How Yoga Poses are Used in Advertising

Images of people doing yoga poses have basically become shorthand for a range of emotions and characteristics. These images evoke serenity, strength, attractiveness, and feminine energy. I’ve looked at a variety of advertisements/commercials which feature yoga poses in order to understand how the practice of yoga is coded in consumer culture.

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What “yoga” means in our wider context is not necessarily how practitioners or the yoga community itself may want to define it. Whenever anyone who is exposed to consumer culture (i.e. everyone) comes into contact with yoga, they carry an enormous amount of baggage based on the images and sentiments they’ve seen in popular culture and advertising. The point of writing this is to both bring attention to these images and their implications, and do some mythbusting while I’m here (so you don’t have to know anything about yoga to read along).

In this analysis, I argue that advertising that features yoga postures heavily emphasises the physical aspects of practice — practices like meditation and pranayama are rare to see, and the ethical elements of yoga described by the Yoga Sutras (the yamas and niyamas) are not seen at all and often implicitly contravened. Ads further depict poses that aren’t particularly accessible; and portray a black-and-white view of what is “yogic” and what is “unyogic” where “yogic” qualities include perfectionism, earnestness, and a profound level of flexibility and grace. Egregiously, the ads seem to have a specific kind of person…