Yoga has become a hot cultish mess

Ommm… are you in the lotus position? Then I’ll begin.

The studio was literally Hades, four industrial heaters blasting in each corner. We were crouching on our knees, sweat dripping, foreheads to the floor. It was a weekday morning. Then our instructor said the six words I can never unhear.

‘Flower your anus to the sky,’ he ordered all the middle-aged WFH men in shorts and yummy mummies in crop tops in this crunchy-granola bit of north-west London. He jutted his rock-hard buns heavenwards as an exemplar of the uttana shishosana pose or, as I prefer to call it, ‘kneeling’.

Even though I’d pre-paid for a package of yoga lessons to save money, I struck my antimicrobial, biodegradable mat and cried: ‘No more!’ This was the last time I would park to pay and be told to be ‘thankful for my instrument’. Everyone talks in yoga-speak as if this side-plank is your true vocation, and everything else you do a trivial side hustle.

So this is my question: since when did the lines blur and yoga become a hot cultish mess of sex and spirituality rather than a free and easy way to get a flatter tummy, which is frankly all I ever wanted from ‘my practice’?

The intersection between yoga and abuse, with many so-called gurus masquerading as predators, is long established. If you want evidence, google Rachel Brathen, aka Yoga Girl, who has been harvesting stories from hundreds of victims of self-styled ‘gurus’. There’s also this summer’s news that several police forces are investigating multiple cases of abuse reported to the Yoga Teachers Union. ‘Cases range from sexual assault during assists going through to senior teachers having serial coercive relationships with people they are responsible for teaching, grooming and all the way up to rape,’ said Clair Yates of the YTU last month.

My friend Daisy Waugh, the comic novelist, has just qualified as a yoga teacher so I went straight to her when this came out, but she was having none of it. ‘This is just utter rubbish,’ she spluttered. ‘There are sex pests in every profession. Take journalism. Life is full of danger – the worst thing that can happen in a yoga class is you might put your back out.’ Then she lectured me: ‘Yoga’s not aerobics – it’s a way of seeing the world.’

As Daisy had clearly drunk deep of the Kool-Aid in her Mexican ayurvedic retreat or whatever, my next port of call was to uber-cool Geoff Dyer, author of Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It and many other genre-defying titles.

I told him what my yoga instructor had said. ‘I’m always happy to talk about women’s bottoms,’ Geoff told me cheerfully, which was quite the start. I got him back on topic and he went on to explain he wrote his book after he’d been to this ‘amazing place in Thailand’ where ‘everyone did yoga all day and partied all night’, but it didn’t really do what it said on the tin. ‘I just dropped the yoga,’ he said, preferring to sit in beachside cafés while bendy young women came in for smoothies, glowing after their practice.

‘There was a beautiful energy,’ Geoff added. ‘There was nothing bad about it. The only problem with the way yoga has taken over the world is that in Venice Beach, where I live, everyone only wears tight athleisurewear. Leggings should be banned.’

I’ve switched to yoga online. At home there’s no risk of ‘stretch rape’ (the term for when an instructor adjusts your pose so forcefully it feels like a violation) or worse, being downwind of the intense pulse-eating beardie with hairy toes.

But even the YouTube yogis seem intent on making me a more grateful and centred person during my quick morning wake-up fix. Perhaps it’s because so many of them are sunny Canadians in designer Lycra. If I only knew how to ‘peg my belly’ and ‘melt my heart through’, I’d be grateful too. Until then, namaste – and may your mat always be your safe space.