Is yoga a personal and private practice, or is it implicitly political?
As a yoga teacher and a student of political science, this is a question I’ve been keen to explore for a while. The present historical moment seems to push us into new critical questions about the private, the public and how we navigate the balance.
We often speak about yoga as a journey inward: a chance to listen to our bodies, understand our minds, and develop a more compassionate relationship with ourselves. There is something deeply valuable in having that space, especially when so much of life demands our attention.
But I keep coming back to what happens afterwards. What do we carry out of the room? How does the way we learn to treat ourselves affect the way we treat other people? And when we talk about compassion, whose needs are we willing to make room for?
To explore whether yoga is political, I think we first need to consider what we mean by politics. Parties, elections, and governments are part of it. So are the everyday questions of living together: whose voices are heard, whose needs are recognised, who has access to support, and how we share responsibility for one another.
Through that lens, a personal practice can have meaning far beyond the individual.
We arrive as individuals
We arrive on our mats carrying different bodies, different histories, and different kinds of days.
One person may feel strong and well rested. Another may be managing pain, grief, exhaustion, or a difficult relationship with their body. Someone may have been looking forward to class all week. Someone else may have used most of their available energy just getting through the door.
We rarely know the full story of the person beside us.
Even within our own bodies, the experience changes. A movement that felt comfortable last week might feel unfamiliar today. Balance disappears for no obvious reason. We discover that our concentration has gone somewhere else entirely, probably taking our patience with it.
Practising gives us opportunities to notice these changes and decide - and practice - how to respond. We can force, criticise, or compare. We can also become curious. We can adjust an expectation, use a prop, take a break, or ask for help.
Those choices are personal. In a shared space, they can also influence what others feel permitted to do.
When we allow ourselves to rest, someone else may feel more comfortable taking the pause they need. When we wobble and laugh in a balance pose, we make it easier for another person to try. When we use a modification without embarrassment, we help make adaptation an ordinary part of the practice.
We contribute to the atmosphere of a room, even when we are focused on our own mat.
The ethical practice begins before the pose
In Patañjali’s eight-limbed framework, the yamas and niyamas precede asana, or posture. These ethical restraints and observances place our conduct within the practice of yoga.
Yoga Sūtra 2.30 names five yamas: ahimsa, non-harming; satya, truthfulness; asteya, non-stealing; brahmacharya, traditionally associated with celibacy or sexual restraint; and aparigraha, non-grasping or freedom from possessiveness. Their meanings deserve more care than a motivational slogan can offer. Together, they ask us to consider how our desires and actions affect both ourselves and other beings. And this framework recognizes that peace is unattainable when sought in a vacuum, when it is an individual endeavor. How are we supposed to feel peace when our actions in the public sphere cause anguish, discomfort and doubt? By laying down a healthy framework of ethical behavior, we are clearing the path to a more peaceful inner life.
Personally, I find that ahimsa offers a particularly useful starting point. In a physical practice, it might mean recognising when effort becomes harmful, or allowing ourselves to rest. Applied to our relationships, it asks us to notice the harm (intentional but more often accidental) we may cause through our words, assumptions, or expectations. Applied to wider communities, it asks us to consider the harm done to populations at large and to work towards the ending of such harm.
Satya adds another responsibility: a willingness to be honest. That includes being honest about the limits of our understanding and the distance between our intentions and our actions, and their effects. It means being able to confront injustice wherever it may present rather than cling to abstract and lofty divisions along party lines.
These are contemporary applications of the teachings, rather than claims that Patañjali prescribed a particular modern politics. Partisan politics, at least in theory, should be based on a shared understanding and adherence of foundational ethical behaviors, but recent years have perhaps questioned such assumptions. That being said, the ethical tenets that are the foundations of our yoga practice help explain why I struggle to separate yoga entirely from questions of how we live together.
Yoga has never developed outside society
The history of modern yoga also complicates the idea of an entirely private practice.
In Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice, historian Mark Singleton examines how modern postural yoga developed through exchanges between Indian traditions and international physical culture, including gymnastics and bodybuilding. Colonialism and Indian nationalism formed part of that setting.
During the early twentieth century, some nationalist movements presented yoga and physical training as means of strengthening Indian bodies and collective identity under colonial rule. Individual discipline could therefore serve a wider political ambition.
This history does not establish that yoga belongs to one political position. It rather shows why we should examine the purposes to which it is put. A shared practice can support belonging, but it can also draw boundaries around who belongs.
Furthermore, the way we care for an individual body can express something about the kind of community we want to build—one in which difference is accommodated, dignity is respected, and support is something we are allowed both to offer and receive.
Permission to be human
In my years on the mat, one of the most valuable things the practice has offered me is space and permission to be human.
That means space to struggle, to misunderstand something, to feel frustrated, and to begin again. It means accepting that our attention will wander and that we will sometimes want to be better at something than we currently are. It means recognising that having limits does not make us less worthy of being there.
When we give ourselves that permission, we can become better able to see and honour the same humanity in others.
If I know how much effort it can take to do something that looks simple from the outside, I have a reason to be more careful with my assumptions. If I have experienced the relief of being offered an alternative without judgment, I have something useful to remember when someone else needs an accommodation and patience.
Self-compassion can become a starting point for a wider understanding: other people are also living complicated lives inside bodies and minds that I cannot fully know or understand.
A community is shaped by what it makes room for
A welcoming community takes more than good intentions. It is shaped by practical choices. And in my work as a yoga teacher and movement educator, I have found that there is more to leading a class, than simply cueing shapes and be encouraging.
Who can afford to attend my classes? Can someone participate with a chair? Is rest treated as a normal option? Does the language suggest that some bodies belong more naturally than others? Can a student decline an adjustment without feeling awkward or ungrateful?
As a teacher, I think these questions deserve ongoing attention.
If every option is presented as a lesser version of the “real” pose, we communicate something about whose experience matters. If we celebrate only the most physically demanding movements, we communicate something about what earns recognition. If we say everyone is welcome but repeatedly overlook the same needs, the welcome has limits.
We won’t anticipate everything. We will sometimes need to listen, reconsider, and change how we do things. Making a space more accessible is an ongoing responsibility.
This is one place where the political dimension becomes tangible for me. Our ideas about dignity, access, autonomy, and belonging become visible in how we organise a shared space. But it can’t end here. Because if dignity, access, autonomy and respect matter in the yoga studio, the absolutely matter in the public sphere. We cannot embrace these principles on the mat but fail to espouse them in our public life, in the way we treat our neighbors, in the way we support education, healthcare and immigration.
Caring for ourselves can extend into service
I think of yoga as an opportunity for service: caring for our bodies, tending to our minds, and extending that care to our community at large.
There are days when caring for ourselves will take most of what we have. Rest, boundaries, and receiving help all belong within this understanding of service. A community that depends on everyone continually giving more than they can afford will eventually leave people depleted.
Mutual support allows us to contribute and to receive.
At other times, our practice may help us recognise that we have something available to offer: attention, encouragement, time, practical assistance, or a willingness to stand beside someone.
That care can take very ordinary forms. We listen without rushing to solve. We make an adjustment so someone can participate. We notice who is being left out. We ask what would help.
Over time, these choices can form a network of compassion and support. Its strength comes partly from knowing that our roles will change. Today I may have something to offer. Tomorrow I may need someone to make room for me.
Becoming clear about our values
Time spent paying attention can also help us become clearer about our values.
What matters to me when I am no longer trying to impress anyone? How do I respond when I feel uncomfortable? What am I prepared to change so that another person can participate? Where do my actions fall short of what I say I believe?
These questions can be uncomfortable because clarity and truth (satya) brings responsibility with it.
If compassion matters to us, we can ask how it shapes our response to people whose experiences are different from our own. If autonomy matters, we can consider whether we respect another person’s right to say no. If inclusion matters, we can look at the barriers, both physical and institutional, in the spaces we help create.
Becoming clearer about our values can empower us in our public lives as much as in our private ones. It can help us decide what we stand for, when to speak, and how to participate in our communities with greater intention.
We may find that something we once accepted deserves to be questioned. We may realize that being agreeable and acting compassionately do not always lead us to the same response. Sometimes care asks us to have a difficult conversation or challenge a decision that excludes someone.
The practice does not make those choices for us. We remain responsible for making them.
The connection is a possibility we have to practise
I don’t believe practising yoga automatically makes us compassionate, or that it leads everyone to the same political conclusions.
We can become more physically capable without becoming more considerate. We can speak warmly about community while overlooking the people who find our spaces difficult to enter. We can value the sense of peace we experience in class and still have work to do in how we respond to others.
That is a reason to keep examining the relationship between our practice and our actions.
What are we learning? Where is it showing up? What feedback are we willing to hear? What happens when living by our values becomes inconvenient?
These questions give the practice somewhere to go.
What we carry beyond the mat
In essence, yes - yoga is deeply personal. But the practice on the mat can create a pathway to our inner development and possibilities extend into our shared public life.
We begin with the body and mind we have today. We learn something about our strengths, our limitations, our habits, and our capacity to respond differently. We give ourselves room to be human and, with practice, become more willing to offer that room to others.
From there, compassion can take a practical form: in the welcome we extend, the support we offer, the boundaries we respect, and the values we are prepared to act on.
We don’t have to arrive feeling peaceful or have everything worked out. We can begin exactly as we are, while remaining responsible for how we grow.
We take our own steps, but we help create the ground on which others can take theirs.