Suddenly things started to happen as we moved into the information and service society of corporate capitalism – the postmodern consumer culture took off. So did the fitness and appearance culture. This meant yoga rapidly diffused among the cultural intermediaries – a social sub-stratum of interactors whose numbers and influence rapidly increased at this point in time. Countless numbers of women – many of them now in new powerful jobs – embodied new lifestyles and social interaction never witnessed before in history. They embraced yoga discourses of fitness, beauty and celebrity and via their central position in the media industry they started to spread the yoga message to the masses. These amateur yoga sympathisers – not yoga professionals – took yoga from the early adopters’ to the early majority’. Yoga had gained critical mass. In the 1990s a wave of new film stars, pop singers and models – like Jane Fonda, Madonna and certain Spice Girls – would confess to women’s magazines that a large part of their success and beauty was due to yoga. So they just loved yoga’! Many of them started actively to promote yoga on television and videos. Jane Fonda who in the 1980s had promoted aerobics in 1994 released her video Jane Fonda’s Yoga Workout (Syman 2010). We see that the yoga sign now was firmly linked to celebrity’ and all the symbolic power and glory associated with that sign in modern mind.
Fashion models, designers and the editors of female magazines would soon be seen everywhere in the media displaying yoga poses. They were keenly watched and followed by a huge new generation of young, single, well-educated, professional middle class women populating Metropolitan centres – independent women who were not going to have babies at the age of twenty, but who instead wanted to live an active social life and have a career.
Contraindication: Cervical vertebral instability. Props: A chair and Child’s Pose Yoga a table. Avoiding pitfalls: Do not collapse the upper back. Keep your shoulders back Child’s Pose Yoga . Sit tall, shoulders back. Rest your elbows on the table. Inhale and lengthen your neck and head up. Exhale and bend your head forward just a little; press your forehead into your hands.
