This Sunday’s New York Times featured “Yoga Assumes a Social Position,” an article about yoga studios that host parties before, after, and sometimes nowhere near, class time.

The story described a gathering at a Yoga Works with wine and chocolate, Om Yoga’s Vinyasa and Vino party, plus scads of less alcoholic events at places like old-school Jivamukti and brand-new Centerpoint.

It’s not just New York––Bloom in Chicago holds Midnight Yoga classes with live music. The Times reports that a confluence of factors has encouraged the gatherings: studios competing with each other to retain students; a hunger to commune with likeminded people; and a rejection of the traditional bar scene.

Though yogis seem to love these things (Laughing Lotus in NYC reports a tripling in attendance), there are those who frown: “Wine in a yoga studio is an oxymoron,” says yoga teacher Donna Davidge in the Times story. “There’s a whole commercialism of yoga, and people are getting away from its roots.”

Well actually, yoga in America has been intensely social from the start––some of the earliest yoga practitioners gathered at spiritual retreats, like Greenacre in Eliot, Maine. Those who found Christianity and Judaism in some ways lacking found a place to bond and an image of spirituality to which they could better relate. I spent my early twenties hanging out at a yoga ashram in Massachusetts. And though we weren’t having any vino with our vinyasa, we spent every non-structured moment talking, connecting, and at evening satsangs, sharing steamy glances as we whirled to sacred chanting, harmoniums, and sitars. After all, yoga means “unity.” And Vishnu knows, many of the spiritually inclined among us—who can’t quite do the church/temple thing––crave community, unity, belonging, like water.

Photo: The New York Times (cropped)