What Happened to Yoga?

At a recent Pilates class, where I pumped and pulsed under infrared heat panels until my fingertips were sweating, I ran into a former yoga teacher of mine, our mats inches apart in the neon-lit room. Afterward, I said hi and told her that I hadn’t seen a yoga class that packed in a while. She shrugged. “Yoga,” she told me, “is dead.” She was being hyperbolic, of course—yoga is still plenty popular. In some ways, it’s more mainstream than ever. People practice it in airports, offices, prisons,…