The Science of Yoga

instructors, as do tropical resorts. Senior centers and children’s museums offer the stretching as a fringe benefit— Hey, parents, fitness can be fun. Hollywood stars and professional athletes swear by it. Doctors prescribe it for natural healing. Hospitals run beginner classes, as do many high schools and colleges. Clinical psychologists urge patients to try yoga for depression. Pregnant women do it (very carefully) as a form of prenatal care. The organizers of writing and painting workshops have their pupils do yoga to stir the creative spirit. So do acting schools. Musicians use it to calm down before going on stage.
    Not to mention all the regular classes. In New York City, where I work, it seems like a yoga studio is doing business every few blocks. You can also take classes in Des Moines and Dushanbe, Tajikistan.
    Once an esoteric practice of the few, yoga has transformed itself into a global phenomenon as well as a universal icon of serenity, one that resonates deeply with tense urbanites. In 2010, the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, began illustrating its parking tickets with a series of calming yoga poses.
    The popularity of yoga arises not only because of its talent for undoing stress but because its traditions make an engaging counterpoint to modern life. It’s unplugged and natural, old and centered—a kind of anti-civilization pill that can neutralize the dissipating influence of the Internet and the flood of information we all face. Its ancient serenity offers a new kind of solace.
    An indication of yoga’s social ascendency is how its large centers often get housed in former churches, monasteries, and seminaries, the settings frequently rural and inspirational. Kripalu, on more than three hundred rolling acres ofthe Berkshires in western Massachusetts, was once a Jesuit seminary. Each year its yoga school graduates hundreds of new teachers. And they in turn produce thousands of new yogis and yoginis, or female yogis.
    Even the White House is into yoga. Michelle Obama made it part of Let’s Move—her national program of exercise for children, which seeks to fight obesity. The First Lady talks about yoga on school visits and highlights the discipline at the annual Easter Egg Roll, the largest public event on the White House social calendar. Starting in 2009, the egg roll has repeatedly featured a Yoga Garden with colorful mats and helpful teachers. The sessions start early and go throughout the day.
    On the White House lawn in 2010, an adult dressed as the Cat in the Hat—a character from the Dr. Seuss book—did a standing posture on one leg. A tougher demonstration featured five yogis simultaneously upending themselves in Headstands. At the 2011 event, the Easter Bunny did a tricky balancing pose. The children watched, played along, and took home a clear message about what the President and First Lady considered to be a smart way of getting in shape.
    Yoga is one of the world’s fastest-growing health and fitness activities. The Yoga Health Foundation, based in California, puts the current number of practitioners in the United States at twenty million and around the globe at more than two hundred and fifty million. Many more people, it says, are interested in trying yoga. To spread the word, the foundation organizes Yoga Month—a celebration every September that blankets the United States with free yoga classes, activities, and health fairs.
    By any measure, the activity is too widespread and its participants too affluent for advertisers and the news media to ignore. Health and beauty magazines do regular features. The New York Times , where I work, has run hundreds of articles and in 2010 began a regular column, Stretch . It has profiled everything from studios that offer hot yoga in overheated rooms to a gathering of thousands in Central Park that its organizers called the largest yoga class on record. A main attraction of that event was the corporate gifts. Participants got JetBlue yoga mats, SmartWater bottles, and ChicoBags filled with giveaways. The allure was so great that many people got stuck in entrance lines before a downpour chased everybody away.
    Yoga may be inthe air culturally. But it is also quite visibly a big business. Merchants sell mats, clothes, magazines, books, videos, travel junkets, creams, healing potions, shoes, soy snacks, and many accessories deemed vital to practice—as well as classes. Purists call it the yoga industrial complex. Increasingly, the big