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At a time when people are comparing supermarket prices, arguing with energy companies, and wondering whether they can justify another streaming or app subscription, the wellness industry is busy building ever more luxurious temples to help people let go of material attachments, live in the present, and find contentment in what they already have.

Walk into many of the so-called ‘wellness centres’ today, and you’ll find less of a spiritual practice and more of a luxury lifestyle brand. Mood lighting. boutique changing rooms, designer activewear, branded 'reusable' water bottles, 'organic' smoothies, and monthly memberships that cost more than the first car I bought in the UK have become the markers of a desirable 'wellness' space.

Some of these spaces are beautiful. This is not the point.

The point is that somewhere between the mood lighting and the smoothie bar, we’ve taken a practice concerned with freedom from desire and turned it into yet another status symbol! At its heart, yoga offers a fairly radical challenge to modern Western life. It asks us to question our attachment to possessions, status, achievement and the endless pursuit of more. Yet many state-of-the-art gyms, Pilates studios and boutique yoga spaces are built on precisely the opposite message: upgrade, optimise, transform, perform.

The Promise of Transformation

There was a time when consumer culture sold essentials we actually needed: a washing machine, a sofa, a fridge. Now it sells us an endless stream of promises: better sleep, better skin, better focus, better mornings, better relationships, better versions of ourselves. The list goes on.

Wellness has become big business. Really big business, worth $6.3 trillion in 2023. It's not entirely surprising. More people are talking about mental health, stress and burnout than they were twenty years ago. That's a good thing. But when practices rooted in cultural, philosophical and spiritual traditions are repackaged, rebranded and sold back to us as solutions to modern anxieties, something important gets lost.

The yoga industry (despite the contradiction embedded in the phrase itself, but when it's worth millions, I am increasingly at a loss for what else to call it) has embraced this logic wholeheartedly. We are sold transformation rather than classes, personal growth rather than practice, our next obsession rather than a way of letting go of them. This sits uneasily with one of yoga’s core principles: aparigraha, often translated as non-grasping or non-possessiveness. Put simply, it asks us to pay attention to our tendency to keep reaching for more stuff, more status, more achievement, and more validation.

Most of us know this feeling. We tell ourselves life will settle down after the next promotion, the next holiday, the next house move, the next pay rise. Then we get there, and the goalposts quietly move again. The wellness industry didn’t create this cycle. It simply found a way to profit from it. And that's where the contradiction begins.

A philosophy that asks us to question our constant desire for more now exists within an industry that depends on keeping that desire alive.

When a Tradition Becomes a Brand

Working as a yoga teacher in the UK has shown me just how far the practice has been pulled from its roots. The more I've studied yoga philosophy over the years, the more I found it hard to reconcile its teachings with aspects of contemporary yoga culture. Yoga was never meant to be a quick workout, a lifestyle accessory, or a vehicle for creating hashtags and emojis. Yet much of modern yoga culture treats it as exactly that.

Perhaps the clearest sign of this shift is how readily yoga lends itself to branding. Everywhere you look, the practice is being reinvented, repackaged and marketed as a new experience. Goat yoga. Beer yoga. Puppy yoga. Yoga and prosecco and DJs. A studio in London currently charges £35 for a puppy yoga session. 20 minutes of Yoga followed by 40 minutes of Puppy Playtime! Apparently yoga is not enough on its own; it needs puppies!

I wish I were making this up.

Note: The RSPCA has raised concerns about puppy yoga, warning that repeated handling, transport, noise and disruption to puppies’ sleep routines can have negative welfare implications.

The consequences go beyond puppy yoga.

Spend enough time around modern wellness culture, and you start noticing that yoga has become as much an aesthetic as a practice. Sanskrit appears on clothing, water bottles and tote bags. Sacred symbols are used as decorative motifs. Ancient philosophical concepts are reduced to catchy slogans and Instagram captions.

I'm not particularly interested in policing what people wear, what they tattoo on their bodies, or what they post on social media. What interests me is what these trends reveal. The bits that don’t photograph well, the philosophy, the ethics, the difficult questions about attachment, desire and contentment, are quietly pushed to the margins.

Eventually, the packaging starts to overshadow the practice itself.

The result is a version of yoga that is instantly recognisable, highly profitable and easy to consume. Whether it bears much resemblance to the tradition from which it emerged is another matter entirely.

The Cost of Wellbeing

The moment yoga becomes a product, another question emerges:

Who can afford to buy it?

Because branding, marketing and premium experiences do more than generate profit. They also determine who a practice is designed for. Yoga may now be everywhere, but unfortunately, access remains uneven. This matters because yoga genuinely helps people. A large survey published in BMJ Open found that participants reported improvements in physical and mental health, reduced stress and better sleep as a result of regular yoga practice. Yet the same study also found that practitioners were disproportionately white, educated and relatively affluent.

The irony is difficult to miss. The people who might benefit most from practices that reduce stress and support wellbeing are often those facing the greatest barriers to accessing them: the care worker finishing a twelve-hour shift; the single mother watching every penny as bills continue to rise; the student struggling with rent ... And cost is only part of the story. Browse enough studio websites, and you’ll start to see the same imagery repeated: beautiful spaces, expensive activewear, and bodies that are young, flexible and seemingly effortless. Many people don’t see themselves reflected in that picture.

What began as a practice concerned with reducing suffering has, in some contexts, become another marker of status and aspiration.

The Yoga We Could Choose

It would be easy to end here by writing off modern Western yoga as a lost cause.

But that’s not it.

For every luxury wellness club selling transformation, a teacher is running an affordable class in a church hall, a community centre or their own living rooms. For every £2,000 retreat promising self-discovery, there is a small community discovering connection much closer to home. For every yoga brand selling a lifestyle, there are practitioners quietly doing the less glamorous work of the practice itself.

The irony is that, despite all my criticisms, more people are engaging with yoga than ever before. That is surely a good thing. The challenge is not whether yoga should evolve. It always has. Nor is it whether teachers should earn a living. They surely should. The question is what kind of yoga culture we want to build.

As practitioners, teachers and studio owners, perhaps we need to become a little more conscious of the choices we make. Which spaces do we support? Who is included? Who is excluded? Are we building communities or simply cultivating consumers?

The most inspiring yoga spaces I have encountered do not necessarily have the best facilities, the newest equipment or the most impressive social media presence. What they have is a sense of collective care. They make people feel welcome. They make the practice accessible. They understand that yoga is not a product, but a practice.

If yoga has anything meaningful to offer in the twenty-first century, perhaps it lies not in the endless pursuit of more, but in the possibility of enough.