existing inner divinity. There are some glaring exceptions, (such as
internationally-known vinyasa teacher Sadie Nardini’s marketing for The 21
Day Yoga Body, which is touted as a “fast-acting program” to “renovate your
mind, body, and spirit”), but most yoga advertising seems to use language with
a fairly gentle brush. A recent edition
of Yoga Journal magazine included advertisements encouraging the reader to
“Explore the Power of You” (Kripalu), “Find Your Serene” (Source Naturals),
“Help People Let Go” (Mindbody), and to “Nourish Yourself” (Special K). Yogi Tea asks “How good can you feel?” and
Tom’s of Maine insists that, “We believe what’s inside matters.” While this language doesn’t go so far as to
support the realization of divinity in all things, it doesn’t contradict it
either.
But words are the smallest part of any yoga advertisement. What really sells are the pictures, and, in
yoga advertising, there are lots of pictures.
A quick perusal of any yoga advertisement reveals what’s really on offer
here: thin, young, strong, flexible,
white women. The 100-page November 2014
edition of Yoga Journal magazine included no less than 38 distinct advertising
images of thin, young, strong, flexible, white women, and that’s counting paid
advertising only, excluding the similar images used in the magazine’s actual
stories. In comparision, advertising
presented 4 women of non-white ethnicities, 3 non-white men, and nobody fat,
old, or differently abled. A review of
almost any yoga-focused magazine, website, or book will reveal a similar narrow
visual focus. Should we assume that most
yogis are thin, young, strong, flexible, white women? Many professionals in this industry with
firsthand knowledge of the diversity of their student populations would argue
against the truth of this assumption. To
understand the gross predominance of these images, we must remember the purpose
of advertising: to convince the consumer of a need for something she doesn’t
already have.
The yoga industry knows who we are, and it knows what we
want. Thinness is offered as a benefit
of yoga by everyone from national registry Yoga Alliance (“weight management”),
to the American Osteopathic Association (“weight reduction”), to the local yoga
studio (Balanced Yoga, Columbus, OH – “weight loss and/or weight
management). The phrase “weight
management” in this setting has to be understood as a euphemism for becoming
thinner – one is unlikely to read this benefit as a way to gain a few or stay
exactly as one is. Yoga Alliance
elucidates:
While most of the evidence for the effects of yoga on weight loss is anecdotal or experiential, yoga teachers, students, and practitioners across the country find that yoga helps to support weight loss. Many teachers specialize in programs to promote weight management and find that even gentle yoga practices support weight loss. People do not have to practice the most vigorous forms of yoga to lose weight. Yoga encourages development of a positive self-image, as more attention is paid to nutrition and the body as a whole.
With this kind of
open-ended and unspecified evidence, one could easily replace the word “yoga”
in the above paragraph with any sort of movement activity. Why list this as one of the benefits of
yoga? Because everyone wants to be
thinner, and yoga is what Yoga Alliance has to sell. While thinness is used as an example here,
this theme is consistent throughout all of the photographed attributes. Advertisers know we want to be
thinner, younger, stronger, and more flexible – these are easy commonalities,
low-hanging fruit. These desirable
attributes also compose a cultural agreement about what it means to be
beautiful. In reality, when we attempt
to sell yoga, we end up selling beauty instead.
Casting one’s lot with the quest for beauty is financially a very
smart move. The beauty industry is
estimated to have garnered $426 billion dollars in sales in 2011, with numbers
heading ever upward. This industry
establishes demand by creating increasingly unattainable “standards,” offering
images of these extremes as a cultural norm, and then offering to sell the
consumer a product or service to help her bridge the gap between the flawed
self and the perfected self. We could be
talking about longer lashes and healthier hair, or tighter tummies and perkier
buns, or an unwaivering Natarajasana and an effortless Bakasana. In the world of advertising it’s all the
same: Offer an image of perfection to
highlight the consumer’s inability and insecurity, and then sell, sell, sell.
What are the risks of this tactic?
Marketing like this helps us keep our yoga studios open and our classes
filled. Many yoga businessmen and women
would argue that we get them in the door with the simple stuff and let the
practice fill in the blanks over time.
You come in the door for handstand and we sell you inner peace. You come for your bad back and leave aware of
your connection to the divine. Is this
wrong? In Tantra Illuminated,
Wallis argues against this deception in this way:
The great
master Abhinava Gupta suggests to us that if you practice yoga from the
perspective that you are not good enough as you are, or that there is something
wrong with you that needs fixing, then your yoga cannot fulfill is ultimate
purpose because it is a practice founded on wrong understanding. …However, if
you undertake the practice of yoga with the right View of self, that you
already are a perfect and whole expression of the Divine and that you are doing
yoga to realize and fully express what is already true, then you have empowered
your practice to take you all the way.
In The Heart of the Yogi, Doug Keller expresses a similar
concern when explaining the importance of the kula, or community, to one’s experience of the truth:
Good company helps us to transcend limitations,
bringing greater acceptance and understanding; bad company reinforces them (sometimes making virtues of our
vices), usually with greater prejudice against ‘others.’ Our spiritual wholeness or integrity depends
on the consistency between inner life and outer action. Integrity requires that we not see or think
of ourselves inwardly one way and yet act outwardly in another way.
This philosophical standpoint indicates that the bait and switch
of beauty for possible divine realization actually builds a barrier decreasing the likelihood of our
students (and customers) ever feeling and experiencing that profound connection
with all that is. Yoga as a pathway to
picture-perfect beauty is a falsehood.
Enticing students to practice on the basis of this falsehood makes a
virtue of their vices by making them heroic in their attempts to improve. Instead, we could be helping them to
transcend limitations by offering the possibility, from the very first
interaction, that they are already intrinsically and unmistakably perfect.
If we choose not to offer beauty as a result of yoga practice or
saturate our advertisements with envy- (and purchase-) inducing images of
perceived perfection, what shape will our marketing take? What can we do to make our imagery reflect
the reality of our classrooms? I propose
the following three
guidelines:
1) Create advertising imagery that includes vast
diversity.
2) Reduce or remove all language or implication
of self-improvement from advertising text.
3) Deliberately include language that supports
the idea of union with the divine or the already-realized self.
Run your advertising through the test described above: how heavily
does it rely on images reflecting beauty standards of thin, young, strong,
flexible, and white? Fostering the
concept that everything that exists is God/dess means allowing those outside
this paradigm to see themselves as yogis as well. Support this by presenting images of a
variety of body sizes, skin tones, age ranges, and differences in ability. Imagine what yoga advertising could look like
if informed by this quote from Dr. Timothy McCall?
What yoga
can do, which can make the critical difference in your health and well-being,
is give you greater control of your mind and a greater understanding of the
tricks it can play. This, perhaps more than anything, is what leads to life
transformation.
Using language that encourages action (as we hope advertising will
do) without encouraging change is tricky, but can be done. Notice the elegance of this sentence about
Baptiste Power Yoga: “This practice is
designed to reveal not just physical strength and flexibility, but also mental
clarity and empowerment.” (Balanced Yoga, Columbus, OH). The use of the word “reveal” (instead of
“create” or “improve”) implies that physical strength, flexibility, and mental
clarity are already within the practitioner.
The practice then becomes the tool that shows her how capable she truly
is, not the tool that creates this capability.
Replenish: the Spa Co-Op (Columbus, OH) recently posted an Instagram
picture of a couples yoga session that showed two men sitting across from each
other in Sukasana with their hands resting on each other’s hearts. The teacher in this image was positioned
well-behind and obscured by the two practicing yogis, demonstrating the
importance of the practice and stepping away from the idea of the teacher as
the celebrity, the most important person in the room.
As yoga continues to grow in popularity, our responsibility to
safeguard its sacred intent becomes increasingly critical. As teachers, business leaders, and longtime
practitioners, our voices reach the widest audiences and have the longest
resonance. While engaged in the
important process of creating financial wealth, let us return over and over
again to the center of the work, and let the practice itself guide us into
divine action.
[Yoga]
involves a honing and refining that releases your true essence, as a sculptor
brings out the beauty of form in a stone by slowly and carefully chipping away
the rest.” –Joel Kramer, “Yoga as Self-Transformation”
Resources
Keller, Doug. The Heart of the Yogi: The Philosophical
World of Hatha Yoga. DoYoga
Productions, 2007.
Kramer, Joel. “Yoga as
Self-Transformation.” http://www.joeldiana.com/downloads/writings/YogaAsSelfTransformation.pdf
McCall, MD, Timothy. “Yoga
as a Technology for Life Transformation.”
http://www.kripalu.org/article/179
Wallis, Christopher D. Tantra Illuminated: The Philosophy, History,
and Practice of a Timeless Tradition.
Anusara Press, 2012.
Yoga Journal, no. 269, November 2014. Cruz Bay Publishing, Inc.
