Reflections on the Meaning of Yoga

Introduction

The easiest way for me to begin answering this multi-layered prompt is with a personal account. I have been deeply inspired by Nadia Gilani’s book The Yoga Manifesto (2022) . While I find the title rather pretentious 1 , her story is admirably down to earth, refreshingly told — even the sad parts — and clearly comes from the heart. I don’t agree with everything she says, however, I hope to at least capture her tone and the profound honesty of her challenging yoga teacher auto-ethnography.

While Gilani’s book provides the prompts for my reflections on my own yoga journey, the rest of my discussion is largely informed by selective readings and listening (on podcasts) to scholar practitioners such as Christopher Wallis (2013) , Daniel Simpson (2021) , Mark Singleton (2010) and Paul Bramadat (2025) among others. 2 Writing this essay, I am wearing two hats at the same time, as academic philosopher/critical theorist on one hand, and yoga practitioner and baby yoga teacher on the other hand. I begin with my personal yoga journey, before discussing the alleged ‘distortions’ of yoga in the West and different perspectives on the meaning of yoga.

My Yoga Journey

I came (back) 3 to yoga, as many middle-aged white middle-class women in the UK (or elsewhere in the so-called ‘Global North’) to fix something. Teenager and young adults rarely attend yoga classes, I believe, because they are still in the process of breaking things before they realise that “The Body Keeps the Score” (Kolk 2015) . I had just quit smoking and was trying to find a way to cope with the horrendous withdrawal symptoms — I wasn’t able to do any serious work for months because I couldn’t focus long enough. My only hope was a new addiction, a healthier one. I tried running first, as it is well-known that running releases endorphins, those feel-good chemicals, that keep you at it. However, it was too late for me, my lungs already refused to cooperate. So, yoga it was. For such a small city, Exeter had quite an extensive yoga scene. I started with some gentle hatha yoga but kept stumbling repeatedly and quite unintentionally into ashtanga through workshops and retreats without knowing anything about it or having heard about Pattabhi Jois or Mysore. At this point, yoga was just something that made me feel better, but it wasn’t ever just exercise either. Almost all my yoga classes in Exeter included pranayama and short meditations, they also emphasised mudras, and drishti. My favourites were Duncan Hulin’s 2-hour long holistic yoga classes, which are only surpassed by Sarah Harlow’s 2-hour long classes at yogasara in Bristol, surpassed in terms of the integration of bodymindsoul practices.

In Bristol my first yoga experiences were in a gym; that’s where I found Wale L. Even though I held all the common prejudices of gym yoga classes, some of which are true, I enjoyed Wale’s classes and kept coming back; Wale’s ashtanga classes were fun and filled with laughter and community also mattered. As a sixty-something-year-old black man teaching between 10 and 20 classes a week, Wale breaks all cliches of yoga teachers. I had other teachers at the same time, some of whom may have paid greater attention to the  energetic or subtle body, but there wasn’t any laughter in these classes and community wouldn’t form easily.

At some point, I had to venture out of the gym and go a bit deeper. I became a MoveGB member – a flexible subscription service that connects you to a large number of yoga studios and teachers — and sampled studio classes all over Bristol and online. I am very much aware of my contribution to the commercialisation of yoga by subscribing to one of the UK’s largest “yoga pimp” as Sarah H. has called MoveGB. While it certainly exploits yoga teachers and encourages students to keep moving from studio to studio, rather than staying with a particular teacher, it also helps beginning teachers to get a foot in the door. Without MoveGB, I wouldn’t have been able to afford that many classes and different styles; and I am not sure whether I would have met Sarah at Yogasara. Having tasted almost every yoga style out there, from nonspecific Hatha yoga, to Sivananda, Ashtanga, Jivamukti, a bit Iyengar, and even Kundalini, I used to have huge prejudices against Vinyasa style yoga; what could be further from the ‘meaning of yoga’, I thought naively, than these choreographed dynamic classes with random playlists. One of the most disappointing classes I remember experiencing was when a vinyasa teacher substituted for a led ashtanga class: I was proud to have made it out of bed early that morning, mentally tuning in to the Sanskrit count (ekam (one), dve (two), trini (three) …), ready for a moving meditation, and then a different teacher showed up and the first thing she did was putting on some music; my heart sank and I was thinking of leaving immediately. It’s somewhat ironic that I’m now becoming a vinyasa teacher myself. While my perspective on vinyasa has transformed—thanks to the incredible Yogasara teachers—my relationship with music in a yoga class remains a bit unsettled.

Before that happened though I dipped my toes a little deeper into ashtanga. After having attended a number of weekly abbreviated led classes (for some years), I flirted with Mysore style self-practices several times, but I never lasted very long. My serious night-owl genes just always won the fight when it came to getting up at 6 am for yoga practice or just staying in bed a little longer. My most sustained ashtanga practice happened during summers that I spent outside the UK, in cities such as Munich and Helsinki where Mysore style classes were offered at different times during the day and led classes on the weekend. It was during one of those Ashtanga led classes of the Primary Series on a Saturday morning in Munich that the physical practice came closest to a spiritual experience for me. Dripping sweat and breathing together with another 20 or so souls in the same rhythms for an hour and a half is an incredible meditative experience. The rhythmic breath simultaneous creates community and guides your self exploration. That was yoga for me then. Unfortunately, my broken lungs are no longer up for that kind of sweaty meditation.

It was through Ashtanga that I became aware of tradition, lineage, and the more spiritual aspects of yoga. Oh, wait …. Well, this is not quite true as I also practiced Sivananda yoga and visited an ashram for a few days. But as I am quite allergic to all kinds of uniforms, strict hierarchical orders, and fantasies of purity, I never really considered finding out more about the Sivananda gurus; most stories I heard were anything but encouraging. It is well known that there have been allegations of sexual misconduct in nearly all guru-based yoga lineages, the allegations against Swami Vishnudevananda (a disciple of Sivananda), however, have been particularly severe. The misogynist hierarchical structure and power dynamics within the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centers are sufficient reasons to stay away, even though I loved the practice — always beginning with pranayama, sun salutations, and many rests between strenuous asanas — it would have been the perfect alternative to Ashtanga for my broken lungs.

I have never been to Mysore and am not sure whether I’ll go, but it’s difficult to ignore all the Mysore circus — I don’t mean that in a derogative way — when hanging out with Ashtangis. I was shocked to learn, however, how much it costs in terms of both money and effort (repeatedly showing up in Mysore) to become a Guru-certified Ashtanga teacher and on top of that, you’re doomed to remain poor, if teaching yoga would be your only income, as you are not allowed to conduct any teacher training yourself. Teacher training, I hear, is one way to sustain a yoga business. Even though I think Kino MacGregor is doing quite well without the training. The so-called ‘yoga industry’ surely cannot be reduced to the ‘West’. It may look very differently in India, but contemporary gurus are certainly not immune to capitalism. And why should postcolonial states be stuck in ‘tradition’ anyway? Is only the ‘West’ allowed to evolve?

Yoga in the West: Cliches and Cultural Appropriation

“The old yoga was intended to be about self-discovery and meditation, while the new practice we have today appears to have become a self-serving, fitness focused, trendy, expensive, and in many ways elitist activity” writes Nadia Gilani (2022, 205) . In the West, “yoga is often being reduced to a form of physical exercise and stretching” has become a common refrain (Csala, Springinsfeld, and Köteles 2021) . The fundamental spiritual nature and objectives of yoga is often missing in its Western incarnation, they say. These assertions have become cliché and as with all clichés there’s a kernel of truth to them, but they seem to crumble apart as soon as you look a bit closer. Since Gilani’s intervention, the Instagramification of yoga seems to have shifted from the display of slim-bodied, expensive outfit-wearing, bendy white yoga models to quite predictable complaints and the lamenting of the models about their peers (other yoga teachers) for the lack of authenticity of their yoga practices. Nowadays we frequently read on Instagram that “the true essence of yoga as a spiritual practice of self-inquiry has been distorted or stripped down”. But what is this tradition that has been distorted? Shall we mimic the practices of Indian ascetics who held up an arm for 12 years? Or follow Patanjali’s demand of celibacy? Who gets to decide how literally to take Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras (Hartranft 2003) ? Is the following of prescriptions for moral conduct the only way to inherit spiritual practices? When Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) brought yoga to North America in the late 19 th century, he revitalised the long-forgotten Sutras of Patañjali. Is that enough reason to adopt them as foundation of our practices? Our YTT handbook cautions: “Genuine Sutric practice is not a ‘lifestyle’ choice! One cannot truly fulfil the tenets of Sutra unless one takes the path a monk” (Harlow 2024) . Respectful inheritance does not mean unaltered transmission. Anything that travels across continents, cultures, and times will necessarily be ‘distorted’. Authenticity requires the purity of origins and a continuous history and that is something, most yoga studies scholar agree, cannot be established in the case of yoga, as I discuss below.

Rather than a stripping down of an ancient Indian tradition to an Instagram-ready performance, Bramadat’s (2025) research in North America and my own experiences of yoga in 5 different countries in the West tell different stories that do not quite align with the cliché. As countless anecdotes illustrate, yoga in the West has become a tool for healing and while not always, often also a way of life. For many, yoga creates a ‘self’ that is less woundable by trauma. Healing is not the same as ‘liberation’ or ‘awakening’ (I will get back to these terms) but healing yoga practices also cannot be aligned with the ‘cooperate mindfulness’ industry and its ‘toxic positivity’ for higher productivities, which I would consider a rather problematic Western capitalist appropriation of spiritual practices. Yoga has been and is saving lives, it couldn’t do that if it were practiced as merely fitness exercise.

Having said that, I am not trying to say that there’s no problem with the commercialization of yoga, its middle-class whiteness, expensive leggings, way too low salaries for yoga teachers, and teacher training crash courses. Gilani has a point and I appreciate her intervention in The Yoga Manifesto. However, I strongly believe that as soon as you think you are on the good or right side from which you can judge other people, you are wrong, and as long I can say this, there’s hope for justice. In response to Gilani’s assertion “I can’t be part of the solution while I’m in the problem” (2022, 253) I would like to propose, “you can only be part of the solution while you’re in the problem”. There is no outside! Change must happen from within the belly of the monster.

What is yoga? – on ‘essence’, history, and goals

So, what is yoga? Is there an essence of yoga? Academics are trained to be suspicious of categories, identities, and essences. The idea of an essence suggests that there is something that is unchanging. Has there been anything in the history of yoga that has not been changing? We cannot begin to explore what yoga is without having a look at its history. According to common wisdoms, “Yoga originated in India” and “yoga is 5000 years old”. While the first statement is probably true and largely uncontested, the second statement is not. According to Bramadat, the evidence for a 5000 year old history is rather thin (Simpson&Bramadat, n.d.) . “The earliest evidence of practice dates back 2,500 years” to the Upanishads (Simpson 2021) .

The history of yoga is complex and confusing. Learning about thousands of years of yoga history and philosophy in a few hours on a teacher training course, may give the impression that yoga has ‘evolved’ – evolution implies continuity. There are the Vedas (circa 1500–1200 BCE), the Upanishads (circa 800–200 BCE), the Yoga Sutras of Patañjali (circa 2nd century BCE-200 CE), the Bhagavad Gita (circa 2nd century BCE-2nd century CE), the Tantras (circa 6th-13th centuries CE), the Hatha Yoga Pradipika (15th century) to just name the most often cited text. When highly incompatible texts are presented with approximate dates and put into chronological order, it may give the impression of continuity. On second sight, however, nothing seems to be further from the truth. Instead of evolution or continuity we see incomplete inheritances, partial mergers, cross-fertilizations, absorptions, and revivals. Not only is yoga philosophy full of paradox and contradictions, but its history is also. How else can we explain the partial absorption of Patañjali’s dualist philosophical system that promises transcendence of the body (focused on separation rather than union) into the nondual Śaiva Tantras for which “the body is the most tangible part of mind” (Wallis, n.d.)?

If we believe Mark Singleton (2010), whose book Yoga Body is concerned with the emergence of asana dominated modern yoga, the very term ‘yoga’ has not only a multitude of meanings, but the words ‘yoga’ in ‘classical yoga’ and ‘yoga’ in ‘modern yoga’ are not even comparable. Even though they sound the same, they have quite different meanings and origins. According to Singleton (2010, 15) , “the term yoga as it refers to modern postural practice [is] a homonym , and not a synonym, of the ‘yoga’ associated with the philosophical system of Patañjali, or the ‘yoga’ that forms an integral component of the Śaiva Tantras, or the ‘yoga’ of the Bhagavad Gı̄tā , and so on”. Later on we learn that “Transnational anglophone yoga was born at the peak of an unprecedented enthusiasm for physical culture, and the meaning of yoga itself would not remain unaltered by the encounter” (Singleton 2010, 81) .

A rather common definition, emphasizing the spiritual aspect of yoga, is giving by Anodea Judith (2011, 4) : “Yoga (which means ‘yoke’) is a discipline designed to yoke together the individual with the divine”. However, it also means yoking together horses and chariots in a preparation for war, as it appeared in the early Vedas. In that context, yoga had nothing to do with meditative practices. According to Christopher Wallis, the Śramaṇas movement (600 – 900) seems to have birthed ‘yoga’ as a psychophysical practice using breath exercises, meditation, holding still for long periods, and dietary restrictions (Wallis, n.d.). Daniel Simpson (2021) , the author of The Truth of Yoga makes it clear “there has never been any such thing as ‘One True Yoga’”. Depending on context yoga has a dozen different meanings. For some, yoga is about shifting perception, for others, the reducing of suffering, for many it is both.

Yoga, but not really yoga? With or without a goal?

Our teacher training handbook (Harlow 2024) reprints Christopher Wallis’s View from his book Tantra Illuminated (2013) . The View is a vision statement and metaphysical overview, it acts as map and motivator for the yogic practitioner on the tantric path. There’s much in this statement that I appreciate, however, as an academic philosopher myself, I don’t adopt ‘views’ undeconstructed from others. 4 A thorough (or even superficial) engagement with Wallis’s View 5 is far beyond the scope of this essay. A perhaps more relevant question for this essay that bring us back to the meaning of yoga would be: Does a yoga practice need to be aligned with a view or a goal?

I think this a topic on which opinions diverge the greatest in my modest readings of yoga philosophy commentaries. According to Mallinson and Singleton (2017) , “Some scholars have attempted to draw a distinction between the early yoga of the non-Vedic Śramaṇas and the this-worldly, power-oriented tapas of the Vedic sages, asserting that even though the latter may be called yoga, it is not really yoga, because it is not concerned with liberation (mokṣa)”. Wallis is quite adamant in his affirmation that the purpose of yoga is awakening and liberation. Awakening (samadhi) is often understood as a step toward self- liberation (moksha), which entails escaping the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth (samsara) to merge with universal consciousness. In contrast, in traditional Hatha yoga, it doesn’t really matter what your view is; practices are effective regardless of the view one holds. Hatha yoga appears to be a simplified practice compared to tantric practices (Adam Keen,n.d.) .

The question about the goal of yoga could also be read as concerning the difference between yoga as spiritual practice or religion. However, even Wallis maintains that yoga is not a religion but overlaps with many different religions such as with Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, even Islam. For him, yoga is a form of spiritual practice supported by a system of psychophysical practices that utilises the mindbody connection.

Are we any further on the questions whether there’s an essence of yoga? For Simpson, the function of yoga is unchanging while the rest is shapeshifting (Keen, n.d.) . But what is yoga’s function? It may depend on how we define ‘healing’.

How to integrate the spiritual aspect of yoga into my teaching

I am aware that ‘sara’ of Yogasara means ‘essence’. However, I would rather describe the approach that I have been exposed to and came to appreciate at Yogasara as holistic yoga or integrated yoga, in which a multitude of yogic practices are offered, and they are offered in such a way that the student can chose which aspects to take on board and which don’t resonate with their particular experiences or belief backgrounds. This is an approach that I am grateful for, I inherit and would like to spread through my own teachings.

From my limited experience of observing Yogasara teachers, Leoni’s class came closest to an adaptation of the Yogasara method for beginners. I really appreciated the effort Leoni made to create connections between the participants — even on zoom (!!) — and to encourage self-exploration through a multitude of options. They also beautifully illustrated how breath and sound connect inner and outer states.

I am still not entirely sure what kind of yoga teacher I’m going to be; I hope that the teaching practice will teach me; but I know that my classes will be playful like Hazel’s, may have themes like Bethan’s classes, and aspire to generate connections like Sarah’s and Leoni’s. I also hope that in the future I figure out how to meaningfully integrate more yoga philosophy texts into relatively short classes.

Conclusion

Most people starting out with yoga in the West don’t consider it a spiritual practice; they enter the house of yoga through a room labelled ‘asana’. Rather than being the ‘third limb’ as it is in Patanjali’s ‘Ashtanga Yoga System’, asana is for most practitioners the gateway into yoga. However, everyone I know or have met, who continued practicing yoga, received way more from yoga than an exercise routine could possibly offer. Personally, yoga is saving my life, in the most literal sense. And it has done that for many others whom I have met or whose stories I have heard, people who were suffering form physical injuries, addiction, abuse, and all kinds of other traumas. From this perspective it doesn’t seem to matter whether yoga is a religion with a View or merely a spiritual practice. You don’t have to believe in rebirth or its possible cessation for yoga to be healing.

References

Adam Keen. n.d. ‘Christopher Wallis – Non-Dual Classical Tantra’. Accessed 19 March 2025. https://www.keenonyoga.com/podcast/christopher-wallis/.

Bramadat, Paul. 2025. Yogalands: In Search of Practice on the Mat and in the World. McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Csala, Barbara, Constanze Maria Springinsfeld, and Ferenc Köteles. 2021. ‘The Relationship Between Yoga and Spirituality: A Systematic Review of Empirical Research’. Frontiers in Psychology 12 (August):695939.

Gilani, Nadia. 2022. The Yoga Manifesto: How Yoga Helped Me and Why it Needs to Save Itself.

Haraway, Donna J. 1985. ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs – Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’. Socialist Review, 65–107. ://A1985ACY6900009.

Harlow, Sarah. 2024. Yogasara 250 Hour Teacher Training Handbook.

Hartranft, Chip. 2003. The Yoga-Sutra of Patanjali: A New Translation with Commentary.

Judith, Anodea. 2011. Eastern Body, Western Mind: Psychology and the Chakra System As a Path to the Self. Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed.

Keen, Adam. n.d. ‘#117 Daniel Simpson – The Roots of Modern Yoga – Keen on Yoga’. Accessed 5 April 2025. https://www.keenonyoga.com/podcast/daniel-simpson-roots-of-modern-yoga/.

Kolk, M. D. Bessel van der. 2015. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Reprint edition. New York, NY: Penguin Books.

Mallinson, James, and Mark Singleton. 2017. Roots of Yoga. Penguin UK.

Simpson, Daniel. 2021. The Truth of Yoga: A Comprehensive Guide to Yoga’s History, Texts, Philosophy, and Practices. North Point Press. ———. n.d. ‘Yoga for Adults – Paul Bramadat’. Accessed 24 March 2025. https://ancientfutures.substack.com/p/paul-bramadat.

Singleton, Mark. 2010. Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice. Oxford University Press.
Wallis, Christopher D. 2013. Tantra Illuminated: The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a Timeless Tradition. Mattamayura Press. ———. n.d.

‘What Is Tantra, Really? Setting the Record Straight’. Tantra Illuminated. Accessed 19 March 2025. https://open.spotify.com/episode/3gaVwnCZn9tOspcNHXGwZE.