Back in 2017, during what many now affectionately refer to as the “before times,” I belonged to a corporate yoga studio. I’ve written about this particular studio elsewhere, highlighting the kinds of affinities that typify commercial yoga spaces in the United States. In this piece I would like to expand my view beyond studio cultures and explore how yoga spaces extend to and from practices of U.S. American tourism—a set of habits I am calling ecologies of yoga. Ecologies of yoga refers to the interconnected practices, philosophies, and communities within which yoga industries operate. It highlights the relationships between the physical, emotional, spiritual, and environmental dimensions of yoga, emphasizing how yoga affects both individuals and broader social systems. Thinking in terms of ecologies helps me understand and explain what yoga has to do with the sensory grounding techniques of place-making (i.e., smell, taste, sight, touch, sound).
The studio I frequented in Texas from 2014 to 2017, and the one before that in Indiana from 2012 to 2014, always had ads for yoga and meditation retreats at the front desk. If you have spent time in yoga studios, you probably know what I am describing—postcard sized flyers, usually with a picture of a natural landscape somewhere remote and/or tropical on the front and details about the retreat on the back. Below is an example:
Front and back of postcard for Energy of the Elements retreat
These sorts of postcards are quite common in yoga spaces: every studio I’ve visited (in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany) has an area featuring them. Though many studios arrange their reception areas as commercial spaces, with items like books, yoga mats, incense, and sometimes even religious idols for sale, the postcards are placed elsewhere—usually near or at the front desk or entrance area, close to where one is expected to leave shoes, or where people linger and mingle before or after class. In many cases, the postcards are created and circulated by one of the studio’s teachers or someone known to them. In other words, these tourism adventures are positioned as extensions of the intimacy of the studio space—an opportunity to take the experience to a place that allows one to feel more connected to nature. As many have returned to travel in the aftermath of the pandemic, I’ve begun to think more critically about these cards, what they signal, and why they are a staple in commercial yoga spaces.
The Tropicalization of Yoga
Tourism and commercial yoga make for easy companions. In fact, in most conversations where I mention my research on yoga tourism I am usually met with quizzical looks: to most people, tourism is a wellness activity and yoga is too, so why wouldn’t they belong together? One interlocutor even asked whether I also studied why people associate water activities or swimming pools with vacation. With such responses in mind, it’s worth disaggregating yoga—both as a set of feelings or habits and an activity—from wellness, if only to understand what has allowed them to enjoy such a twinned life today in consumer culture.
Most of the postcards I have collected advertise a specific form of yoga tourism, what is known as a yoga retreat. The yoga retreat model offers teachers the opportunity to take their regulars on the road; like a study abroad program, but for yoga.
Generally speaking, these retreats appear to share a few basic qualities:
1) They need to take place at locales that are distant, that require non-ground travel.
2) In all the cards I have collected over the years, the retreat was being held in a part of the world that was warm(er) or “tropical.” It’s clear that these retreats are meant to appeal to those who do not live in the area already.
3) The rhetoric in the postcards highlights words like “escape, journey, healing, nature.”
Yoga retreats are often modeled on ashrams, that is, they are meant to be experienced as a physical escape, an emotional sanctuary, and a departure from the demands of the everyday world. Ashrams are often imbued with history, too—they rely on place-making that suggests a space, whether it be a repurposed historic building or simply a location on a map, is special or even spiritual in some way. In this way, yoga as wellness appears to operate on two levels. It is both the reason for the escape, and it is the mechanism by which the escape is accessed. These retreats and the ads for them place an emphasis on being in nature and on doing yoga in a space that inspires wonder or awe, especially through ideas of historicity, indigenous knowledge, or timelessness. To this end, the vistas that are featured on the cards tend to focus on a particular site, often near a body of water (like Lake Atitlán above). Take the advertisement above, for example, which appears to be for a retreat held at The Yoga Forest in Guatemala. The Yoga Forest was founded by a yoga teacher from New Zealand, Hayley Tennyson, in 2009. Recently, the business adopted the indigenous name for the land, Kawoq Forest. The retreat is described on the business website as an “eco-luxury wellness sanctuary.”
Over at least the last decade, commercial yoga industries have increasingly adopted the trappings of environmentalism. These trappings position yoga, as an activity, and yoga practitioners, as consumers, as an assemblage—a social, economic, and cultural set of habits and relationships where individuals make choices that are grounded in a proclaimed concern for nature and for sustainability. The negative impacts of ecotourism on biodiversity or other threats to the planet are rarely mentioned or acknowledged. However, commercial yoga industries and those who participate in them often promote vegan or vegetarian diets, and when, in my research I have asked why, I’ve often received responses about “being better for the environment,” a claim that ties environmentalism to morality as well as individual consumption and behaviors. Notably, mention of the availability of locally sourced vegan or vegetarian food is prominent in the copy on all the yoga retreat postcards I have seen. That observation will be one of the subjects of my next post.
For now, though, I want to focus on what exactly “eco-luxury” is. And, what does it have to do with wellness (a feeling or state of being) or sanctuary (a place that provides safe harbor and protection from a threat)? What I offer below is a preliminary set of thoughts, based on ethnographic research conducted in 2018 at a retreat in South Beach Miami, the COMO Metropolitan Miami Beach. This venue was, at the time, part of the COMO Shambhala group of eco-luxury wellness hotels.
Wellness Tourism and Settler Sanctuaries
Published on the rear cover of The Florida Times-Union’s “Florida Roads and Resorts,” 1924 edition.
There is, of course, much to say about the history of tourism to Miami, especially the waterfront tourist area known as South Beach. Like the postcard of Lake Atitlán above, tourism to Miami is tied to a conglomeration of ideas about health and the environment. For example, the earliest advertisements for tourism to the area known today as Miami described the area as a land of “eternal youth,” establishing the region in the public imagination as ideal for health and healing (Sewell 1933, 56). In a manual published in 1876 in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the Biscayne Bay Company insisted that Miami’s “advantage as a resort for invalids will be evident,” for “beyond dispute” the area “was more healthful and free from disease than any other section of the Union.” The company’s promotional literature, and that of its counterparts, was arguably part of a larger colonial project to “settle” the area. Settlement in this context took on a specific meaning, linking health and related ideas of individual liberty and freedom to both morality and property rights.
A discourse of moral rights permeates the longer history of the area. Florida became part of U.S. territory in 1821 because slaveholders in the neighboring states of Georgia and South Carolina wanted fewer obstacles to recovering fugitive slaves in Spanish Florida. The Seminole Wars (1817–1858), the first of which resulted in the annexation of Florida to the U.S., were predicated on the idea that indigenous inhabitants needed to be removed and relocated because they were harboring runaway slaves. Removal and relocation would ensure the rights and safety of property holders and white settlers—a logic of security that extends to the contemporary moment in many ways. Put another way, white slaveholders like Andrew Jackson accused indigenous populations of harboring fugitive slaves, and it was this accusation that initially provided justification for forcibly displacing native populations from their own homelands. Moreover, it was during the military campaigns to gain and maintain control of the area that word began to spread among soldiers that Florida had curative powers because the region was a “beautiful retreat … a blessed unviolated spot of earth” (Bartram 1998, 99). Ultimately, by the early twentieth century, the mythology that Florida offered magical health and healing dovetailed with initiatives to colonize and settle the area, and the tourist destination known today as Miami was born.
Postcards of the Traymore (1940s) from MDPL reports
The original building which housed the retreat I attended was constructed in the early era of real estate and tourism development along Miami Beach, roughly the 1920s and 1930s. Located at the intersection of 24th Street and Collins Avenue, the building was originally known as the Traymore Hotel and was completed in 1939. It was not the first beachfront hotel to operate along Collins Avenue; it is, however, the oldest one still standing, and it cannot be torn down. In 1976, the Miami Design Preservation League (MDPL) was established and the Art Deco district was the first district that it designated as “historic” and thus “protected.” The Traymore was designated within the Art Deco Historic District in 1979.
Even before its designation as a protected building, the Traymore appealed to a wide variety of travelers. According to MDPL reports, which use postcards as historical evidence (see above), the Traymore operated as a military convalescent hospital after World War II. In the early 1970s the hotel became exclusively kosher to attract a more observant Jewish clientele. By the mid-1970s, it had become a community center and a temple for the Hare Krishna movement—an identity which arguably connected it to the COMO Shambhala brand many years later. After it was designated a historic site, it was officially sold to the International Society for Krishna Consciousness of Miami Beach, who had their South Florida headquarters there until 1981, after which it returned to being a hotel. Following significant interior renovations which started in 2008, it reopened in 2014 as The Metropolitan by COMO.
Homepage for COMO Shambhala
When I visited the Metropolitan in June 2018, the first thing I experienced as I entered the lobby was the strong scent of the hotel’s signature essential oil fragrance. As I checked in, I asked about the scent, and the receptionist explained that all COMO hotels use aromatherapy developed by the COMO Shambhala brand. The receptionist explained that the scent, named “invigorate,” was “designed for our wellness retreats for mental clarity and physical energy.”
I had understood from the website that I would have access to wellness activities, like yoga classes, throughout my stay, but I quickly realized once I arrived that “access” meant only that a yoga mat was included in the cost of my room. This yoga mat was promoted throughout the hotel in partnership with the yoga mat manufacturer Manduka. I was informed by staff that I could purchase a new version of this mat, if I wanted, in the gift store. I could also purchase larger bottles of signature scent toiletries in the gift shop.
COMO Shambhala by Manduka yoga mat for sale in gift shop
During my stay, though I enquired daily at the front desk, the hotel did not offer any yoga activities. I learned in chatting with the manager over breakfast one morning, that there simply was not enough demand to justify hiring a teacher. One receptionist told me she knew the popular yoga teachers in the area who the hotel usually contracted to teach and offered to help me get in touch with them. I was offered alternatives to yoga, such as the rooftop hydrotherapy pool (jacuzzi), the steam room, the pool, or the fitness center. One receptionist did mention that if I wanted to hire a teacher to come teach a private class, they could help with the arrangements. Ultimately, despite the prominence of yoga-as-wellness in the COMO’s branding (see above), it seemed that yoga as an experience was not actually available.
I left after a few days with the distinct impression that calling one’s organization a wellness resort or wellness sanctuary that features yoga is primarily a marketing ploy. “Wellness” is simply a synonym for pampering. And “retreat” or “sanctuary” perhaps assuages the guilt a customer might feel for participating in a care economy where one purchases personal care services from primarily black and brown retreat employees. Through a variety of sensory tethers, from photographs, which circulate as postcards, to essential oils, wellness retreats have established ecologies of yoga, connecting tropical climates to travel and yoga to both. Ultimately, yoga uniquely provides moral cover to an otherwise nakedly commercial enterprise. It is this moral cover that seems to sanitize, spiritualize, and excuse what are otherwise environmentally unfriendly habits.
Special thanks to Julia Logan Labow, Anna Schultz, Kajal Nisha Patel, Bart King, and Travis A. Jackson for bringing these ideas into focus for me.
Works Cited
Bartram, William. 1998. The Travels of William Bartram. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Saunt, Claudio. 2020. Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory. New York: W.W. Norton.
Sewell, John. 1933. Memoirs and History of Miami, Florida. Miami: Franklin Press.
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