The Holy Yoga Revival
Inside the massive studio there is nothing but space. Cavernous, open, sacred amounts of space. I arrive early and head directly to my spot, front left corner, against the wall. I unpack and settle into my mat. I have a fifteen-minute warmup routine, a necessary negotiation with a body that needs a little pre-game before the main event. Gradually, the space starts to fill. Dozens settle into row after row, stacking their mats in uniform patterns like pews. The sound begins as murmurs, climbs to chatter, and keeps climbing as twenty-five people becomes fifty becomes one hundred and fifty. By the time the room is full, the noise has become something primal, an energetic cacophony that reminds me of the jungles in Southeast Asia, where cicadas create a deafening blanket over the night with their pulsing chorus. It is loud. And it is building toward something.
Then the door opens. And the room falls instantly, completely silent.
Stephanie Snyder enters, and she is immediately in control. Her bare footsteps break the silence, creaking across the wooden floor, up to the small stage. She sits down facing the crowd. One hundred and fifty people. Eager eyes, all pointed at her, as they have been for decades. She looks out at the room with the calm of someone who has done this a thousand times and still means it. "Hi everyone. Let's do some yoga." And then her voice, booming, strong, perfectly pitched, soars through the room: JAI SHIVA SHANKARA, BOM BOM HARA HARA. On cue, one hundred and fifty devotees send it back in response, perfect unison, vibrating the floor, the walls, the air itself.
This is Love Story Yoga.
From the outside, one could easily see this gathering as almost cultish. The chanting, the reverence, the charismatic leader, the sermons on living life in balance, and the endless prostrations in the form of chaturangas. Even an experienced casual practitioner may feel the room to be less like your average practice and more like a Holy Yoga Revival. This definitely ain't Core Power.
Which got me thinking. Where does the line between yoga and religion actually exist? Technically not an official part of Hinduism, yoga seemingly borrows the gods, for metaphor or in actual worship? The Yoga Sutras are taught to all aspiring yogis and yoginis. But what do they actually teach? Is the "divine" that's always referenced an actual god? Or are we dealing with metaphor, symbolism, and a secular practice that most people find to be a calming, healthy workout?
I think many are like me. We love the energy created in a yoga session, the physical movement and sweat, the calming of the mind, the connection to fellow humans with an intention to live better individually and collectively. But I definitely get lost in the sauce at any hint of actual religion. Personally, I'm a bit challenged when we're asked for prayer hands, bowing in worship, and teachings that invoke gods and goddesses in a literal sense. For figurative lessons, I'm happy to indulge.
Over thirty years of practice, I've seen yoga in many lights. I was introduced via Bikram in 1997, my instructor was a raw-food pioneer who ultimately got deathly ill. Following the trend, I transitioned to Vinyasa in the early days of Yoga Tree. Yoga Tree was everything in the early 2000s, the brainchild of Tim and Tara Dale. They expanded to numerous locations and launched the careers of many top yoga instructors in San Francisco. Darren Main, Janet Stone, Jane Austin, Stephanie Snyder, and Rusty Wells are all recognizable names in the yoga world and we happily flowed with all of them.
Yoga in San Francisco in the early 2000s was having a moment. Studios were popping up like coffee shops. Everyone had a mat. Everyone had a teacher. And depending on which door you walked through on any given Tuesday, you could get anything from a glorified stretching class with ambient music to a full-on spiritual experience complete with altars, incense, and Sanskrit invocations to an endless list of deities. Same word “yoga” covering everything from athletic performance training to something that looked, sounded, and felt an awful lot like church.
I did some digging.
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the closest thing yoga has to a foundational text, barely mention the physical postures most of us associate with the practice. The asanas get roughly three verses out of 196. The rest is about the mind. Concentration, meditation, ethical conduct, the nature of consciousness. Patanjali wasn't trying to help you touch your toes. He was trying to help you understand why you suffer.
So where did all the poses come from? The physical practice as we know it, the vinyasas, the warriors, the sun salutations, is actually a relatively modern invention. Most of it traces back to the early 20th century, when Indian teachers like Krishnamacharya began blending traditional hatha yoga with gymnastics, wrestling exercises, and British military calisthenics. His students: Pattabhi Jois, B.K.S. Iyengar, Indra Devi, carried those teachings westward and built the lineages that eventually became the yoga we practice today. The ancient rishis sitting in meditation for decades? They weren't doing crow pose. The physical practice is essentially a modern remix, ancient philosophy strapped to a movement system that's barely a hundred years old. Which makes the whole "is it religion" question even messier, because the part most of us actually do in class is the part that has the least to do with the original spiritual tradition.
Then there are the gods. Shiva, Ganesh, Hanuman, Lakshmi, they show up everywhere. On studio walls, in the chants, in the names of the poses. Hanumanasana is literally named after the monkey god's legendary leap across the ocean. When Stephanie opens class with JAI SHIVA SHANKARA, she's invoking a Hindu deity. Not metaphorically. By name.
So is it worship? Is it exercise? Is it self-help with better outfits?
In my experience, the yoga world breaks into roughly three camps.
The fitness crowd. These are your Core Power regulars. They're here for the sweat, the stretch, maybe the stress relief. They showed up because their friends do yoga. Perhaps their doctor said something about their hamstrings or their therapist suggested they try "something physical." If chanting breaks out, they look around nervously like someone who accidentally walked into the wrong church. Om is tolerated. Anything beyond Om is a bridge too far. For them, yoga is exercise. Full stop. And honestly? Nothing wrong with that.
The committed casuals. This is probably the biggest tent, and the one I'd put myself in most days. We love the philosophy. We eat up the sermons on impermanence and non-attachment. We'll gladly sit through a five-minute dharma talk before class and walk out feeling like we just absorbed something meaningful. The metaphors land. The community feeds us. We might even tear up during savasana once in a while and not entirely know why. But when things tip from metaphor into literal deity worship, when the teacher starts talking about Shiva not as a symbol but as an actual being who actually does things, we quietly check out. For us, yoga is something like a secular religion. The ritual and community of church without the requirement to actually believe in the supernatural bits.
The true believers. And then there's the third camp, the ones who take the whole thing literally. The gods are real. The sutras aren't philosophy, they're scripture. The practice isn't adjacent to religion, it IS religion, or close enough that the distinction stops mattering. I respect the sincerity. But I've also seen what happens when sincerity curdles into dogma. The same thing that happens in every religion when people stop questioning and start obeying. The eyes get a little glassy. The critical thinking goes soft. The guru becomes infallible. Bikram went there. Jivamukti went there. The history of yoga in America is littered with teachers who confused the devotion of the room with permission to do whatever they wanted.
So herein lies the actual conundrum. SoulCycle and CrossFit attract cultish followings, but nobody confuses them with religion. Yoga is different. Yoga comes with actual scripture, actual gods, actual philosophy about the nature of suffering and liberation. It didn't start as a workout. It started as a path to enlightenment. The fact that it's also great for your hamstrings is, historically speaking, a footnote.
And yet, the beauty of yoga as it exists today, at least in places like that room with Stephanie, is that nobody's forcing you to pick a camp. You can be fitness crowd on Monday and committed casual on Thursday and have a moment that touches something deeper on Saturday, and none of those experiences invalidate the others. The practice holds all of it. Like any good tradition, religious or otherwise you can choose your level of devotion. Everybody's presumably welcome. The mat doesn't check your beliefs at the door.
That's the thing about yoga. At some point, if you stick with it long enough, it stops being someone else's practice and starts being yours. You take the parts that light you up and you leave the rest on the floor with the sweat. You build your own version, your own ritual, your own relationship with whatever it is that happens when a room full of strangers breathes together in the dark. You can always go deeper – the well is limitless.
In a sense, I’m a hypocrite. I sing at the top of my lungs. I don't know what half the Sanskrit means and I don't care. I sweat my ass off through ninety minutes of flow that leaves my legs shaking and my mind mercifully quiet. When Stephanie asks for prayer hands, I bring them to my chest, not because I'm praying to anyone, but because the gesture has become part of the ritual, the discipline, and it honors my commitment to better myself. When the class ends and we bow, I always pound the ground with a JAI MA. It's a thing I picked up from Stephanie years ago. I do it now in every class, with every teacher, whether they call for it or not. It's mine. My own personal Holy Yoga Revival.