Namaste All Day

This chapter focuses on the appropriating and commodifying practices of spirituality industries and asks how corporations, entrepreneurs, and consumers relate spiritual practices to ethical values through marketing and consumer activities. The author analyzes popular spiritual discourses, demonstrating how the powerful and subversive expressions appliqued across yogaware and the industry’s “do good” discourses are tied to a commitment to particular “yogic” or “spiritual” values. Yet, for all of the self-actualization it offers through PEACE LOVE YOGA the industry also plays a capitalist game that thrives on nostalgia about lost cultural norms, as well as neoliberal narratives about the capitalist market, self-care, and personal improvement.

Good Karma

This chapter argues against the common tropes that bemoan the commodification of spirituality as the loss of an authentic, pure religious expression or spiritual consumers as the passive victims of manipulation, deception, and coercion, as cultural dupes living in a permanent state of false consciousness. It suggests such critiques depend on the ahistorical assumption that there is an original, static tradition to be preserved, one that preexisted the profanation of religion through commodification, and consequently they produce nostalgic representations, mirroring the essentialisms of consumers themselves. Alternatively, this chapter provides an analysis of spiritual consumers, not as duped, but as choosing spiritual commodities because they privilege the culturally dominant neoliberal capitalist values and ideologies they already embrace.

Made in Bharat

This chapter evaluates neoliberal spirituality in India and its relationship to public space and dominant political values by evaluating prime minister of India Narendra Modi’s 2015 inauguration of the International Day of Yoga with a vast public ritual. Drawing on Steven Lukes’s suggestion that political rituals manipulate an agenda in order to make it appear that community power is at play when in fact they empower a select few, the author argues that Modi’s Yoga Day demonstration demarcated out-groups and empowered a heteropatriarchal Hindu elite. Yoga was an instrument of domination through which Modi mainstreamed Hindutva, the position that the strength and unity of India depend on its “Hindu-ness,” and that therefore unorthodox or foreign social practices and religions should be resisted.

An Inside Job

To conclude, the author poses the question of how adherents might put spirituality to work to organize the world in ways that counter neoliberal capitalism, asking whether spirituality can resist the neoliberal capitalist demand to achieve perfection through correct production and consumption. The chapter attends to prison yoga and meditation as a way of exploring the question of whether a form of spiritual militancy could attempt to go beyond simply self-describing as “alternative” or “spiritual” and gesturing toward resistance, to facilitating actual structural change. In other words, the chapter poses the question of whether these forms of rehabilitation serve as a counter to or a part of the rise of invocations of spirituality as gestural subversions, concluding that they, like their commodified counterparts, offer defanged subversions of the neoliberal order.

Self Love Club

The ascent of spiritual industries is no doubt in part about some women’s pursuit of empowerment; yet they are also a site of rampant sexual violence. This chapter looks at attempts to diagnose the problem, which range from blaming the “guru model” to blaming the conservative sexist and heterosexist ideals certain teachers and gurus represent. This chapter complicates these diagnoses, taking the position that attention to different and conflicting narratives of sexual violence sheds light on larger systemic issues, particularly by illuminating the following: a globally pervasive neoliberal logic whereby control over one’s body is valued, but is defined as an individual achievement; policing of deviant bodies or bodies that resist the wellness ideal; and capitalist strategies of commodification that contain dissent against neoliberal individualism through gestural subversions. Together, these brew an industry that neither challenges dominant heteropatriarchal ideologies nor holds industry leaders accountable for sexual violence.

Breathe Practice Repeat

This chapter suggests we can better understand the apparent conflicts and contradictions of the practices and commitments of neoliberal spirituality by approaching it as both a body of religious practice and a neoliberal ethical complex. The chapter makes a case for the ways neoliberal spirituality reflects and affects adherents’ values and value systems. It argues that neoliberal spirituality can betray ritual, mythological, and other religious qualities, but it is also made up of industries that operate by the logic of multinational corporations, so consideration of the religious qualities of neoliberal spirituality generally need not (and should not) avoid a critique of neoliberalism itself. This chapter explains what is meant by neoliberalism and neoliberal governmentality and the ways they are embodied by the neoliberal subject who both dissents against neoliberal capitalism and consents to its domination.

No Bad Vibes

This chapter introduces the term neoliberal spirituality, which serves as a category to represent a crucial node in global neoliberal capitalism. Spiritual industries, corporations, entrepreneurs, and consumers relate spiritual practices to ethical values through marketing and consumer activities. The result, neoliberal spirituality, represents a neoliberal mode of governance. Gestural subversion, subverting dominant power structures through gestures, however, is a key area of their valuation. The subversive expressions appliqued across yogaware and the industry’s “do good” discourses, for example, signal to the consumer that the products are characterized by values antagonistic to or at least in tension with the forces and relations of capitalist production. They provide the language for spiritual consumers’ discontent.