Tara Stiles: An Outsider's Perspective

For the uninitiated, Tara Stiles is one of yoga's It Girls.  She hangs with Deepak Chopra.  Her story is written up in the New York Times.  Now she's balling out with Ryan Reynolds in car commercials.

And Tara Stiles does not care what you think about her.

Let me clarify.  Stiles has been the subject of a huge amount of controversy within the yoga community.  Now, some of that criticism comes from, if I may be blunt, the type of women whose sole mission in life seems to be to hate on any woman who dares to be too young, too pretty, and too thin.

The flipside is, some of that criticism is legitimate worrying about what happens when yoga meets capitalism.  I am not all that thrilled that Stiles models some of the packaging for her products on The South Beach Diet.  The dieting culture in this country is really, really awful.  That Stiles is tying her brand to it makes her part of a really big problem.  And regardless of how Stiles came about her particular body type, it isn't and shouldn't be a legitimate aspiration for most women.

(Tangent: it's also not the body type guys want, for whatever that's worth.)

However, that's not what I find most interesting about Stiles.  What's most interesting is that Stiles is the first yoga celebrity I can remember who is building her career and brand with a complete disregard for the yoga establishment.  Stiles is undoubtedly more famous and popular than other rising stars of yoga like Kathryn Budig or Elena Bower, yet it's Budig and Bower who are on the covers of Yoga Journal and headlining conferences.  I haven't heard of Stiles touring around the world offering workshops.  I haven't heard any hardcore yogas talking about the amazing class they took at Strala, her studio.

Instead, Stiles seems to be about yoga for the non yogi.  She eschews chanting in her workshops.  She helps normal, everyday people meet the goals they want to meet, like weight loss.  She offers a class called "Yoga for a Hangover."

My purpose in writing this post is not to judge Stiles.  If you want to construct her trial, just Google her name, and you'll hear plenty of people praise and crucify her.  Besides, Stiles has probably forgotten more yoga than I ever knew.  She lived on an ashram, for God's sake.

My point is, regardless of what one thinks of her strategy, Stiles represents an interesting development for yoga in the West.  The people who built the yoga culture in the United States focused on building a tribe of people who would be committed to following yogic ideals and support them with their dollars.  Put another way, even Rodney Yee, undisputed king of the yoga DVD,  wanted his DVDs to lead viewers to class, where they would learn more about the history of yoga and start down the path that countless others have trod over the past four thousand years.  That insularity made everyone very, very rich.  Yoga is now an eight billion dollar a year industry, and I would wager that most money comes from people like me who consider yoga to be a central part of their lives.

Stiles is not Rodney Yee.  Publicly, at least, she doesn't care about the yogic tradition, and she sure doesn't care about the tribe.  She shows that it is now possible to have yoga for the masses in the West.  Her yoga seems to ask for no deep commitment and promises the practitioner no great spiritual breakthroughs.  And her yoga seems to say, you can be a housewife who watches Oprah and still do my yoga.  You don't have to be part of the tribe.  You don't have to wear hemp.  You can take showers.

So Stiles, to me, is ultimately more about the growth of the yoga business than anything else.  The yoga business seems to be no longer dependent on a subculture of true believers.  As if we needed anymore proof, Stiles' runaway popularity shows that yoga has penetrated the culture on the deepest possible level.  Yoga is part of the Spectacle, and we can sell yoga the same way we sell hamburgers.