The Conspirituality Report
Yoga Absolved Our Capitalist Guilt
In the post-COVID, ecocide era, it can change direction
This piece, part memoir and part opinion, starts with the fact that the globalized yoga industry, now estimated to be worth $88bn annually, has grown in tandem with the excesses of late capitalism.
My argument is that its main value proposition is its power to absolve and even spiritualize these excesses. It is a form of virtuous consumption that allows its consumers to feel better about a burning world. Worse: that they are transcending it. Worse still: that by transcending it, they are healing it.
In this framework, the universalist and pacifist platitudes expressed by Swami Satchidananda before he consecrated Woodstock with Sanskrit chants have not aged well. “America is becoming whole,” he intoned from the stage on August 15th, 1969. “America is helping everybody in the material field, but the time has come for America to help the whole world with spirituality also.” (In 1991, he was accused of sexual abuse by several followers.)
But the Americanization of yoga and wellness has not been a gift to the world. The growth of global yoga offered no substantial opposition to imperial warmongering, economic inequality and environmental degradation. On…
