The first popular cultural history that tells, cleverly and entertainingly, how yoga conquered the world. Today, yoga can be practiced everywhere—in Mumbai, Los Angeles, and in every mountain cabin. There's Yin yoga, power yoga, aerial yoga, and more recently, beer and wine yoga. Yoga has long been more than just a practice for a select few. It's a philosophy of life, a path to salvation, a sport for some—and a very lucrative industry. How did it come to this? And does what we call 'yoga' today—a sequence of poses and movement patterns, breathing and relaxation techniques—still have anything in common with what was supposedly called yoga thousands of years ago on the Indian subcontinent? Cultural scholar and yoga teacher Gunda Windmüller traces the thousand-year-old history of yoga and describes its development from a spiritual technique to a global phenomenon. It is a fascinating and surprising story that tells of distant lands, of religion, politics and money, of people, charisma, suffering, and liberation from it. A story of spirituality, colonialism, modernity, and capitalism—a story of us. New product