Yoga Reality Show: The Project I Imagined in India

A few days ago, while sorting through my archives, I came across a huge folder I hadn’t opened in years. Dozens and dozens of printed pages, handwritten notes, titles crossed out, circled and rewritten, research on American television, reality TV, yoga, celebrities, TV networks, sponsors, ashrams, yoga teachers who had become stars… And in the middle of it all: Yoga Life, my Yoga Reality Show. I had almost forgotten just how far I had taken this project.

In 2009, after the birth of my second child, while we were living in India, I had a slightly crazy idea: to use television to show what yoga could truly change in a person’s life. Not simply to make a show about yoga or show people doing poses. I wanted to follow people, immerse them in the experience and see what might happen. Because I already knew what yoga had changed in me.

At the time, if you wanted to reach millions of people, there was still one medium that dominated all the others: television. Instagram didn’t exist, TikTok even less so, YouTube was barely four years old, and Facebook was only just beginning to become a global phenomenon.

I wanted to create a Yoga Reality Show. And when I look back now at the amount of research I did to make it happen, I wonder how I even found the time!

It All Started in Mysore

I had just given birth to Darjeeling, Nalu was three, and I was living right at the heart of the yoga world in India. I didn’t really know much about the world of television, so I started researching. A lot. I studied different reality TV formats, transformation shows, competitions, eliminations, confessionals, challenges, hosts, treatments, pilots, teasers, networks that might buy this kind of programme, product placement… I studied reality TV almost as if I were studying a new discipline. And of course, the more I researched, the bigger the project became. It also needed a name. **Yoga Life** was the obvious choice, but apparently that wasn’t enough for me, because my archives have just reminded me that I also considered **America Loves Yoga**, **From India with Love**, **Yoga Goes to America**, **YogaMania**, and a few others. And yes: **Kiss My Asanas!** I’m not sure whether I should be proud of or slightly worried about the person I was in 2009. Probably a little of both.

What I Really Wanted to Show

At its heart, the idea behind **Yoga Life** was quite simple: I wanted to show that yoga could transform a life. It was something I had experienced myself years earlier, and that was precisely what interested me: not simply creating a show around the world of yoga, which was already very trendy in the United States, but following people for long enough to see what this practice, and more broadly everything surrounding it, could truly change in their lives.

I had imagined a very diverse group of participants: beginners, people who already practised yoga, and others who were teaching or considering becoming teachers. They would live together for several weeks and be completely immersed in yoga. And when I say “yoga”, I already had a very broad vision of what that meant. There were, of course, asanas, pranayama, meditation, Yoga Nidra, chanting and philosophy, but also Ayurveda, massage, nutrition, vegetarian cooking, energy practices, bodywork, dance, silence… I wanted to create a truly immersive experience.

Reading all of this again today, I can also see something I probably wouldn’t have expressed in quite the same way in 2009: what interested me was never really the performance of a pose. It was what the practice could shift in a person’s life.

But there was a problem: I wanted to make a reality show, and reality shows had their own rules.

Did We Really Have to Eliminate Anyone?

I had done a huge amount of research into reality TV and reality shows, how these programmes were structured, and the use of challenges, evaluations, confessionals and eliminations. Inevitably, some of the early versions of **Yoga Life** incorporated some of these mechanisms. There were evaluations, eliminations and, in some versions, finalists and a prize.

It would be very easy, in 2026, to rewrite this story and say, “Obviously, I never wanted any competition.” Except that wouldn’t be true. It was there. I was trying to figure out how to make a show work within the conventions of television at the time. But something about the idea of eliminating participants deeply bothered me. If the goal was genuinely to give them the opportunity to experience transformation through yoga, why send someone home after a few weeks? Why decide that one person deserved to continue receiving the teachings while another had to leave? Little by little, the concept evolved towards something that felt more like me: **no more losers**. Everyone could stay long enough to benefit from the experience and the teachings. What interested me far more than finding out who would win was another question: **what would remain once they went home?**

Maybe the Real Experience Began After Yoga Life

This is probably one of the things I was happiest to rediscover in the project today. I hadn’t only imagined the immersion in **Yoga Life**. In one fairly developed version of the concept, a second part was meant to begin afterwards: **the return home**. Going back to your family, your habits, your work, your fears, the people who have known you forever and who haven’t spent several weeks doing yoga, meditating and questioning their lives. And seeing what lasts. Because it is relatively easy to change something when you are removed from your everyday life, surrounded by people doing the same thing as you, and placed in an environment designed entirely for that purpose. But what remains three months later? That was where it became truly interesting to me.

In my notes, the participants were supposed to try to integrate what they had learned into their **REAL lives**. For some, that could mean starting to teach, finding their first students, facing their fears and seeing how the people around them responded to the changes they had made. Then they would come back.

In 2009, I thought of this as part of the television programme. In 2026, reading these pages again, what I see above all is the question behind it all, one that still feels just as relevant to me today:

An experience can shake us deeply, but what do we do with it afterwards, in our lives?

I Started Studying Television… and the Yoga Business

Once I decided that this idea could become a real television show, my research grew considerably. I wanted to understand why certain shows created such a strong connection with their participants, and which networks might be interested in this kind of programme. But very quickly, my research began to extend beyond television. Because in trying to figure out how to develop a show about yoga, I found myself observing what was happening to yoga itself. And in 2009, particularly in the United States, something was happening. Yoga had long since moved beyond ashrams and small circles of practitioners. It was becoming a major cultural, media and economic phenomenon.

Behind this project was also something very simple and very profound: the idea that yoga could reach people who wanted to take care of themselves, to live better and with less suffering, but who might never have thought of walking into a yoga studio. Even then, I could already see that the practice often remained more accessible to those who could afford it. With *Yoga Life*, I wanted to open the door a little wider, broaden the circle, and introduce yoga to people and communities who were still far removed from it.

The figures I had kept in my files still seem staggering to me today: the 2008 *Yoga in America* study estimated that **15.8 million American adults practised yoga**, spending $5.7 billion a year on yoga classes and related products. Around this, an entire world was developing, and I watched it with great curiosity: magazines, clothing, retreats, DVDs, sponsors, major brands, yoga teachers becoming celebrities, actors and models talking about their practice. Yoga was meeting American celebrity culture and, inevitably, for someone who was in the middle of imagining a television show about yoga, all of this fascinated me. Seventeen years later, these figures also show just how far things have come. In 2022, **a major study conducted by Yoga Alliance** counted 38.4 million yoga practitioners in the United States and more than $21 billion spent around the practice. The yoga world I had watched take on a new dimension in 2009 had, in the meantime, truly grown to another scale.

,Who Was Going to Take Part in My Yoga Reality Show?,

I had imagined bringing in well-known yoga teachers, specialists and celebrities. And here again, I need to be precise about my memories: finding someone’s name in my research absolutely does not mean that I had contacted them. I was researching. I was looking at who practised yoga, who talked about it, which teachers were well known in the United States, and which public figures might have a genuine connection with the practice, ecology, wellbeing or certain causes. **Christy Turlington**, for example, appears in my notes as a possible host in New York. Did she even know that I had considered her to host my yoga reality show? Almost certainly not. But apparently, I had big plans.

What strikes me as I rediscover these pages is also the number of bridges I was trying to build between worlds that might have seemed contradictory: India and American television, ashrams and celebrities, yoga philosophy and business, inner transformation and entertainment. I don’t think that, in 2009, I was yet aware of all the contradictions I can see in it today, but some of them were already on my mind.

In my research, I found reflections on how yoga teachers were paid, seva, integrity, money, fame and the commercialization of yoga. I was already trying to understand how far we could use the media to bring yoga to a wider audience without turning yoga into just another product. And in the middle of all this research, I came across **Ava Taylor**.

An Agent for Yoga Teachers?

I remember very clearly what this discovery meant to me at the time. Ava Taylor lived in New York and worked in a field I barely knew existed: the professional representation of yoga teachers and personalities. Basically, I was discovering that a yoga teacher could have someone managing their career, much like an actor has an agent.

Today, perhaps, that seems much less unusual. The wellness world has its entrepreneurs, content creators, agents, managers and personal brands. But in 2009, that world was completely unfamiliar to me. Her name stayed in my huge folder of research on **Yoga Life**, and what makes this little story much more amusing today is that **a few years later, I actually ended up working with her**. In 2009, Ava Taylor was a name on a piece of paper in my research. A few years later, she had genuinely become part of my professional journey.

That is also why rediscovering these archives today feels so meaningful to me: I don’t just find a project that was never produced, but names, ideas, places and questions that, at the time, belonged to a future I had yet to discover.

And Then My Yoga Reality Show Began to Grow Beyond Itself

Obviously, I didn’t stop at a house and a few yoga classes. At some point, **Yoga Life** became **Green Karma House**, then **Green Karma Project**, and then **Karma House**. Because if we were going to talk about transformation, why stop at the practice of yoga? **For me, all these dimensions were also part of a yogi’s life, far beyond what happened on the mat.** I started thinking about how to integrate food, ecology, consumption, recycling, gardening, the way we live, **community life and what each person could genuinely change in their everyday life**. I even found this sentence handwritten in my archives: “What can you change in your everyday life to save the world?” Nothing less. I recognize my way of thinking quite well in all of this: I start with a television show about yoga and, a few dozen pages later, I’m trying to save the world.

Seventeen Years Later

And then the folder disappeared into my archives, and life went on. I never produced **Yoga Life**, I never moved fourteen people into my guest house in Mysore to see what yoga would change in their lives, and I never had Christy Turlington as the host of my show. I continued on my path with yoga.

What is quite surprising is that in 2017, eight years after my project, a reality show about the yoga world finally appeared in the United States. *Yoga Girls*, which aired on Z Living, followed yoga teachers in Los Angeles as they navigated their practice, professional ambitions, social media and business. The concept was very different from mine.

At its core, imagining a reality show about yoga presented an almost impossible contradiction. And the fact that so few shows of this kind have been made since brings me back to one of the difficulties I had already encountered in 2009:

How do you build a reality show around yoga when you reject the very mechanisms that usually make reality TV work, such as competition, elimination, winners and losers?

Today, I find myself looking at this impressive amount of paper, trying to decide what to keep and what to throw away. It is a strange experience to rediscover the work of the person I was almost twenty years ago. I could look at all of this and focus on what I had “seen before everyone else.” It would be tempting. There are things in these pages that feel remarkably current: personal transformation turned into a spectacle, wellness becoming an industry, yoga teachers becoming public figures, personal branding, celebrities, sponsors, environmental issues, and the question of how to transform our everyday lives.

But that would also mean rewriting 2009 through the eyes of 2026. At the time, you still had to go through a handful of major gatekeepers to reach a huge audience: TV networks, producers, magazines, agents. Today, a yoga teacher can livestream a practice from their living room, post it online a few minutes later and be watched on the other side of the world. The world has changed completely, and the yoga world along with it.

My Yoga Reality Show never actually came to life. But when I look at social media today, I sometimes think that part of what I imagined in 2009 is now playing out there every day. Yoga is no longer presented simply through a practice or a series of poses, but through an entire way of life: what we eat, where we travel, how we live, what we consume, the retreats we go on, the choices we share.

In a way, the television camera I imagined back then has simply been replaced by our phones.

What I Still Recognize

What interests me most in these archives, in the end, is not whether **Yoga Life** would have worked. I will never know. What interests me is recognizing in this project **questions that have never really left me**: how do we teach yoga without reducing it to postures? How does a practice become something we truly live? What happens after a training, a retreat or a powerful experience, when we return home and everyday life begins again? How do we make yoga accessible to more people without losing what gives it its depth? And how do we use the tools of our time to share it? In 2009, for me, that tool could have been television. Today, we have other tools. But I recognize the woman who was sitting somewhere in India with all her papers, her research, her ideas and her improbable show titles. I also recognize her tendency to start with a relatively simple idea and end up with an enormous project. Apparently, that hasn’t changed much.

Pourquoi j’ai gardé cette histoire

I’m in the process of clearing out a huge amount of material accumulated over more than twenty years. I photograph, sort through and reread everything, save what matters, and throw away a lot of paper. This particular folder was difficult to throw away without preserving its story. Not because **Yoga Life** is a project I would want to revive today, but because it captures a very particular moment in my life, and also a particular moment in the history of yoga: a time when yoga was becoming increasingly visible, commercial and present in the media, when teachers were beginning to become public figures, when celebrities were helping to bring it to a wider audience, and when yoga was becoming an industry while still carrying ideas of detachment, seva, integrity and inner transformation.

And there I was, in the middle of it all, trying to figure out how to make a reality show about yoga without completely losing the yoga along the way.

I think, in the end, it was a pretty good question. And I’m very glad I found this folder again.