The Cruel World of Yoga
12th May 2022
The bar for doing a yoga practice couldn’t be any lower: all you need is a mat and a body, although even the mat is optional. You don’t have to be flexible. You don’t have to be strong. You don’t have to do a single thing — as we yoga teachers are fond of saying at the start of classes — except be present, and breathe.
As fitness goes, then, yoga has always been among the most accessible forms of exercise. Yet the community surrounding the practice is paradoxically plagued by anxiety about access, led by critics who are less interested in doing yoga than in obsessing about everything that yoga does wrong.