Part 1 of a series on rebuilding a more honest relationship with this practice, in a yoga world shaped by self-orientalism, appropriation, erasure and abuse.
My aspiration as a yoga teacher is simple. I want to share a practice that is honest about where it comes from, awake to the times we live in, and gives the people learning it real agency. I want it to ask those of us who teach to hold a self-reflective ethic, to be clear and transparent about why we teach what we teach, and to make the rooms we practice in spaces of contained care for everyone who walks into them. This piece is part of an ongoing series, where I am working through what I have lived, taught, and learned as a yoga teacher trained in India. None of it is finished thinking. It is me, sitting with the questions I do not yet have full answers to, and writing my way toward them, one piece at a time.
There is a particular kind of person who sells yoga, and a particular kind of person who buys it, especially inside the Western, white wellness market, and that relationship did not emerge in a vacuum. It carries a long history of self-orientalism, of Indian teachers shaping their own tradition into the form the West was ready to receive, and in places, of outright abuse. People are fed up with the disorientation of the present moment, and the promise of something ancient, pure, and pre-modern is part of what gets sold to soothe that. That need for purity immediately disconnects the practice, and the people practicing it, from the reality of where the tradition actually came from, and from the reality of the present they are trying to escape.
The truth is that every cultural export from India is a revival. This land has been a site of cultural convergence for thousands of years, shaped by wave after wave of migration, conquest, trade, and religious exchange, long before the European encounter and continuing after it. I am not interested in placing a value judgment on that history, calling it simply good or simply bad. I am interested in its complexity, a complexity that a modern European lens, built on cleaner categories of native and foreign, pure and corrupted, Vedic and non-Vedic, ancient and modern, tends to flatten rather than hold. With the birth of India as a modern nation-state in 1947 came the need for a cohesive cultural identity, and among other things, the export of Yoga became one of its projects. That doesn’t mean the practices or the knowledge system are fake. It means everything has been revived and already reinterpreted through the lens of the modern world.
As an example, there are thousands of ancient texts from this land. Why are the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Sutras the ones that became globally popular? No one in India was reading them or practicing them the way we do today. The Yoga Sutras especially were all but forgotten for hundreds of years, even dismissed when the West first encountered them, and only rose to their current status as yoga’s founding scripture within the last few decades, largely on the back of Vivekananda and the Theosophical Society in the late nineteenth century. Before that, it was the Gita, the Yoga Vasistha, and the older hatha and tantric traditions that actually shaped how yoga lived in India, not Patanjali.
The Gita’s story runs along the same lines. It was an esoteric text, sitting inside circles of philosophers and theologians, centuries of commentary from minds like Shankara, Ramanuja, and Abhinavagupta, but never the daily, central scripture of a civilization the way it gets imagined today. It only became that once it was read back to India through Western eyes, and Indian nationalists like Gandhi, Tilak, and Aurobindo picked it up and built it into a defining text. Some scholars rightly call it out as a category error to even name the Gita Hinduism’s “Bible,” since Hinduism never held it the way Christianity holds its scripture. But once the world is organized around the idea of one holy book, a tradition either produces something that looks like one, or it doesn’t get seen at all.
I also don’t think it’s enough to say that some texts and lineages got more attention than others. The deeper truth is that what gets called “Yoga,” the version anyone outside India learns first, was shaped by who held the power to write, to be heard, and to be preserved. Most of the influential teachers credited with building the yoga the world practices today, Krishnamacharya, Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois, were Brahmins, working under royal patronage, part of a tradition where access to scripture and spiritual authority was tightly held by a small caste elite. That same elite shaped which commentaries on the Gita survived and which interpretation of yoga’s purpose got carried forward. There were, and still are, other paths. The Bhakti movement existed precisely because access to the divine had been gatekept by Brahmin ritual, and bhakti offered marginalized people, especially women, a direct relationship with God that needed no Sanskrit and no intermediary. Some historians argue yoga itself may have started as an Indigenous practice before it was absorbed and redefined by Vedic and caste-dominant groups, with real contributions from Adivasi and other communities that the dominant narrative simply doesn’t carry forward. None of this is fully recoverable. Some of it was never written down. Some of what was written hasn’t survived, or hasn’t been found, or sits untranslated and undecoded. Some of it was deliberately Sanskritized out of its original form to be made acceptable to power. When yoga gets exported today as a single, ancient, unified system, what’s actually being exported is one branch of a much wider, much messier tree, and the people teaching and learning it abroad deserve to know that.
The physical practice itself tells the same story. The flowing, athletic asana sequences that most people today think of as ancient yoga, the kind taught in a typical vinyasa or Ashtanga class, trace back to a specific moment in the 1930s, developed under royal patronage in Mysore, shaped not only by older Indian traditions of exercise but by the European gymnastics and physical culture movements circulating through colonial India at the time. What gets sold today as a 5,000-year-old unbroken practice is, in its actual form, barely a century old.
None of this is unique to yoga, or to India. This is what happens to the cultural exports of any colonized people. They pass through the lens of the colonizer, get reshaped to be legible and palatable on someone else’s terms, and the people of that culture often become active participants in that reshaping themselves, because self-orientalism, performing the version of yourself that the world is ready to receive, is often the price of being seen at all. What gets exported is rarely the thing itself. It is the thing translated into a language of acceptance, and that translation always costs something.
There’s a deeper claim hiding inside that need for purity and structure, one worth naming directly. The kind of knowledge that gets treated as legitimate, fixed, classifiable, written down, teachable in a linear sequence, certifiable by an external body, has its own history, and that history is not neutral. It is the kind of knowledge a colonial and patriarchal world has always trusted, because it can be standardized, owned, and controlled. Knowledge that lives in the body, that moves in cycles rather than straight lines, that gets passed down through relationship and direct transmission rather than through a manual, has historically been treated as lesser, as folk practice, as the soft and unprovable cousin of “real” knowledge. This isn’t unique to yoga. It’s the same logic that decided which medicine counts as science and which gets dismissed as superstition, the same logic that decided whose oral histories count as history and whose don’t. When yoga had to compete on the world stage, it had to take the second kind of knowing and dress it up as the first kind, structured, sequenced, certifiable, in order to be taken seriously at all.
Nowhere is this more literal than in the body itself. A male body runs on a roughly 24-hour cycle. A female body runs on a menstrual cycle. The Yoga that got codified, certified, and exported follows the male body’s logic, like the sun, the same every day, predictable, linear, disciplined. A female body does not show up that way. Her sadhana is different each day, not simply a matter of resting on the day she bleeds. Her rhythm moves the way the moon moves in relation to the earth, in phases, not in a straight line. A system built to reward linearity has no real place for that. It reads her cyclical nature not as a different rhythm to be honored, but as inconsistency, as a deviation from discipline, something to be pushed through rather than listened to.
That same logic is what makes yoga spaces fertile ground for harm. When a body that doesn’t move in straight lines is already treated as a problem to be corrected, it becomes easier to override what that body is actually saying, easier to read hesitation as resistance to growth, discomfort as ego, a “no” as something to be worked through rather than respected. Every student in these spaces is vulnerable to this, the labor extracted under the banner of seva, the emotional and psychological manipulation dressed up as spiritual breakthrough, the physical pushing past a body’s real limits in the name of discipline. But there is an added layer for women specifically, because the same dynamic that reads her body as deviant also makes her violation easier to explain away. Sexual abuse is the sharpest, most visible form this takes, but it does not stand alone. It sits inside a much wider pattern of bodies being overridden in the name of a system that was never built to listen to all of them in the first place.
The instinct, once you see this clearly, is to reach for regulation, licensure, oversight, the kind of accountability structures that govern doctors or therapists. I understand the appeal, and I don’t think it’s nothing. But I don’t think it’s the real answer either, because regulation asks yoga to become more fixed, more standardized, more certifiable, exactly the demand this whole pattern grew out of in the first place. It solves a problem created by rigid, linear, male-coded systems by adding another rigid, linear, male-coded system on top of it. That isn’t healing the wound. It’s another version of the same wound, wearing a safer-looking coat.