#31 - The Economics of Wellness, Part 1: Women & Yoga Culture

The Fairer Cents: Women, Money and the Fight to Get Equal

This week’s show is part 1 of a 2-part series on the wellness industrial complex, and all the ways it manipulates women and makes us poorer. First up, we’re tackling yoga culture in particular, because of how ubiquitous it has become in western society, and just how problematic that is. We talk with Tejal Patel and Jesal Parikh of the Yoga Is Dead podcast about how yoga has been culturally appropriated from its roots in India and from Desi people today, and Tanja draws on her long career teaching yoga to delve into yoga’s problems with economics and inclusivity. Big thanks to Freshbooks for sponsoring season 4 of The Fairer Cents. If you’d like to try their cloud accounting software for free, go to freshbooks.com/tfc and enter “the fairer cents” in the How did you hear about us?

Links from the episode:

• Yoga Is Dead podcast
• Yoga Is Dead on Instagram
• Tanja’s piece on Our Next Life, “How Teaching Yoga Is Like Multilevel Marketing”
• Yoga Alliance and Ipsos 2014 survey
• International Association of Yoga Therapists 2004 study
• The Billfold piece by Jessica Pishko, “Spiritually Bankrupt: How I Went Broke Trying to Teach Yoga”
• PayScale data on yoga instructor hourly pay
• Atlantic piece by Rosalie Murphy, “Why Your Yoga Class Is So White”
• Yoga Journal piece by Rina Deshpande, “What’s the Difference Between Cultural Appropriation and Cultural Appreciation?”
• “(More) Reasons Why Your Yoga Class Is So White” by Chanelle John on Decolonizing Yoga “The cover shoot that brought me face to face with racism in the wellness industry,” by Nicole Cardoza in Quartz
• “Jessamyn Stanley and the Yoga Journal Debacle” on Yoga for All Training blog