It’s hard to keep track of all the yoga studios these days—especially when the names like Silken Tent, Heaven Meets Earth, Generations, Sweet Pea’s Studio, Too Hot and Brooklyn’s Every Breath You Take—seem to have so little to do with yoga.
“Your first public interface is often the name, and might affect how people perceive who you are,” explains Gabriel Halpern, owner of Yoga Circle. He and the other Iyengar teachers who opened the studio in 1985 chose the name because “it represented the whole idea of coming together—especially since ‘hatha’ is often translated as sun-moon.”
Beth Range Kiely was thinking of her late father, Charlie Range, when she and her husband launched Ravenswood’s Om on the Range in 2002. “He was the type of guy who always said to do what you love and everything will be just fine,” says Kiely, who quit her corporate fundraising career to open the center. “We thought it was a nice tribute to him—and a play on words.”
Kiely says the unusual name hasn’t caused any confusion, but that’s not the case for studios with Sanskrit names.
“When I first opened we got a few calls from teachers asking, ‘What kind of yoga is Niyama Yoga?’” says Mac McHugh, who opened the Wilmette studio in 2002. “We’ve had a kind of educational process along the way.” She chose the name, which she translates as “the journey of self observation,” because she “wanted to explain what yoga had done for me.”
Namaksar Yoga owner Chris DeLitzer says her studio’s name is an Indian greeting that means “the divine in me acknowledges the divine in you.”
“People usually ask what it means, but they don’t always get the pronunciation. People are, like, ‘Is this NAYM-askar?’ But why correct someone?”
“There was always confusion with the name,” says Suddha Weixler, who opened the NU Yoga Center in 1984 at the behest of his guru, Swami Narayananda. The name was an abbreviation for an international nonprofit trust based on his guru’s teachings, but most people didn’t know that. “We would get a lot of calls for Northwestern University,” says Weixler.
In 2004 the studio separated from the trust, expanded and became the Chicago Yoga Center. “It’s very simple,” says Weixler. “There’s no assumption. I also chose it because we are one of the older schools in Chicago.”
“It’s really hard for a business to make a name change,” admits Sharyn Galindo, who opened the So Fun to Do health club in Wilmette in 1996. “We wanted to make exercise sound fun,” she explains.
Over the next several years she added yoga classes, and after a trip to India four years ago she expanded and changed the name to North Shore Yoga and Fitness.
“People got really confused and asked, ‘Did you just buy out So Fun to Do?’” she says.
Last year, she sold the exercise equipment, moved the studio to Northfield and shortened the moniker to North Shore Yoga. “We toyed with Sanskrit names,” she says. “But it just kind of came down to here’s what we do, here’s where we are.”
That’s also the case with YogaNow, which is a play on the first yoga sutra, “Now yoga exposition begins,” says owner Amy Beth Treciokas, whose student chose the name. “It is also about being in the present, the here and now, and honoring the sacred feminine.”
Simplicity and approachability were Laura Jane Mellencamp’s goals when she opened Yoga Among Friends in Downers Grove in 1998. “I didn’t want to do anything to make people frightened of yoga, and I thought friendship was the key,” she says.
When Chad Satlow unveiled Barrington’s Yogawerks five years ago, he wanted to use the word “yoga” and to honor his father, a daily practitioner who had worked for 30 years at Motor Werks of Barrington.
Satlow didn’t learn about LA’s popular Yoga Works (now part of a national chain of yoga studios) until years later, when he got a call from then-owner Chuck Miller—who wanted him to change the name.
“I thought he wanted to do a workshop here,” says Satlow, who didn’t budge. “I never heard from him again.”
Cara Jepsen is a Chicago-based writer and yoga instructor. Visit carajepsen.com.