The Wall Street Journal reports that traders are working off market stress with sun salutations--either in workplace classes or after hours."
The yoga industry, shrugging off its brown-rice-eating-and-sandal-wearing image, is adapting to and courting its new, wealthy customers. Yoga retreats in places like Malibu -- which offer grueling regimens of several hours of yoga a day -- have become popular destinations for the finance crowd."
I don't know one yoga teacher who hasn't made this adaptation, or at least wanted to.
"Catharina Hedberg owns a yoga retreat called The Ashram in the Southern California hills near Malibu and says she has seen an increase in finance types attending over the past five years. Now, about a quarter of her customers, who pay $4,250 for a one-week stay, are financiers. The retreat offers a hard-core program of 6 a.m. yoga sessions with an alcohol-free, caffeine-free vegetarian diet that she says is popular with the Wall Street crowd. "Every week you see someone from hedge funds," says Ms. Hedberg."
Business people are no different from the rest of of us stressed out urban rats. Why does it surprise anyone that traders need to cool of with some twisting and inverting? They do tend to like the more athletic practices like ashtanga... and they can't quite bring themselves to chant OM... and they have trouble with the whole process aspect of the practice... but other than that..."
Teachers say one key principle poses an implicit challenge to Wall Streeters: Value the process of hard work rather than the rewards it brings."
Read it here.