The Establishment linked yoga with hippie ashrams and guru worship, however, and yoga couldn't keep pace with another revolution picking up speed -- the Fitness Revolution, says Harvey Lauer, president of American Sports Data, a New York research firm.
Fitness evolved from running in the '70s, to high-impact aerobics in the '80s, to low-impact aerobics and walking in the '90s. As hippies aged and transformed into workaholic, overstressed yuppies seeking self-improvement, yoga started making new inroads.
Yoga never went mainstream, says Beth Shaw, here leading stretching exercises during the DCAC conference. "That's why we've invented things that are fun."
(Katherine Frey For The Washington Post)
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By the new millennium, a "new, kinder and gentler world of physical fitness" was emphasizing stretching, flexibility, balance and relaxation, says Lauer. Mind-body practices such as tai chi, Pilates and yoga fit the bill.
Next, yoga went Hollywood. In 1998, Madonna released the CD "Ray of Light" with a Sanskrit chant, touting her devotion to yoga. Two years ago, supermodel Christy Turlington appeared in Vogue to introduce her sexy line of yoga clothing. Yoga became a regular mention in celebrity interviews, from Gwyneth Paltrow to Metallica.
By last summer, 15 million Americans were practicing yoga, 28.5 percent more than the year before, according to a Harris poll conducted for Yoga Journal.
In 1998, Lauer says, the number was just 5.7 million.
With the masses comes big business, of course -- trendy yoga clothing with labels such as L.L. Bean, Old Navy, Nordstrom, Land's End and the Gap, meditative music, books and videos. Yoga researcher Trisha Lamb, associate director of the International Association of Yoga Therapists, in Manton, Calif., estimates that people are spending $20 billion annually on yoga.
YogaFit, the Redondo Beach, Calif., company that invented YogaButt, began in 1994 with Shaw selling T-shirts and books out of her car trunk. Now it's a multimillion-dollar corporation selling dozens of YogaFit products, says chief financial officer Amy McDowell. It has trained 50,000 instructors, licensed studios throughout North America and this summer signed a contract to open 100 studios in Japan.
Basically, yogafuture looks bright.
At Gaiam, one of the nation's biggest makers of yoga products, sales have grown 41 percent over five years -- despite the entry of giants such as Nike and Reebok into the market. From 1998 to 2003, the number of retail locations that carry Gaiam's products jumped from 5,000 to 30,000, according to the Broomfield, Colo., company. Over the past three years, Gaiam sold 1.6 million yoga mats priced at $20 to $30. "That math works out to $30 million to $50 million in mats alone," says marketing director Byron Freney.
According to Barnes & Noble, five or six new yoga books are published practically every month. "Yoga is such a huge category in terms of people's interest," says editor Stephanie Tade at Rodale Press, which last year paid a seven-figure advance for world rights to yoga master B.K.S. Iyengar's new book, "Light on Life" (due out in October 2005).
"Yoga for the Rest of Us" -- targeting the out-of-shape and the elderly -- ranked No. 2 recently on Amazon.com's daily top-selling video list.
But if you still need evidence that yoga has struck a nerve in Middle America: Wal-Mart and Target now carry hefty lines of instructional videos, books and paraphernalia. Wal-Mart's Web site boasts 990 yoga products; Target's has a mind-numbing 4,235.
"Consumer demand for yoga has increased dramatically," says Dayna Macy, communications director at Yoga Journal, the Berkeley, Calif.-based magazine that has covered yoga for 25 years.
