The Commercialisation of Yoga reaches new Heights: Naked Yoga Ads
The ancient sport of yoga is rapidly becoming the newest feel good activity all around the world. This Indian sport has a long and interesting history but it seems the modern form of the sport and particularly the intense commercialisation of the practice
has got traditional yogis in a furore. It seems that what was once the private discipline and activity of selected practitioners has become as widespread as fast food. This may not be a bad thing though because through commercialisation, the sport is being
spread to many places of the world and numerous people are feeling the positive health benefits of it. A recent trend has sparked the debate once again; ads featuring naked yoga.
Yoga has prehistoric roots and stretches back thousands and thousands of years. It was originally part of Hindu philosophy but along the way it branched out and developed into different styles and over time has lost its religious tendencies. Traces of yogic
practices were first found in the civilisation of the ancient Indus Valley which lasted from 3300 BC to 1700 BC. Statues were found that showed yoga like poses and seemed to suggest an earlier form of the yoga than that was practiced later had existed at the
time.
The practice grew during medieval times and many yogis, or practitioners of yoga, developed their own styles and different versions of the sport emerged. The yoga that developed during this time utilised the ancient ritualistic form of the practice but new
poses and forms of meditation were developed. It was in later years that the health benefits of the sport were realised and once they were, they sport grew and spread from the East to the West. Western countries started to develop love for the new found sport
and took to it like fish to water.
With the rise in the sport in the West, a lot of traditional views of the sport have been dropped so that a new type of modern yoga has emerged. The health benefits were more rigorously tested and people even developed fusion sports integrating yoga into
them. Some of these were Yogalates, Body Balancing and Body Conditioning which have started to become very popular as more energetic types of yoga. With the spread and evolution of yoga came problems as well. The traditional yogis and practitioners of the
sport clashed with these new versions that were being incorporated and spread. These yogis did not seem to realise though, that even their traditional form of the sport was adapted and was an evolved version of an ancient practice.
Still the debate raged and it seemed a sort of balance was struck, the new forms of the sport were allowed to stand side by side with the original forms. Then a new controversy struck; yoga entrepreneurs started to try and use the ancient sport to make some
serious money from it. With this new form of aggressive consumerism attached to the sport came ads featuring a naked woman in several yoga poses barely covering her modesty. The purists were up in arms, they had previously been alright with the spread of the
sport and not too happy with the dumbing down of it for mass appeal but this latest onslaught was too much. The ads featured a beautiful and toned woman advertising a line of socks. It took away from the basic ideas of yoga; that the sport was for everyone
no matter how they looked, and it tried to show that the sport was more s**y than healthy.
The problem is that the yoga industry makes money; it is worth $6b at the moment and it is still growing. Whenever something is worth that much money, it will have a lot of people interested in making more money out of it. It seems that this debate will
continue to rage for a long time and we will have to wait and see who will come out the victor. Yogis are not the most aggressive people on the planet and so they might keep plugging their message until hopefully one day it is heard. It may not slow down the
commercialisation but it may put a stop to dodgy ads featuring the sport.
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