Yoga Goes Profitable

There’s a photograph on Hilary Lindsay’s Web site titled “The Warrior,” a staged, Richard Avedon-ish portrait of Tennessee Titan Eddie George, stripped to his skivvies and striking a Heisman Trophy-like pose. His almost Byzantine musculature stretches this most iconic of football postures into something different, something far more exotic than he already is. It’s not just the difference between 21st century training and 20th, though there is that. And, of course, George’s natural athleticism is undeniably mind-boggling, although that’s not it either. No, the answer, as is gently inferred by the Web site, is yoga.

“The Warrior” is one of a series of portraits on Lindsay’s site (www.activeyoga.com) collectively called, “A Celebration of Students.” Other subjects in the collection, posed in various states of artful yogic posture, include a skydiving instructor, a pastry chef and a federal investigator. There’s a picture of three Nashville Polo Club members assuming cosmically symmetrical positions astride their horses, mallets in hand. There’s a CEO, a musician and a lawyer—which sounds for all the world like the beginning of a joke, but instead of walking into a bar or standing in comic judgment at the gates of heaven, their bodies are gracefully whorled into positions that defy stereotypification. The photographs are individual set pieces, and the subjects no doubt bring with them bodies that were shaped, at some point, by things other than the asanas, or postures, of yoga. Though never explicit, the message is nevertheless clear: This is what yoga can do for you, and this is who’s doing it. Which is to say, everyone.

Lindsay, a yoga instructor in Nashville for the past seven years, is one of scores of instructors in town operating out of dozens of studios and locations. (Hard numbers are sometimes difficult to come by in Nashville’s yoga community—perhaps appropriately, given the ancient practice’s mystic roots.) Aside from individual studios, more of which are cropping up by the month, classes are being taught everywhere from the city’s YMCAs to the Jewish Community Center to local gyms. (Lindsay rents space in the Nashville Ballet studio in Sylvan Park.) Like running in the ’70s or aerobics in the ’80s, the practice of yoga simply has exploded in Nashville.

But that wasn’t always so.

“In the late ’70s, my mom was teaching out of her home with maybe three or four students,” says K-Lea Gifford, director of 12South Yoga. Gifford’s mother, the late June LaSalvia, is considered one of the first yoga teachers, if not practitioners, in Nashville, along with other longtime stalwarts such as Jan Campbell, currently teaching at the Yoga Center of Nashville, and Robbie Williams, a founder of the Nashville Yoga Society.

Julie Russell, another local yoga pioneer, says it wasn’t until the mid-1980s or so that the first full-fledged studios started popping up—and they were still, at that point, few and far between. “I remember it being a bit of a tricky thing because there was—and, sometimes there still is—a lot of fear involved with yoga,” she says.

People simply didn’t know what yoga was, Gifford says. “I think the mysticism, the myths of yoga, the common misunderstandings required a lot of years of groundwork in terms of clarifying what yoga is and what it isn’t,” she says. “And in the West, and in Nashville particularly, because we’re right in the middle of the Bible Belt, it’s taken a lot of years for people to begin to embrace yoga as something they can try or do without necessarily imposing on their beliefs.”

Now, of course, it’s hard to imagine Nashvillians and yoga in any heartier of an embrace. Gifford, whose studio opened in 1999, says revenues have doubled every year since. At least three new studios have opened within the last year and, according to virtually all instructors, there are plenty of active and prospective students to go around.

“To be honest, I moved here purely for the marketing opportunity,” says Cassandra Aitken, owner and instructor at Hot Yoga, which opened its doors in October. “I was scouting all over the country for a location, and I think there’s a huge opportunity here, really, because the demographic is here. No one has seized the market.”

Aitken, who has a master’s degree in business administration, is the first to bring the Bikram style of yoga—a regimented series of breathing exercises and postures executed in a 105-degree studio—to Nashville and, indeed, to the state of Tennessee. Regarded in other parts of the country as a slightly controversial approach to yoga, Aitken says Nashvillians have taken to it like gangbusters.

“I’ve been so surprised by how welcoming the yoga community in Nashville has been, because typically, around the country, when a Hot Yoga studio comes to town, people aren’t crazy about it,” Aitken says. “There’s usually some rivalry. But none of that’s happened here.” (There are 450 Hot Yoga studios in the U.S., Aitken says, and over a million practitioners.)