The Sunday Times - UK (2022-05-29)

Expensive yoga mats, cultlike classes and ‘spiritual’ memes ...

the world of western yoga has been gentrified, says the author

of a new book – and it’s time we did something about it

Nadia Gilani describes the moment she started to

question yoga. It was 2013 and she was in Goa:

“A yoga teacher took a phone call halfway through a

class and just wandered off.” A few days later she was

“sitting in a café — vegan, obviously — when students

from one of the teacher-training schools filed in. There

was not a brown person among them. They sat there

talking loudly, sounding superior and entitled. It made

me cringe.”

Something snapped. The former journalist, now a

writer and ashtanga yoga teacher, started seeing more

and more that bothered her about the way the West

had taken the ancient spiritual discipline she loved

and turned it into a self-serving, narcissistic and vapid

commercial enterprise. “Yoga has become a culturally

appropriated, body-obsessed, self-care biz,” she says.

Yoga tourism is just one of the targets of her new

book, The Yoga Manifesto, which is part memoir, part

takedown of western yoga. Gilani, 41, did not go

public with her discontent until International

Women’s Day 2019, when, she says, she found her

voice. The catalyst was hearing about “a hugely

popular, London-based teacher” whom she describes

as a “narcissistic , self-congratulatory ... type” and his

mistreatment of a student. The student described the

way the yogi had singled her out for ridicule when she

had chosen not to put her hand on her glutes, the

buttock muscles, as ordered. Gilani says: “He went

up, grabbed her hand, slapped it on her arse and

leaving his hand resting on top said something like,

‘This girl’s so uptight she can’t even put her hand on

her bum.’ Everyone else in the class laughed.”

Gilani did not. “It sounded like assault to me.”

Which is what she also added in an Instagram post.

“The post got a really big reaction and lots of yoga

teachers privately messaged me saying they knew

exactly who it was and that they too had felt uncom-

fortable about his behaviour.”

Instead of feeling vindicated, however, Gilani said

her overwhelming feeling was disappointment. “It took

me, at the bottom of the yoga food chain, to speak up.

Why wasn’t anyone else?” The

outcome was equally disappointing.

“The managers at the fashionable

studio where he teaches rang me up

and gave me a talking-to.”

The allegations against the big

yoga names are legion, including

Bikram Choudhury (sexual harass-

ment, homophobia and intimi-

dating behaviour), BKS Iyengar

(physical abuse — he would

slap and kick students into posi-

tion), kundalini yoga’s Yogi Bhajan

(sexual abuse), ashtanga’s K Pattabhi Jois (inappro-

priate touching) and John Friend, creator of Anusara

yoga (affairs with students, drug use and financial

mismanagement).

I first did ashtanga in a municipal gym way back in

the early Nineties, moving on to lessons in an old

school that had been decorated in an odd mix of paint

colours — the floor was uneven and the floorboards

squeaked. After class on Friday night lots of people

stayed back for Yogi Tea and homemade biscuits. The

classes were often taken in tealight-illuminated gloom,

but if you squinted hard the students included Jade

Jagger, numerous fashion sorts and once, if I remember

the excitement, Madonna.

The scene has changed so much since then. Last

summer a friend who grew up on a Mediterranean

island was showing me her favourite swimming spot

in an intense sapphire-blue bay. “Oh,” she said, as we

arrived at the top of the uneven steps carved into the

rock. Below us, scattered about on the flat outcrops

in the steep cliff face, were a number of people prac-

tising yoga. I say practising — actually they were

posing for photographs. It transpired that they were

on a yoga retreat and their teacher was showing

them the best spot for the mandatory “Me, doing

yoga” Instagram posts.

Rosie Hall is the founder of the Rogue Room —

what she calls a “rebellious wellness project” that

aims to “welcome all kinds of people” — which holds

classes at Fabric nightclub in London. She agrees that

yoga has become a narcissistic luxury activity that

gets “weird” at the teacher-training stage. “These big

teachers that are put on pedestals are recruiting disci-

ples and students that look like them, so you have this

kind of self-perpetuating narcissism,” she says.

“People feel excluded, people feel their face doesn’t fit

— often the very people who would benefit the most

from yoga find it hardest to access.”

Gilani pines for simpler, less-pricey times. When

she started practising in 1996, she recalls: “You put

your fiver in the petty cash tin and practised in your

trackie bottoms. I felt more at

home in those places.”

“How did an ancient practice ever

come to this?” she asks. “I have

friends who practise kung fu, t’ai

chi, qigong, karate — these eastern-

lineage martial arts systems haven’t

been commercialised like yoga. You

go to classes and it’ll be a few quid

for a two-hour intense session,

everyone’s working hard and just

wearing what they’re wearing. Why

has yoga been co-opted into such

‘They were on

a yoga retreat,

and their teacher

was showing

them the best

spot for their

Instagram posts’

Words Kate Spicer

The Sunday Times Style • 31