In my Fishtown-Northern Liberties Philadelphia neighborhood, many of the young women in their twenties and thirties wear tight black yoga pants. Yoga pants have become a uniform of sorts like bell bottoms and love beads in the 1960s. Many but not all of the women who dress this way have incorporated yoga into their daily lives. 

Yoga has become big business, big enough to accommodate hundreds in a rehabbed warehouse near the Market-Frankford El station at Frankford and Girard in Northern Liberties. The sign Amrita Yoga graces the front of the building like the identifying framed information board outside the city’s Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul. 

The neighborhood is also home to Grace & Glory Yoga, MotherHeart Yoga Sangha and Pacific Yoga. The Yogic Encyclopedia states that “Ananda Sangha also provides people with two options for formal renunciation as Brahmacharis or Sannyasi. Brahmacharis renounce family ties in an inward path of realization.” 

On Girard Avenue not far from Amrita Yoga, you sometimes see smiling yoga proselytizers handing out colorful booklets labeled Yoga. This is a relatively new development in the neighborhood. The proselytizers tend to be young, some Indian and some not, but every time I’ve encountered them they have always been deeply engaged with one or more passersby unlike the stoic but bored Jehovah’s Witnesses standing under the El next to their portable rack of take-away magazines. 

Because yoga is considered cool, the yoga street missionaries can always be spotted in conversational huddles. I might add that the online video advertisements of these yoga places always feature young women talking about yoga in that unique millennial way of ending each sentence with a question mark. Observing all this, one is tempted to ask: are these angelic looking proselytizers advocating yoga as a form of physical exercise, or is there something else going on here? 

Hatha yoga is mostly an umbrella term for all the branches of yoga that emphasize yoga’s physical practice. Other branches of yoga, like kriya, raja, and karma yoga are more meditative and interior. All yoga of course is at the heart of the New Age movement and it all comes from India. Yoga, it might be said, is the heart of Hinduism despite the many different schools of practice. Hatha yoga promises mental and physical health. 

At the outset in many of these yoga-as-exercise places there are no mantras involved or instructors who are really wannabe gurus (called geshes in the yoga world.) I say “at the outset” because over time I have read of instances of yoga instructors assuming more and more power so eventually the practitioner comes to see them as total life teachers with specific guidelines on how to live your life outside yoga class. This sneaky personal invasion might go unnoticeable at first, but that changes when the instructor suggests a light mantra to accompany exercise.

One mantra leads to two mantras and after that might come a repetition of om and before you know it you have a yoga class that’s tipping into the tenets of Hinduism. But Hinduism is cool because it has yoga, so who cares? 

Besides the types of yoga already mentioned, there’s 1) Baby Yoga, 2) Mama Yoga, 3) Laughing Yoga, 4) Superbrain Yoga, 5) Beer Yoga, 6) Drunk Yoga and Yoga and Wine. By the time this column is published there are likely to be additional yogas added to the list.  

Generally, more women than men are enrolled in yoga classes yet numerous articles on yoga point out that yoga started with male sages 2000 years ago and that male leaders dominated the world of yoga until the 1990s, so that today it’s mostly a female-centric practice. And while there’s been a tiny upswing of male participation, the truth is yoga is perceived as being much more conducive to the female body with its built-in ability for pretzel-like, acrobatic poses, than the male body. Most men are just not that flexible and don’t see yoga as providing a sufficient workout. One Huff Post article explained that men “might also be turned off by various spiritual aspects of the practice, such as om chanting or naming poses in Sanskrit.” 

But why are secular-oriented young and older women in yoga pants chanting om anyway?

If yoga is supposed to be merely exercise and a way to loosen up, how does chanting om fit into the equation? One could say that the repetitious chanting of om puts one in a transcendental state much like any chant, be it Hare Krishna, “Make America Great Again” or “Mary Had a Swarm of Bees.” Om is said to approximate the vibrational sound of the universe, which might be perceived as a neutral thing but yet there are fervent Christian practitioners of yoga who avoid saying om because they say it lends itself to more questions than answers. In other words: om opens the vestibule door to Hinduism. 

A 2018 op-ed in The New York Times mapped out Why Yoga Pants Are Bad for Women. The writer questioned the necessity of going out and buying a uniform in order to “do” yoga.

“Seriously, you can’t go into a room of fifteen fellow women contorting themselves into ridiculous positions at 7 in the morning without first donning skintight pants? What is it about yoga in particular that seems to require this? Are practitioners really worried that a normal-width pant leg is going to throttle them mid-lotus pose?” 

The writer is right, of course. 

The one-must-have-a-uniform virus has contaminated the world of bicycling and running so participants in these once ad hoc casual activities now find it necessary to spend serious money on the right uniform in order to engage in the sport. Grown men have even taken to the soy-femboy practice of shaving their legs because they think shaving off a few hairs will give them additional speed while pedaling or running. 

Sounds to me like a ‘White Dudes for Harris’ cosmetic procedure. 

Robert Hurst, in his book Cyclist’s Manifesto: The Case for Riding on Two Wheels Instead of Four, writes:

“And then there are the bicyclists who wear the clothing for reasons having virtually nothing to do with practicality. They dress up in bike clothes so they feel and look like ‘real’ cyclists, because that’s what ‘real’ cyclists wear. A lot of unnecessary leg shaving occurs for this reason as well. There are those who are attracted to the look-at-me factor of a shiny, bright colored outfit.” 

Aerobics, popularized in the U.S. by a physician named Kenneth H. Cooper, swept the city of Philadelphia in the 1980s, inspiring men and women alike to take classes so they could dance in the form of exercise to music by Pat Benatar, Kool and the Gang and Michael Jackson. 

For a couple of years, I took regular aerobics classes at the (now defunct) Maywood Dance Academy near 17th and Sansom Streets. The exhilarating hour sessions led to a heightened state of being so that all you wanted to do was continue dancing at a local disco. 

The push with yoga today is to move it “off the mat” and to discover “a deeper understanding of who you really are,” at least according to Darren John Main, a yoga teacher. Main uses quotes from The Yoga Sutra, the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads to bring “these ancient Hindu texts to life in contemporary cities.” 

Alexandra Stein, a scholar of social psychology of ideological extremism, writes that a cult is, “A group that violates the rights of its members, harms them through abusive techniques of mind control . . . Or, a group that is adverse to adherents’ best interests.”

Is yoga a cult? 

Pope Francis (whom I criticize a lot) seems to think so:

“You can take a million catechetical courses, a million courses in spirituality, a million courses in yoga, Zen and all these things. But all of this will never be able to give you freedom,” Pope Francis explained in a homily in 2015. 

The Greek Orthodox Church, reacting to the UN’s decision to designate June 21 as International Day of Yoga back in 2014, reminded its adherents that the postures of yoga were created as adulation to 330 million Hindu gods. The postures are viewed in the Hindu faith as offerings to gods that in Christianity are considered to be idols.

But try telling this to the scores of eager young people racing across town with their rolled up yoga mats.

Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.