Yoga and Money

Photo Credit : borman818, flickr

Yesterday a came across an advertisement for Yoga teacher's training. In the picture for the advertisement, Bikram Choudhary, the 64 year old Yoga billionaire and founder of “Bikram Yoga” is leaning onto an expensive car and in the background is Las Vegas signboard, inviting you to join a teachers training. It is a nine weeks course costing $7000 per person. Bikram earns several millions every year and earns enough to maintain around 30 expensive cars. These are the kind of courses which have made Bikram rich.

Around 10 years back one of my ex-colleagues, in Baroda, India, who used to work as software trainer, wanted to reach United States. Not for working as a software professional though, but as a Yoga trainer. During those days I used to be surprised at his ambition and thought it was a foolish idea. What I did not know was in those days, how big this was in US and it was a perfectly valid reason to go to America. We I visited US in 2004 I came to know the amount of interest people have in Yoga and how costly the Yoga retreats could be.

If you ask a common person what is the first thing that strikes their mind when they think about Yoga, depending upon their awareness, the most common answers could be, “It is a slow moving exercise routine”. Another common answer could be “It is some sort of Indian spiritual practice”. If you ask this question to people who are practicing yoga they would talk about inner peace, healing or how it made a difference in their lives etc but generally never about money. In several of the interviews I have read on Yoga, none of them talked about money.

I am yet to come across any interviews which are somehow associated with yoga and with money as if both can be associated together—yet, it is a fact that Yoga is now a billion dollar industry. If you look around you will find so much money involved and still people do not talk about that. If you look at the yoga magazines, and the internet, there are so many products available and so many retreats going on all over the place which involves lot of money.

Is it Ethical to Make Money from Yoga?

In the ancient times, the sages, teachers etc were the responsibility of the kings or the states. The basic needs were met by the donation of land and money received and they could concentrate on their work. Now each person needs to take care of their need. Those who want to teach Yoga to other also have family to feed and bills to pay. This makes money essential in day to day life and it is fair to charge money for the services they provide to people.

Sri Ramakrishna Paramhansa, did not touch money as it brought attachment. Once someone place some coins under his mattress and as soon as he sat on his bed he started feeling burning sensation. Yet, he told his wife that she should save money since it was required for all the daily expenses. Swami Shivananda also advocated having some interest account which would pay the bills so that people could work on the spiritual practices without any concerns of how to feed themselves.

Money is not bad or good. It is how it is used. In my opinion it is perfect to make money from Yoga when proper services are being rendered. When you teach something for free usually less importance is attached to that where as when a value is attributed to the service or skill more people are attracted and interested. Just imagine if you had the money, would you go to learn yoga from someone famous, though charging money or you would go to unknown teacher although teaching for free. Most people would go to the person who is charging money since they would be more confident about the skills of that person.

The person who is teaching will also need to make more efforts to improve the skills and offerings which is beneficial to the students. Therefore money charged for Yoga related services are indirectly helping it spread this knowledge to needy people.

There are lot of people who snigger at the mention of Bikram Yoga, although the fact is, it is one of the most successful form of Yoga in US, and several people took to yoga due to him. Yoga needs a poster boy and Bikram is one of them.