Fortunately for Javier, he doesn’t exist. He’s a figment, a spectre, a ghost in the machine of the diversity-industrial complex — and a character in the anti-harassment and discrimination training that I had to complete last month. This training, accessed remotely via an online portal, is an annual requirement of my part-time job as a yoga instructor. Designed by a third-party contractor, it covers all manner of workplace sins: sexual harassment, discrimination, plus various isms and phobias.

It also takes two hours — as in, 120 minutes — as required by state law. In 2019, Connecticut governor Ned Lamont put his signature on two pieces of legislation known, collectively, as the Time’s Up Act. Touted as a “proactive approach” to combating workplace sexual harassment, the law was inspired by the #MeToo movement (along with, presumably, the movement’s fancy Hollywood cousin, Time’s Up.) Among its accomplishments was a mandate that the employees of any company comprising three or more people must complete two hours of sexual harassment training, no exceptions.

The above information is contained in the training itself, for what I’ve concluded must be two reasons. The first is that the authors of the training want you to know exactly who is responsible for making you sit through an interminable lesson in why you shouldn’t refer to your co-workers using homophobic slurs. The second reason is that, man, two hours is a lot of time to fill.

To be fair to the creators of the training module, they have done their best to make it interesting (more on that later). But, having been employed at the same company since before the passage of the Time’s Up Act, I’ve noticed something intriguing: all this content is virtually unchanged from what it was several years ago, when the law required just one hour of DEI compliance training. It’s not just the same concepts, but the same actors, the same scripted scenarios. Is this a two-hour training? No: it’s a one-hour training in a two-hour bag padded out with a bunch of foam packing peanuts. Having noticed this DEI twist on shrinkflation, it’s impossible to unsee. The sheer volume of gimmicks, whereby the training designers manage to convey the same information in double the time, would be awe-inspiring if it weren’t so irritating.

Each hypothetical harassment scenario is described four times: in a short text essay, then in a first-person video, then as a word problem followed by a multiple-choice quiz, and then, finally, in a post-quiz recap that reiterates the same information all over again. A segment about the professional hazards of social media is similarly laborious, making you click through six panels of an alleged confession by “Sarah”, who wrote a social-media post with a “discriminatory tone” before boarding a long flight, only to find herself dogpiled when she landed. (It’s hard to know what’s worse: the time-consuming structure, or the blatant, uncompensated rip-off of the Justine Sacco story, as if that woman hasn’t suffered enough.) And in the section detailing the content of the Time’s Up Act, the legislation is broken into eight bullet points, each hidden behind an interactive drop-down menu that you have to physically click on three times — once to open it, once to close it, and once to advance to the next one.

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Have you ever been stuck in the supermarket checkout line with a cashier who insists on breaking a bunch of bananas into eight individual bananas and laboriously scanning them one at a time? It’s like that, but worse, because you can’t eat the sexual harassment training. But if the form of the training is categorically absurd, what it attempts to teach isn’t much better. At best, these concepts are common sense, a reiteration of the basic norms of human interaction that most of us learned in preschool. Don’t exclude, don’t name-call, don’t touch people who ask you not to touch them — and no, Javier, I do not think you should tell Raphael to “stop being such a drama queen” about his co-worker referring to him with a homophobic slur.

At worst, though, this training seems like it was designed in a lab to replace a functional, high-trust workplace with one in which employees are both in constant terror of giving offence and primed for any opportunity to take it: ratting each other out to HR for failing to use a co-worker’s preferred pronouns, hand-wringing about whether it’s harassment to invite a gluten-intolerant colleague out for a pint, asking formal consent to high-five. And I particularly have questions about the instructional video on gender identity, featuring a montage of daring gender nonconformists such as… a man holding a baby and a woman lifting weights. Should we really be telling people who literally work at a gym that every woman in the weight room is gender nonconforming? Isn’t this crude and sexist stereotyping the opposite of inclusive? Excuse me, sir, but don’t you know that holding your infant child is for sissy girls? A real man would drop-kick that baby through the goalposts at the Big House while shotgunning two beers at once!

It’s strange to realise that all of this has been done in the name of the #MeToo movement, whose original purpose was to raise awareness of how women continue to be held back in the workplace on the basis of sex. It wasn’t just harassment or assault; it was pregnancy discrimination, gendered workplace expectations, the way the inescapable presence of sexuality loomed in the background of our professional lives. A woman who is expected to sleep with her boss in order to advance professionally is in a terrible position, but so too is the woman at the same company whose boss doesn’t want to sleep with her, and whose prospects suffer as a result.

But insofar as this problem can be solved, it’s not by ensnaring would-be perpetrators in a web of red tape; it’s through the slow and deliberate work of effecting cultural change, and the immediate improvement of support for the victims of discrimination. On this front, I’ll grant that the Time’s Up Act isn’t entirely useless. Those who wish to file a workplace harassment complaint now have up to 300 days to do so (it used to be 180 days). And while employers were already prohibited from retaliating against complainants, it is now also illegal to change the terms of a person’s employment after they make a harassment complaint — by relocating that person, for instance — without their consent.

But mostly, this legislation is typical of the extreme do-somethingism that politicians become afflicted with whenever a lot of Americans — and particularly the subset of Americans who walk the red carpet at the Oscars wearing $85,000 gowns — are up in arms. From the War on Drugs to the Patriot Act, moral panics tend to make for bad policy. And in this case, the clarion call of “There oughta be a law!” becomes complicated by the fact that there already is one: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 established a nationwide edict against workplace discrimination and harassment on the basis of sex, one which has been consistently upheld by both the courts and a cultural consensus that women should be able to do their jobs unmolested.

The problem is, there’s a difference between making a thing illegal and writing that thing out of existence; much like thieves, murderers and fake Nigerian prince email scammers, sexual harassers are still out there, harassing people sexually. But rather than admitting the limits of their power to eradicate the world’s ills through bureaucracy, politicians instead conclude that the existing law making workplace harassment illegal doesn’t make it illegal enough. It needs more bells and whistles! More rules and regulations! We need a cursed matryoshka doll of policies within policies within policies, each more unwieldy and elaborate than the last.

This is where the mandatory training comes in — a training which I would estimate prevented exactly zero incidents of harassment, unless the would-be offender happened to be stuck completing it at precisely the day and time when he would have otherwise been harassing someone. The Weinstein-esque perpetrators at whom the #MeToo movement took aim are not going to be deterred by an extra hour of anti-harassment training, if they even have to take it (most, I would imagine, are getting an assistant to complete it for them). This is what makes the Time’s Up Act and its ilk so toothless, and frankly so offensive: it pretends to address the abuses of powerful men by condescending to and wasting the time of ordinary working people.

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It’s worth noting that employees like me are often not compensated for this training, and it goes without saying that we are not meant to model our actual behaviour on it. It’s not just that being maximally sensitive to microaggressions is incompatible with a job that requires you to stand at the front of a crowded room, in spandex, lunging and squatting while two dozen people stare at your body in order to mirror your movements. It’s that fitness is a service industry, one in which tolerating people’s idiosyncrasies, oddities and low-key improprieties is part of the job.

Of course, if I were sexually harassed at work, I’m sure my employer would protect me to whatever extent required by law — but only because it’s required by law, much like the two-hour harassment training, which I’m equally sure the company would point to as evidence that they ought not be held responsible for the bad acts that happen under their watch. We gave them the training! It’s not our fault! Ultimately, these measures are little more than exercises in box-checking compliance, a way for corporations to dodge lawsuits and displace the accountability for workplace harassment onto someone else’s shoulders.

This was never more apparent than in the moment after I finished the final quiz, when I was greeted with a pop-up and a countdown clock: “This course requires you to spend a certain amount of time on your learning experience,” it read. “Please go back and review the course material until you’ve reached the time limit.” In spite of everything, I had finished too quickly; I would need to stare aimlessly at the module for another 30 minutes to fulfil my compliance. Time’s Up, indeed.

Modi had been angling for a moment like this since September of the year before, when he lobbied the United Nations to make 21st June “International Yoga Day”. In an address to the General Assembly, he claimed that “Yoga is an invaluable gift from our ancient tradition. Yoga embodies unity of mind and body, thought and action … a holistic approach [that] is valuable to our health and our well-being. Yoga is not just about exercise; it is a way to discover the sense of oneness with yourself, the world and nature.”

Modi’s successful pitch for yoga at the UN contained eerie echoes of a pitch for Hinduism made by one of his heroes, the religious teacher Swami Vivekānanda, to the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago back in 1893. It was a masterclass in using the language of inclusivity to make the case for a particular idea. Hinduism, declared Vivekānanda, is the “mother of all religions” and has “taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance”. To an audience consisting primarily of American Christians, familiar with Jesus’s claim that “No one comes to the Father except through me”, Vivekānanda offered a contrasting line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me.”

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Vivekānanda’s expansive case for Hinduism was helped by the fact that the concept itself was only around a century old by the late 1800s and remained somewhat flexible. Europeans in colonial-era India had used the term “Hindu” (derived from a Sanskrit word for the Indus River) to describe people on the subcontinent who did not belong to better-understood and apparently more clearly-defined traditions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Indian reformers later used the term “Hinduism” to refer to a broad system of ideas and practices that went beyond “religion” in the narrow confessional sense familiar to modern Westerners and encompassed culture, identity and, in time, a sense of national political purpose.

In the decades running up to Indian independence in 1947, there was nervousness among religious minorities — particularly Muslims — about what this might mean for the role played by Hinduism in a future independent India. The country’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was among those who advocated for secularism and religious pluralism. Other forces in Indian politics, including the predecessor to Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), encouraged the idea that India is fundamentally a Hindu country and that its politics and institutions ought to reflect that fact.

The vexed politics of “Hinduism” in India — religious tradition versus a more encompassing cultural or national identity — has been mirrored in the West by arguments about yoga, one of whose earliest teachers was Swami Vivekānanda during visits to the United States. Is yoga essentially religious in character? If so, is it wrong to use it purely for its health benefits or to teach it in schools that are subject to rules about the separation of church and state? And given its origins in India, is there something morally wrong or at least a little unseemly about white Westerners making money from promoting it — or even practising it at all?

Just as these anxieties appear to be ebbing in the West — though concerns remain about shallow and overly-commercialised forms of yoga — Modi has been leading the charge to reclaim yoga for Indians, and for himself in particular. It is part of a broader push to promote traditional Indian culture at home and to leverage India’s spiritual wealth abroad as a soft power asset. Modi has already made much of his country as the home of Buddhism, finding it useful when dealing with Buddhist-influenced cultures around Asia, from Vietnam to Korea.

Modi’s critics worry about what this might mean for the secular and pluralist character of their democracy. When, in his 2014 speech to the UN General Assembly, Modi described yoga as a gift from “our ancient tradition”, who exactly was the implied “we”? Indians as a whole — or the country’s large Hindu majority? Modi and the BJP are suspected of using yoga as a means of encouraging people, both at home in India and abroad, to think of those two categories as more or less one and the same. That risks reinforcing the idea that India’s Muslims, Christians and Dalits — formerly referred to as “untouchables” and historically mistreated by upper-caste Hindus — are outsiders, potentially exposing them to yet more discrimination and violence. Modi is also accused of engaging in what one commentator memorably called “om-washing”: linking yoga to everything from world peace to a healthier climate while pursuing destructive policies on these and other issues.

No doubt there will be those who regard worries over Modi’s appropriation of yoga as of no more consequence than hand-wringing in the West about wellness enthusiasts who like to greet each other with namaste gestures. Depending on your point of view, Indian soldiers performing yoga in freezing temperatures at the Siachen Glacier is either a step towards entrenching Hindu nationalism at the heart of Indian politics while provoking Pakistan — with whom India remains in dispute over sovereignty in the region — or simply a nice touch for International Yoga Day. Likewise, government bureaucrats and foreign diplomats in India taking up yoga, on Modi’s advice, may be regarded either as working on their general health or participating in a slow but steady narrowing of acceptable discourse in India.

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Time will tell just how much or little this matters for India. As Modi enters his third term as prime minister, the argument over yoga seems set to extend to schools across the country. Some BJP-led regional administrations have already sought to make it mandatory among the nation’s children, prompting objections from defenders of India’s minorities and the country’s secular constitution. A Sun Salutation — or Surya Namaskar — may strike most as an innocent sequence of yoga moves. But “Surya” is both the sun and the Hindu solar deity, rendering the sequence controversial in the eyes of some Muslim groups in India.

Those wanting to see yoga’s influence diminished in Indian politics may hope that Modi’s Olympic dream comes true. Modi wants the Games to come to India in 2036, and for yoga to be included on the list of events alongside chess, kabaddi, kho kho, squash and T20 cricket. It may well prove divisive: plenty of yoga practitioners will no doubt object to what they see on display, just as large numbers of karate fans regarded its Olympic incarnation — when Tokyo hosted a delayed Games in 2021 — as “not proper karate”. A more potent message still would be sent if things take an Australian turn. The sight of an unfortunate competitor butchering their contribution — offering an unintentionally comic twist on the downward dog to rival Raygun’s kangaroo hop — might end up harming yoga’s global reputation.

In the shorter term, there seems little prospect that Modi will retire yoga as a pawn in India’s over-heated politics. Promoting ancient glories is a cheaper and more reliable way of winning hearts and minds than promising the earth politically, whether at home or abroad. And as long as the wellness boom is with us, so too will be that sweet spot where fitness, fulfilment and wisdom coincide — seasoned, dare it be said, with a dash of the exotic, courtesy of images of the far-away or the long-ago. For all the anxieties that it seems to be causing of late, in the West and in India, nothing promises to hit that spot quite like a good sweaty hour on a yoga mat.

The genesis of this conflict is hard to explain, but the passions it inflamed were real. For all our avowed belief in the equality of the sexes, we still can’t help but assign gendered valences to even our most mundane behaviours and experiences, associations which can sometimes abruptly reverse polarity. Pink was once the boldest and most masculine of colours, until it suddenly wasn’t. Computer coding was the purview of female “calculators”, until it was overtaken in the Eighties by hungry hordes of Tech Bros.

And then there’s yoga: an athletic and spiritual practice originating among Indian men as early as the 10th century, and exported to the West by male gurus, beginning in the Twenties. One hundred years later, how things have changed. The gurus are gone — in some cases defenestrated by the #MeToo movement — and the entire enterprise has been fully subsumed by the same willowy-white-woman-wellness industrial complex that gave us Soul Cycle, Goop cleanses, and 500 different kinds of barre workouts. So complete is yoga’s feminine positionality in the West’s collective consciousness that it is now apparently necessary for niche varieties to crop up just for men.

So we have Broga, “a yoga class geared for men (where it’s okay if you can’t touch your toes)”. And among male professional athletes, per a recent New York Times write-up, we have “Joga”, a portmanteau of “yoga” and “jocks”, which suggests that something new, exotic and very, very manly is happening here. The JogaWorld website concurs: “Similar to Yoga, Joga involves physical postures, breathing, and relaxation techniques. However, where the goal of Yoga is to become more flexible and spiritually aware, Joga’s aim is to enhance performance, improve concentration, and reduce recovery time within the context of an athletic environment.”

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That said, if there’s a difference between improving flexibility and awareness via yoga and enhancing performance and concentration with JOGA, it’s not readily apparent (even if, as I did, you have watched the better part of a 56-minute explanatory YouTube video titled, “How is Joga REALLY Different?”) Much like goat yoga, power yoga, hot yoga and the briefly trendy “vino vinyasa” classes that involved sipping chardonnay between poses, Joga is really just yoga by another name, and marketed to a particular audience. Nevertheless, one gets the sense that we should not tell the men as much, lest we spook them off the mat.

The gender trajectory of yoga is a complicated one, a winding journey through a decades-long miasma of gender stereotypes, fitness fads and shifting, sex-specific beauty standards about what constitutes an ideal physique. Jane Fonda, Gwyneth Paltrow and the ubiquity of the phrase “long and lean” in fitness marketing certainly played their part here. But so too has the Marvel Cinematic Universe — and before that, Fight Club — for which the male actors cast as superheroes adopt a much-vaunted and highly publicised fitness regimen that transforms them from normal-looking human beings into walking sides of beef.

The lithe male physique of the Seventies and Eighties, the sinuous grace of a Baryshnikov, or even the androgynous sensuality of a David Bowie, have been side-lined in recent decades. In their place is a creeping conviction: that the ideal man should be so swole that he can barely fit through a doorway without turning sideways, let alone be able to touch his toes or balance gracefully on one leg. One thinks of Kevin Kline in the film In & Out, receiving lessons in manliness from a cassette book: “Men do not dance. They work. They drink. They have bad backs. They do not dance!” the instructions sneer. “Think about John Wayne! Arnold Schwarzenegger! Arnold doesn’t dance, he can barely walk!”

Arnold also did not do yoga (or if he did, he wasn’t telling anyone about it). In fact, for men who look like him, the practice can be challenging: the massive muscles that are so essential to the contemporary superhero aesthetic don’t just compromise flexibility but also create a literal obstacle to various yoga poses that require you to wrap one body part around another. There’s a reason the male gurus who popularised yoga in the US were all built like string beans. But these days, the aesthetic distinction between the body of an athlete versus a movie star versus a bodybuilder is increasingly non-existent; these men all aspire to the same physique, and they all follow the same weightlifting regimen and ingest the same substances (legal or otherwise) to get there.

Meanwhile, the few male celebrities who do announce themselves yogis tend to be, if not exactly effeminate, then certainly not beacons of wholesome, Captain America-style masculinity. It’s a type embodied by Adam Levine, perhaps the best-known of the male Hollywood yoga evangelists, who famously told a reporter from Details: “You know what yoga’s good for? I’ll tell you what yoga is good for: Fuuuu-k-ing!” (all while pointing at his penis and gyrating, apparently). As for Arnold himself, he still seems to consider body awareness and flexibility something of a joke.

Of course, the things that make yoga unappealing to men also make it a natural home for women, who continue to aspire to a sylph-like aesthetic — and to gravitate toward workouts that promise to “sculpt” and “tone” the body without bulking it. At the entry level, yoga is more accessible to women — not just because our bodies are naturally more flexible and hence better suited to bending, twisting and stretching, but because of the vibes. Women are more drawn to group fitness classes in general and to the barefoot, spa-like aesthetic of yoga in particular. So, as night follows day, dozens of brands have cropped up to serve the bougie athleisure-wearing wine mom who is yoga’s perceived consumer base, which reinforces its feminine reputation. And that is not to mention the poses themselves, which do often look most lovely when expressed in the lines of a female body — or at least, a female body that looks terrific in a pair of skin-tight pants, which just happens to be the one currently deemed most desirable by the standards du jour. Put it all together, and it’s no surprise that this spiritual practice designed for young Asian men has now transformed, in the age of influencer culture, into a contemporary showcase for Western female beauty.

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The irony is that yoga’s feminine trappings do not reflect an actual feminisation of the physical practice itself. The traditional yoga poses I teach — many of which haven’t changed for centuries — were designed with a male default in mind and require modification for female bodies, with their broader hips and lower centre of gravity. (“Hop your back foot wider!” I say, as female students struggle to square their hips in Warrior A.) Men may be intimidated (or repulsed) by yoga’s apparent incompatibility with their masculinity, but foundationally, it is still a practice ultimately made for them.

Still, if they need “Joga” — or broga, or whatever — to realise as much, it’s certainly better than the alternative: a world in which they do no yoga at all. Likewise, “bromance” — and its near sibling, the bromantic comedy — represented a silly but desperately needed correction to the notion that men couldn’t enjoy close same-sex friendships without there being something a little bit gay about them. In some senses, this yoga rebrand is just another example of the practice’s infinite capacity to be modified so that people with different bodies, different backgrounds and different limitations can access it.

Here’s something interesting, though: in recent years, as yoga has become synonymous with a particular brand of Western womanhood, it has also become a magnet for cancellation. In public op-eds and private Facebook groups, the yoga world’s self-appointed culture police are eternally wringing their hands over the “colonisation” of yoga by Westerners, or the scourge of those high-end leggings, or the permissibility of “namaslay” shirts. After all, any activity that reliably brings together a bunch of upper-middle-class white women in a single room must be problematic. About the emergence of male-dominated Joga, meanwhile, there has not been so much as a peep.

The old arguments were dredged up yet again last week, when the Guardian ran a story under the headline, “‘Cultural appropriation’: discussion builds over Western yoga industry”. The description of this discussion as building is, I guess, technically true, in the same sense that a news item about a certain unfortunate mythological figure might be titled, “Man pushing stone uphill nears summit”. It is a construction project without a conclusion, without even the dream of one. Consider another headline, also from the Guardian, this one from 2010: “Yoga heritage: don’t even think about stealing it, says Indian government.”

Even in this decade-old account of the efforts of the Indian government “to provide irrefutable evidence for anyone hoping to patent a new style of yoga that the Indians got there first”, one gets the sense of a barn door being closed after the horse had escaped. Yoga was already a global phenomenon then, and it has only grown, both in terms of its market share and its place in the cultural discourse. The latest estimates put the number of yoga practitioners at more than 300 million worldwide, with the industry valued at just shy of $90 billion. Before the pandemic, yoga was ubiquitous — not just at dedicated studios but in hotel fitness centres, universities, care homes; during the pandemic, it became famous for being one of the few forms of exercise you could do without leaving your home.

Given its ubiquity, it’s hardly surprising that it’s had its fair share of controversies. The hot yoga guru Bikram Choudhury was best known for his failed attempt to copyright his signature 26-asana sequence in the US, which is cited in that 2010 piece as having catalysed the Indian government’s protective instincts surrounding yoga’s origins. But in 2017, Choudhury became one of the more deserved casualties of the MeToo movement, and fled to India after losing a lawsuit brought by one of his accusers. (Choudhury is now attempting a comeback campaign, which is called “Bikram is back: the unapologetic tour.” Unfortunately for him, this news is buried in his Google search results beneath mentions of a 2019 Netflix documentary titled Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator.)

Considering the global saturation of the practice, the idea that Westerners doing yoga represents a form of cultural theft is surprisingly resilient. After a 2013 essay on the now-defunct XOJane website declared, “LIKE IT OR NOT, WESTERN YOGA IS A TEXTBOOK EXAMPLE OF CULTURAL APPROPRIATION”, a painstakingly-researched rebuttal by Michelle Goldberg should really have put an end to the discussion once and for all. Among Goldberg’s acerbic observations was that yoga had been strategically pushed by India to Western audiences, not least because its popularity acted as a flipped bird of sorts to the contemptuous attitude of colonial Britain toward Indian traditions and religion. The same year Goldberg’s essay was published, 2015, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi successfully campaigned to further globalise yoga with the UN-approved International Yoga Day, which has since been recognised annually with mass yoga demonstrations worldwide. Modi’s campaign wasn’t without its critics, who believed that the celebration was in fact an act of oppression against India’s Muslim population — but, per Goldberg, it at least demonstrated “that the spread of yoga in the West is not just a story about Westerners raiding some pristine subcontinental reservoir of spiritual authenticity”.

And yet, in these final days of 2022, here again is the now-familiar narrative of an awakening to the unwokeness of yoga. The featured complainant, an author named Nadia Gilani, was alarmed to realise that “not only were most yoga teachers and students in the UK white, but the accompanying wellness narrative has divorced yoga from its 5,000-year-old roots”. Beyond that “wellness narrative”, which puts yoga in the same category of commercialised self-care as juice cleanses and jade yoni eggs, Gilani is also especially peeved about t-shirts bearing the ubiquitous Om symbol and tattoos featuring Hindu gods. “It’s cultural appropriation and it’s offensive.”

This is an interesting moment, with interesting rules about which religions and cultures are deserving of reverence. On the one hand, tattooing an image of Ganesh onto your body is offensive cultural appropriation; on the other, a hilariously blasphemous sweater featuring Jesus himself in a baby bjorn is available for $60 and will make you the life of every holiday party. Ironically, the people who believe that Eastern cultures are too precious, too exotic, to be subject to this sort of playful remixing are the same ones who tend to hurl allegations that Western yogis are “fetishising” the practice. There is also the question of who is more guilty of failing to acknowledge the roots of yoga: the yogi so invested in its cultural background that he gets a Ganesh tattoo, or the yogi who couldn’t pick Ganesh out of a lineup.

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But it is also strange to describe yoga as divorced from its roots, when every breed — from hot to nude to power to goat — derives from just one ancient practice, which has evolved in its native habitat just as much as it has spawned offshoots on other continents. Even contemporary yoga in India differs hugely from the practice described in ancient texts, which is one of the reasons the Indian government had such a hard time defining it in 2010. But far from being forgotten, what is incredible is how easily those roots have grafted onto other movement styles, other cultures, and other forms of community building. In a world where human ingenuity and imagination has given birth to everything from water ballet to jazzercise to competitive cheerleading to cat dancing, yoga stands out. The accessibility of it, the many paths that lead people to it, its infinite adaptability to any body or lifestyle, have allowed it to become not only one of India’s chief cultural exports but the living embodiment of that saying about letting a thousand flowers bloom.

And while, yes, one of those flowers is the fancy boutique studio where a moneyed clientele with fawn-like bodies practise handstands in $500 spandex jumpsuits, this is at worst a conceptual annoyance. It doesn’t stop anyone else from rolling out a mat, from taking a breath, from exhaling against the limits of a stretch until the body opens. The latest Guardian article features one yoga instructor lamenting the scourge of “$100 Lululemon leggings and an equally expensive mat”, while Gilani describes group classes at a flashy studio as “gatekeeping, in a way” — but is it? More so than demanding religious or cultural fealty in exchange for the privilege of practising? More so than aspiring to make yoga off-limits to people of certain socioeconomic backgrounds, who are wearing certain pants?

This is somewhat personal to me: I’ve been practising yoga regularly for just over 10 years and teaching group classes for five — it seemed in the pre-pandemic times like a reasonably secure alternate source of income should the writing work dry up. My teaching style is focused on movement, anatomy, and choreography; I don’t Om or chant or pray, which is either an egregious failure to acknowledge yoga’s heritage or a noble refusal to appropriate another culture’s spiritual practices, depending on who you ask.

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But then, every teacher at the studio where I work approaches the practice differently. There’s the one who leads long, guided meditations that make 15 minutes feel like five hours, seamlessly dipping in and out of consciousness until even the sensation of the floor underneath you completely disappears. There’s the one who brings little gifts to her students, shells or stones or paper butterflies, so that her classes feel a little bit like yoga but also a bit like nursery school. There’s the one who reads aloud from poetry books and punctuates the end of savasana with a Tibetan singing bowl. The thing about yoga is, it leaves room for all of us. There is no one path to the sense of peace and connection that comes from the practice, no one right way — and, crucially, no wrong one.

But it’s difficult to build a marketing campaign on that, and here it is worth noting that Gilani’s appearance in this article is tied to a book release. Of course it is. After all these years, this might be the biggest reason why the debate about yoga and cultural appropriation won’t die: because bringing it up is too valuable a promotional tool to let it go entirely. What is being built in these endless relitigations of the same set of talking points, these arguments over who owns what, is not a discussion, but a brand. Yesterday it was Bikram’s. Today it’s Gilani’s. Tomorrow, it will be someone else’s.

My favourite of the yoga sutras goes like this: By cultivating attitudes of friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous, and disregard toward the wicked, the mind-stuff retains its undisturbed calmness. I can’t speak to its spiritual meaning; it just strikes me as good advice, a variation on that Alcoholics Anonymous prayer about knowing the limits of one’s control. Disregard toward the wicked: an acknowledgment of the existence of wickedness, but a refusal to dwell on it, to obsess over it, to let it spoil everything else.

This doesn’t just work as a means of staying sane and centered while the latest outrage cycle churns — but for that, it works very well indeed.

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.

The online communities where yoga instructors gather are some of the messiest and most judgmental environments on the internet, marked by high tension and fierce infighting — even before the pandemic forced studios to close their doors. Battles raged over the proper way to Om, the acceptability of Sanskrit-based puns like “namaslay”, and whether the white women who make up the majority of American yoga instructors were guilty of colonising a spiritual practice to which they had no legitimate claim.

Those who eschewed those aspects and approached yoga primarily as a form of exercise, however, were treated with no less contempt — especially the yoga-influencers of Instagram, whose ability to stand on their hands or twist themselves into pretzels inspires envy and awe even among seasoned practitioners. Just like the culturally-appropriating woman Om-ing in a “namastay in bed” tank top, the Instagram yogis were guilty of crimes against inclusivity — in this case, making less-svelte practitioners feel inadequate by comparison. The last time I posted a video of my own practice, standing on my forearms in a pose called charging scorpion, another yoga instructor huffily scolded me that “yoga is not for showing off”.

All this scolding isn’t very zen, nor is it particularly in keeping with the fifth-century ethical code that yoga practitioners are supposed to abide by. On the other hand, it hews closely to a dynamic that seems to invariably emerge in spaces where liberal white women tend to gather, where whatever shared hobby or interest becomes subsumed by infighting over social justice issues. As with similar meltdowns in the YA fiction or knitting communities, the problem with yoga isn’t the practice itself but the audience it attracts. If privileged white women like it, it’s inherently suspicious for that reason alone — a conviction that nobody feels more keenly than the women themselves.

This predates the 2020 diversity reckoning that took particular aim at stuff white women liked — and that toppled the girlbosses in charge of brands like Refinery29, Man Repeller, or Reformation. The “whiteness of yoga” was a topic of critical discussion as early as 2014, but as in so many similar communities, the pressure to explicitly declare one’s allegiance to progressive politics ramped up to a fever pitch in the wake of Donald Trump’s election.

The first time I saw one of those now-ubiquitous “In this house we believe” signs was in 2019, hung on the wall of a local yoga studio where most of the clientele had mink eyelash extensions and shopped regularly at Lululemon. In early 2020, shortly before Covid threw us all into a state of emergency, the Yoga Alliance (a sort of unofficial governing body for certified yoga instructors) announced that it was overhauling its certification guidelines: registered yoga teachers would now be required to complete additional coursework in social justice and to sign an ethical commitment to “equity in yoga”. A statement on the website read:

“[We] recognise the inequities in the systems that surround yoga and through which yoga is practiced. These inequities have led to the marginalisation of many communities within the practice. In the spirit of “ahimsa” (non-violence), we acknowledge the harm that has resulted from this.”

As is often the case, evidence of the aforementioned harm is relatively thin on the ground. Critics of yoga’s “exclusivity” will point to things like the prevalence of thin, white models on the cover of magazines such as Yoga Journal, or one-off anecdotes such as this one — in which a non-incident, wherein the author accidentally stepped on a white woman’s yoga mat, spawns an increasingly far-fetched series of imaginary harms including the murder of the mat-stepping woman by racist police.

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It’s not hard to see how yoga’s politics are fuelled by this particular brand of liberal guilt, the same one that made Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility an instant bestseller among the suburban wine moms of the world. It’s the sense that one must always apologise, not just for being privileged, but for being basic: to be the type of woman who has a yoga studio membership, who goes to book club, who wears Reformation dresses, is in itself a sinful state for which you must atone. Your leisure time is not for having fun; it’s for doing better.

Of course, the exceptional levels of privilege-awareness and equity-commitment in yoga offer little protection from cancellation. Indeed, in some instances, it appears to have only made it that much easier to identify vulnerable targets, the ones least able to defend themselves. Take the case of Kindness Yoga, a chain of studios in Denver, Colorado whose owner Patrick Harrington was so committed to inclusivity that he regularly held classes just for people of colour. But when the studio posted in support of the Black Lives Matter movement in June 2020, it was immediately denounced by its own employees for “performative activism” and “tokenisation of black and brown bodies”.

The owner of Kindness made the requisite apologies, promising to listen and learn, but critics were not placated — and all nine studios, already in financially precarious circumstances from having been unable to operate during Covid, were forced to shut down. (The last news report on the Kindness Yoga cancellation noted that Harrington and his wife were frantically trying to sell their home to cover the costs of their lost livelihood. The ringleader of the campaign to kill Kindness, meanwhile, was planning to open her own studio, although it doesn’t look like she ever actually got around to it.)

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Meanwhile, the alleged exclusivity of the yoga community becomes laughable in contrast to the genuinely exclusive fitness trends that attract a similarly elite but less guilt-ridden clientele — and also, it must be said, to men, who can be found performing exactly zero hand-wringing over the whiteness of pursuits like alpine skiing, ice hockey, or the Tour de France. Compare the yoga folks meditating unhappily on their privilege to the Peloton junkies of the world, blithely spinning away on $3,000 exercise bikes — or to the $650 per hour pilates instructor Liana Levi, whose entire brand is to be explicitly, even hilariously, inaccessible. “I don’t cater to the masses, I cater to a demographic,” Levi told the New York Times in a recent profile. (When pressed on which demographic that might be, Levi’s amazing reply was: “Not masses.”)

And yet, perhaps Levi has the right idea. Cynically, what happened to Kindness Yoga can be seen as a cautionary tale, the living embodiment of the axiom, “Go woke, go broke”. But what’s more striking is how it reveals the cruelty that lurks within a community that prides itself on caring, and how the quest to repair harm invariably seems to perpetrate it in worse and different ways.

In this case, a few venal and self-interested actors were able to destroy reputations, torpedo livelihoods, and rob a community of nine wonderful spaces where people once joyfully gathered — all in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The yogis who commit the hardest to this new ethos are only putting blood in the water: the more you do, the more you’ll be accused of not doing enough.