You're not imagining it: Everyone really is doing yoga.
Okay, maybe not everyone. But the ancient discipline, which promises spiritual enlightenment along with long, lean muscles has certainly boomed in popularity over the past several years.
Just how big has the trend become?
- Yoga is now practiced by seven percent of U.S. adults, or 15 million people, according to a market study conducted by Harris International this summer for Yoga Journal. That's up 28.5 percent in the last two years alone.
- The same study found that more than half of the general population has at least a casual interest in yoga, and one in six respondents planned to try yoga in the next year.
- Three-quarters of fitness clubs now offer some form of yoga class, according to the International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association
Just call us the Yoga Nation.
For a dramatic example of the juggernaut that yoga has become in America, look no further than San Francisco, where Berkeley-based Yoga Journal magazine held its West Coast regional conference five weeks ago.
The event brought hundreds of teachers and practitioners to the Embarcadero Hyatt Regency, where they did lunch, traded business cards and unrolled their sticky mats in giant meeting rooms to work with such yoga legends as Baron Baptiste.
Some teachers, such as Ashtanga veteran David Swenson, had to wear microphone headsets to amplify their voices through the twisting and stretching crowds.
"I wonder if Patanjali had one of these," Swenson joked, referring to the Indian sage who wrote the Yoga Sutras.
Quite a change from the old days, he added, when yoga enthusiasts scrounged for old carpet scraps to use as mats.
Judith Hanson Lasater, a longtime yoga teacher and the author of "30 Essential Yoga Poses," said the current flurry of interest in yoga is really the second to hit the United States.
"I started yoga practice myself in 1970, when there was a mini-wave of yoga, with the Beatles and the Maharishi and sitar in rock music," she said. "There was a big cultural divide, and this was sort of part of the counterculture. It wasn't just yoga; it was how you ate and how you dressed.
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