It’s challenging to have a conversation around the lack of diversity in the yoga community.
Yoga can be a powerful tool on your journey to empowerment, healing, and awareness. But for a practice that has unity and oneness at its core, the walls of accessibility remain to be as complicated as ever.
It’s uncomfortable, because a practice like yoga that promotes health, wellness, and spirituality, has become another expression of society’s racial prejudices.
And this is where I stand:
Yoga is not reserved for the elite demographic, and it is not a luxury status. It is a 5,000-year-old practice that is here to serve everyone.
Perceptions of exclusivity in yoga are continuously being rejected, and it should be everyone’s mission to continue this trajectory.
Despite the efforts of some yoga schools, the barriers people face entering yoga is proliferating. Yoga is becoming more and more mainstream while still favoring the elite-few. Barriers like income, language, culture, race, lack of education, health challenges, negative body image, and feeling like an outsider all contribute to the lack of diversity in our community.
The blatant commodification of yoga has seen entire groups of people pushed out. And it’s our social, religious, and racial divisions that underlie the disparities and lack of diversity in yoga.
But it shouldn’t have to.