Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat

by Derek Beres

We just didn’t know. And the vast majority of our friends and colleagues didn’t either, to say nothing of...

Self-awareness in the yoga industry was so dim that when Mark Singleton, a British religious studies scholar, popularized his PhD thesis on the real history of modern yoga for the trade market in 2010, the ground began to shake. Singleton’s meticulous research proved that modern Indian yoga was inextricable from fin-de-siècle European physical culture.

If capitalism is good at anything, it’s co-opting and monetizing transgressive trends into new income opportunities.

Mass-marketing in the 1970s pitched alternative medicine to a counterculture distrustful of authority, hungry for natural cures as opposed to chemical fixes, and attracted to premodern wisdom.

The broad political appeal of the movement predicted the horseshoe-type scrambling of ...

In its rejection of institutional knowledge, alternative medicine allows progressives to believe they are embracing ancient, Indigenous wisdom. But that same rejection also appeals to more libertarian values such as self-reliance, freedom, and back-to-nature traditionalism. Alternative medicine allows a broad coalition of political actors to sing Kumbaya around a rejection of medical ...

Modern yoga teacher training dates back to 1969 in the Laurentian ski town of Val-Morin, Quebec, where Kuttan Nair—dubbed Swami Vishnudevananda by his guru, Swami Sivananda—started selling “yoga vacations.”

The modern urban yoga studio has always been on the bleeding edge of rising real estate prices, especially in areas where the working class is driven out and yuppies flood in with income to burn on boutique wellness.

Studios like Jivamukti, which functioned as a hub for gig-working teachers, would always make some money for a while, but the margins would tighten as the rents went up.

What saved the bacon of most urban yoga studios was the high ticket price of the yoga...

Over two decades, this created an economic cul-de-sac, in which a proliferation of trainings saturated the labor market while increasing the perception in the workforce that...