Claudia from earthyogi.blogspot.com just schooled Bloomberg news for publishing an article describing the cost of yoga to be so prohibitive as to be unavailable to all except the so called 1%. She set them straight. I thought it might be a good idea to describe my annual yoga costs. I live in an area where one or both spouses make a pretty good living and costs are NYC high, so the farther you are the lower the costs (I extrapolate here, I’m not Paul Krugman).
One Manduka mat: $65.00
six C9 yoga pants@ $19.99 @ target. $119.94
Six Mossimo tank tops@ 8.99 @ target. $53.94
Monthly unlimited pass@ shala $170×12. $2,040.00
Total. $2,278.88
Which if you practice six days a week it ends up costing you a whopping $7.30 a day to practice yoga for one hour and a half give or take.
I did not include food,gas or toilet paper since a use that for other things not related to yoga.
Books and workshops are optional as they are not mandatory to learning how to do your practice.
I kind of feel the same about books, shouldn’t have included them in my comment on Claudia’s, if i wasn’t reading around yoga I’d be reading around something else. I guess the dvd’s count as part of the practice though, taking the place of visiting a shala or workshops. $7 a day isn’t much and when you think about it the Ashtanga probably means you eat drink and/or smoke less, we’re saving money.
Eat & smoke yes. Drinking, I’m working on it. I sure am saving on medical visits. I used to have horrible sinus problems. I also save on entertainment because I have to wake up early the next day. We are using our money wisely which beats saving it!
I posted a response to this on my blog. Yes, my BLOG. Congrats, Maria – you flushed me out of hiding for a few minutes, at least!
It’s amazing how affordable yoga is when you do it often, even with shala fees or class fees. And home practice is practically free. There are so many options. This definitely isn’t a practice available only to the elite.
Thanks for this post Maria, I just got to this through Kai, yes Kai!, I thought you just commented on the post did not even notice you had done the whole break-down. Fascinating.
Claudia & Kai: Real yogis, real numbers instead of the hypothetical thirtysomething female that is paraded in the media every time they need to sell something.
I take issue with the article – *why* does it have to be a 37-year-old female living in NYC??? Why take the most expensive example?? In any case, I did my own numbers and struggle to come up with anything more than $3k. Then again, I don’t live in NYC….
D, I was so annoyed with the article that when I commented at their site, I made several typos when all I wanted to write was: “This borders on hyperbole”. It came out like – this bri rides on hyperbole! Just as well.
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