Suni Gargaro sells yoga clothing, mats and other yoga accessories. But for Gargaro, the fact that she is an Indian in the yoga industry in the United States means that her company, Sunia Yoga, is more than what she sells – it is about representing the Indian cultural heritage of yoga .
“I love what I do,” Gargaro says. “But we don’t just sell yoga pants. Our company is a mission and purpose-driven brand where we seek to get people on the yoga mat and go deeper with their practice.”
Gargaro, who is in her mid-40s, stands out in a large and growing commercial yoga group. According to market research firm IBIS World, the yoga and Pilates industry was worth $12.8 billion in the United States in 2021. And the multi-billion dollar industry in America is overwhelmingly white.
“I am a woman of color. It’s not easy even now,” Gargaro says of starting a yoga business in an industry dominated by white customers and white executives. “Entering this market is not easy for me.”
But Gargaro has big goals for Sunia Yoga’s missionary impact and hopes other people of color follow in her footsteps.
Arriving in Iowa, confronting racism and learning to love being Indian
Gargaro moved with her family from Kerala, India to Des Moines, Iowa when she was ten years old. She arrived “without speaking English,” she says.
When I grew up, India “was still considered a third world country,” says Gargaro.
At school, her classmates made fun of her. “Growing up, I experienced discrimination. People were racist,” she says. “Culturally, I was so out of balance.”
So she tried to assimilate. “I tried so hard not to be associated with my own culture,” she says. “I almost felt like I was trying to fit in with Western culture and I didn’t fit in because I tried so hard.”
But when Gargaro came to the University of Illinois at Chicago, she encountered a community of other Native Americans.
“I realized, ‘Wow, … I should embrace (my heritage) instead of trying to hide from it,'” she says. In her 20s, Gargaro “went completely in the other direction. I really learned to embrace it,” she says.
As a child in India, Gargaro had practiced a form of dance called Bharatanatyam, which she describes as a “dance form” of yoga.
So she started practicing yoga in her late 20s.
Introducing Sunia Yoga
After a tour of corporate life where she worked as a business systems analyst at a mobile phone company, Gargaro met her now-husband, who gave her the idea of becoming an entrepreneur.
Gargaro quit her corporate job in 2004 to open a high-end bath products boutique in California. But when Gargaro was ready to start a family, the entrepreneurs’ working hours of “working around the clock” no longer worked. She closed the boutique in 2006 and had a son, Mason, now 11 years old.
“I only had one, and I really wanted to embrace that part of his childhood and be there for him,” Gargaro says.
But she also knew that at some point she would have to return to the entrepreneurial life.
“It took five years, but I literally did yoga the whole time,” she says. “It just clicked one day when I said, ‘I love retail, I love fashion. I love yoga, I put them all together.’”
In 2018, Gargaro launched Sunia Yoga, featuring yoga clothing with unique patterns associated with the Eastern mentality, she says.
“When you look at a mandala, the pattern itself, when you look at it and concentrate, it helps you calm your mind, because that’s what mandalas are supposed to do.”
Gargaro has four employees and her husband helps with digital marketing. Sunia Yoga primarily sells clothing through its website, but Gargaro says she has some wholesale customers, yoga and dance studios throughout the U.S. that carry Sunia Yoga gear.
Gargaro notes that the company is growing but is still small and declined to disclose revenue figures.
A future where more Indians are heard
Gargaro has been practicing yoga for more than 15 years and received her teacher training certificate in Hatha yoga in early 2020. She interns in San Diego with a teacher from southern India who, like Gargaro, speaks Malayalam.
With a few exceptions, Gargaro says, many studios and teachers today are unaware of yoga in its entirety. Yoga is about uniting mind and body, she says, and many miss mindfulness in particular. Instead, American teachers and studios tend to push complicated postures or fast movement sequences. When they sing, teachers often don’t know the meaning of the words they’re saying, Gargaro says.
“I practice hatha yoga, and it’s very calm, and it’s about holding the posture and then realizing that the mind, you’re breathing, connecting the breath to the mind and the movement. If you do flows, I don’t do that.” “I don’t feel like you do that,” Gargaro says.
Gargaro would like to see more effort from yoga teachers to understand and honor yoga’s cultural roots.
“I really feel like the authenticity and essence is gone. And I also feel like the spiritual part of it has disappeared. And that’s one of the main reasons why Indians are not happy in the community because the mindfulness part of it and the spirituality aspect of it,” she says.
She would like to see more diversity in the yoga community in the future. “I would like to see more (people of color) doing yoga,” she says.
Specifically: “I would love to see more Indians given opportunities.”
Gargaro says Indians who teach yoga often struggle and feel like they aren’t given a fair chance, “because a lot of white people go to white teachers,” Gargaro says. “They just want to be heard more.”
Gargaro knows that Western yoga teachers don’t necessarily know what’s missing.
“I don’t want to be critical,” she says. “I know everyone has good intentions.”
“I just hope that people can show more of the Indians and appreciate the Indians,” she says. “Because it comes from their culture. It comes from their roots.”
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