Published September 21, 2026 02:06PM
Yoga is changing. It might no longer be the cultural status symbol it once was, but that doesn’t mean the practice is disappearing. Yoga Journal Editor-in-Chief Renee Schettler looks at where yoga is actually showing up, and why losing its cool might not be such a bad thing.
Here we go again.
That was my thought when I abruptly stopped scrolling a couple weeks ago upon seeing the latest yoga headline, which asked, “What Happened to Yoga?” Accompanying the query was a faintly damning article, published by The Atlantic, that seemed to answer itself in the first paragraph with the assertion “yoga is dead.”
This was not the first article, essay, blog, or social media caption to have expressed that sentiment in the 20 years I have been practicing yoga. In this instance, the sentiment about the practice’s demise came from a yoga teacher’s offhand comment that was overheard by the writer and quickly qualified as “hyperbolic.”
Still, the message of the article was clear. Thanks largely to contemporary workout culture and “wellness seekers” obsessed with strengthmaxxing, biohacking, and various trending movement styles, there has been an increasingly lackluster response to yoga classes at boutique gyms and studios. According to the article, we are witnessing the decline of interest in yoga as a “lifestyle” compared to recent decades. Hence the writer’s pronouncement that “yoga lost its cool.”
I had been mentally scribbling notes in the margins and writing a defense of yoga’s relevance in my head. But as I carefully read the article’s take on yoga’s trajectory, I paused. It mentioned yoga as a “fringe activity” in the 1960s. As a celebrity-endorsed gym craze in the 1990s. As a culturally appropriated and commercialized lifestyle in the 00s. As a business that can be incredibly challenging to sustain, as shown by the continued financial hardships and closures many yoga studios have faced before, during, and beyond the pandemic. As a movement modality that has seen diminished attendance in some studio and gym spaces in recent months.
These were well-established facts reported with unerring accuracy. They weren’t revelatory. Yet there was nothing to factually contest. So after some thought, I ditched the idea of responding.
Weeks later, I find myself still thinking about that article and what it says about yoga. Yet the question I’m musing about is different than the one The Atlantic posed.
What I keep asking myself is: if yoga is no longer cool, is that such a bad thing?
What the Numbers Don’t Show
Let’s contextualize the assertion that yoga’s cultural cachet is in a downturn.
To be clear, the article did not assert that yoga no longer matters or is irrelevant. Nor did it conflate the entirety of yoga tradition with a workout. It didn’t even suggest that yoga is no longer popular. It measured yoga’s alleged tumble from fashionability by falling attendance at studios and gyms and equated that to conspicuous coolness.
That’s one measure of coolness. Yet it seems to focus on the segment of the population that not only wants to attend yoga classes but can afford to attend classes. When I taught at studios, regular students sometimes pulled me aside to share that they could no longer attend class because of financial constraints. Some explained they were opting instead for a gym yoga was on the schedule in addition to everything else, even if, in their words, it wasn’t quite the same experience as the studio. Bottom line, they couldn’t afford the membership. I’ve been in that situation. And I chose the same.
So when the economy squeezes, that can affect studio attendance. And if there is one thing everyone learned during the pandemic, it’s that you can get your yoga fix without leaving your apartment or house. Unrolling your mat amid your bed, piles of unwashed laundry, and the wall certainly isn’t as sexy or social as practicing at a studio. But it works.
You can actually practice yoga almost anywhere. The article even listed a few alternative places where yoga classes are happening, including prisons, in acknowledgment of yoga’s continued popularity. That expanded perspective is critical. Look closely at the dynamics behind these and other spaces where yoga is happening and they reveal a broader look at where people are practicing. Teachers are sharing yoga with populations who likely would never otherwise access it. There are crowds practicing at libraries, sidewalk stoops, kindergarten classes, church basements, addiction recovery programs, veterans’ groups, spinal rehab centers, community spaces where 75-year-olds practice chair yoga to a playlist of ZZ Top, and the list goes on.
That is diffuse. Not dead.
That very diversity in class type and location might play a larger role in yoga attendance than anyone knows. Yet these go largely undetected in terms of tracking because so many organizations and teachers run these classes, some of which are free or donation-based. Still, these classes are happening. Everywhere.
Yoga studios matter tremendously. Yet studios are not the totality of yoga. Nor is studio attendance a census of what is taking place with yoga at large or an indication of where the practice, cool or otherwise, is increasingly headed. Inherent in assessing coolness by that measurement is a privilege and exclusivity that many in the yoga space have been working to counteract in recent decades. And when yoga becomes more accessible to anyone who wants to try it, that’s when it falls into even greater alignment with its underlying philosophy.
Coolness is one measure of where yoga stands. But not the only one. So in response to the question of what is happening to yoga, my answer is “a lot.”
Why Coolness Was Never the Question
Implicit in this entire conversation is the irony that yoga doesn’t care about being cool. There’s something remarkably aligned, if not karmic, about a practice that teaches turning inward and relinquishing ego being critiqued as less culturally conspicuous.
Yes, yoga has, at times, unwittingly made a loud statement, notably during the 1990s, 2000s, and beyond. Paparazzi chased mat-toting celebrities, one out of seemingly every three people signed up for yoga teacher training, Sting appeared on the cover of Yoga Journal, and the Museum of Modern Art lauded yoga leggings as one of the 111 items that forever altered fashion. And who can forget thousands and thousands of yoga-goers liking, sharing, and identifying with the viral meme about staying indefinitely in Child’s Pose when the world shut down in 2020?
Yet that was maybe three decades of yoga’s existence. Three decades out of an entire century during which yoga has fallen in and out of vogue. In a New York Times article titled “Yoga, a 60’s Survivor, Is Luring New Converts,” from 1993, the late Maty Ezraty, yoga teacher and co-founder of the now-closed YogaWorks, explained, “It’s not that yoga hasn’t been there all this time,” she said. “But it’s like it’s just been discovered.” In other words, cyclical.
Perhaps the lack of continued cultural clamor around yoga is, at least in part, an inevitable shift following being discovered and becoming pervasive. Maybe yoga no longer needs to announce itself in the same way.
Yoga is still there. It still brings the same profound benefits in physiological functioning, neuroplasticity, stress reduction, sleep quality, and more that millennia of practitioners understood and decades of scientific research have reiterated again and again and again. Yoga has remained an influencer, just not of the contemporary sort. And I guarantee you it will outlast the latest maxxing trend, something the writer of The Atlantic article, a trained yoga teacher, hinted at toward the end.
Drawing conclusions about yoga’s shrinking role in lifestyle aesthetics is like assuming someone’s practice is lacking because their Warrior 2 doesn’t look like a textbook example. Which is to say, it tells you nothing about the larger, unseen experience taking place.
Just ask the ER nurse who remembers to take a long, slow breath to regain her focus. Or the 20-something reeling from a break-up who practices along with a yin yoga video to help sort some emotions and feel less alone. Or the student who ditched high school gym class every chance they got yet attempts an arm balance years later and begins to redefine what they think is possible for themselves.
So, what happened to yoga? Maybe it is less fashionable and more quietly aligned with itself than in recent decades. But don’t mistake that for disappearing. Because it hasn’t.
