I grew up in the birthplace of yoga, India, but for most of my life, yoga wasn’t part of it. I knew it involved postures, and I had heard of pranayama, but if you had asked me what yoga really was, I probably wouldn’t have had a clear answer. I thought people who leave material life could be called yogis.
Then I left India.
And strangely, it was only after leaving that I noticed just how popular yoga was around the world. Yoga studios were everywhere. I saw people travelling to India to learn yoga. I met people who were fascinated by Indian philosophy and spirituality. People were practising something that had always been in the background of my own culture. So, I started looking at it differently.
I wanted to learn it too
Life took me back to India, and by then I wanted to understand yoga more deeply, but I couldn’t quite make it happen at that time due to various reasons.
Then I moved to the UK, and eventually I started studying yoga properly and, little by little, my understanding of it began to change.
I had thought of yoga as something you do. You get on a mat, you practise postures and maybe sometimes you meditate but the more I learnt, the more I realised that yoga is a way of living.
It shows up in how we respond when someone annoys us.
In the way we speak to ourselves.
In choosing to pause before reacting.
In whether we notice that we are rushing through our day.
In how we deal with change.
In fact, perhaps every moment can become an opportunity to practise yoga, although it will not look like yoga from outside.
Who is a ‘Yogi’?
There is another thing I have realised about myself along the way. I still feel slightly uncomfortable when people use the word ‘yogi’ lightly. Growing up in India, my image of yogi was not simply someone who taught yoga or attended yoga classes. Yogi was a revered word, and it suggested someone who had embodied its teachings and renounced the world.
So I find it difficult to casually apply that word to myself. Although I teach, study and practise yoga. But yogi? No, I still wince a little. Maybe that says more about my cultural understanding of the word than anything else.
Recently, I attended a workshop with Donna Noble, a British yoga teacher, author and advocate for diversity and inclusion in yoga, where she made a point that stayed with me: representation matters.
It got me thinking about the image of yoga I had grown up with. When I imagined a yogi, the pictures that came to mind were mostly male. Men meditating, men renouncing worldly life, men portrayed as deeply spiritual figures. But if you walk into any yoga class today, the picture can look quite different. Women are everywhere, practising, teaching, creating communities and shaping what yoga looks like in everyday life.
During the workshop, some participants shared what they had grown up thinking yoga was. For some, it was associated with celebrities performing impossible, pretzel-like postures. Others shared how their families had portrayed yoga as something almost cult-like or deeply religious.
It struck me how different these images were, and yet how they could all make yoga seem quite distant from everyday life. Whether it is a yogi stepping away from the material world, a woman twisting into an elaborate posture or a spiritual group that feels difficult to relate to, these images can create the impression that yoga is meant for someone else.
But is that really what yoga is about?
Who do ‘WE’ think yoga is for?
Representation matters because what we see influences what we believe is possible for us.
If my image of a yogi is someone sitting cross-legged in a cave, far removed from ordinary life, it’s easy to think, This isn’t for me.
I definitely carried some version of that idea. I was living an ordinary life, became a mother, had a family and all the responsibilities that came with it. It took me years, and a move away from India, to realise that yoga didn’t require me to step away from any of those roles. Yoga doesn’t teach escapism. It teaches us how to live life differently.
I am still learning
The more I learn about yoga, the more I realise how much I don’t know, and that’s what I like about it.
My understanding has evolved from simply knowing yoga existed in India to discovering its popularity elsewhere, studying it and eventually experiencing it beyond the mat.
I still don’t know if I will ever feel comfortable calling myself a yogi. For now, I’m happy to keep learning, practising and discovering what yoga means to me.
And maybe that is enough.
Because the yoga I have found, through leaving, returning, studying, stumbling, feels more genuinely mine than anything I might have inherited without question.