Decolonizing Yoga: Why Postures Are Only One Part of the Practice
I have been practicing yoga for twenty-two years and teaching for seventeen. I come from a family lineage that includes Ayurvedic doctors and yogis. I have spent 12 years studying in Chennai and Mysore, and I continue to learn from teachers who carry the Krishnamacharya tradition in its full depth and integrity. So when I talk about decolonizing yoga, I am not speaking from the outside of this tradition looking in. I am speaking from within it as someone who loves it, has been formed by it, and feels a profound responsibility to protect it.
Yoga today is most commonly understood through one lens: posture. For many people, it begins and ends on the mat. This is understandable. But it reflects only a small fraction of what yoga actually is, and the conversation about decolonizing yoga is, at its heart, a conversation about restoring what was removed.
Is Yoga Just Physical Practice?
In modern spaces, yoga is often presented as a physical discipline. Studios, social media. and teacher training programs overwhelmingly centre asana (posture), as the primary, and often the only, expression of yoga practice.
But traditionally, yoga is a complete and extraordinarily refined system. One that includes the body, but is not limited to it.
Postures are one component within a much broader framework that Patanjali systematically outlines in the Yoga Sutrasm a text that mentions asana in only three of its 195 sutras. The full system includes:
Pranayama, breath and regulation of energy and life force
Pratyahara, withdrawing the senses inward
Dharana, focuses attention and concentration
Dhyana, meditation as an unbroken process
Samadhi, the culmination of integration
the Yama and Niyamas, ethical and internal disciplines that form the very foundation of practice
Mantra and Vedic Chanting, vibrational practices that refine conciousness itself
When yoga is reduced to the physical, its deeper purpose doesn’t just becomes less visible. It becomes inaccessible, and something essential gets lost for both the practitioner and tradition.
What Does “Decolonizing Yoga” Mean?
The phrase decolonizing yoga can be misunderstood or deliberately misunderstood, as an act of exclusion. It’s not.
Decolonisation, in this context, not means restoring what was removed. It means recognizing what is being taught and sold as yoga today is one very narrow expression of the tradition, extracted from its epistemological roots, severed from its living lineages, and repackages within a commercial framework that serves markets rather than human transformation.
Yoga carries within it a complete pramāṇa structure, a system of valid knowledge that includes direct experience (pratyakṣa), reasoned inquiry (anumāna), and the authoritative transmission of a realized teacher (āgama). When yoga is reduced to posture and wellness of fitness aesthetics, this entire framework is discarded. What remains is the form without the intelligence that gives it meaning.
Decolonizing yoga is not an act of anger. It is an act of restoration, an invitation to return to the full depth and scope of what this tradition actually is and offers.
How Did Yoga Become So Focused on Postures?
As yoga moved through periods of cultural exchange, colonial encounter, and globalization, its presentation was significantly shaped by what was legible, marketable, and adoptable within Western frameworks. Physical practice translated easily across cultures. The internal dimensions; the ethical disciplines, the study of consciousness, the guru-śiṣya relationship, the oral transmission of Vedic knowledge- did not translate as easily, and so they were quietly set aside.
Over time, the internal aspects of yoga became quieter, while the physical aspects became more commercially visible. Entire lineages of knowledge, passed carefully from teacher to student across generations, were bypassed in favour of weekend certifications and large-scale teacher training programs.
This is not simply a cultural shift. It is a profound loss.
My own lineage connects to Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, widely considered the grandfather of modern yoga, whose approach was always deeply individualized, therapeutically oriented, and inseparable from the full philosophical and spiritual context of the tradition. His students, including his son, T.K.V. Desikachar several students that were opening teachers at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram, like Raghu Ananthanarayanan and Lakshmi Ranganathan have continued to carry this depth forward. This is the yoga I was trained in. This is the yoga I teach.
Cleansing Saṁskāras and Vāsanās — The Inner Work Yoga Requires
True yoga practice is fundamentally an inner process.
Saṁskāras are the deep mental and emotional impressions formed by past experience, the grooves through which our patterns of thought, reaction, and perception run. Vāsanās are the subtle tendencies and desires that arise from those impressions, shaping how we move through the world largely without our awareness.
Traditional yogic practice, beginning with the yamas and niyamas, moving through breath and sensory refinement, and deepening into meditation, is designed to work with these layers directly. Not to suppress them, but to illuminate them, understand them, and gradually release their grip on the mind and the self.
Without this inner work, even a committed physical practice can remain on the surface. The body becomes more refined, but the conditioned patterns that bind us continue largely undisturbed.
Dhyāna, true meditation, is not simply sitting in stillness. It is the fruit of sustained inner work. It arises when the conditions have been carefully prepared: when the ethical foundations are in place, when the breath has been refined, when the senses have been drawn inward, and when the mind has developed the steadiness to rest in awareness without grasping.
This is the yoga that transforms a life, not just a physical body.
Returning to the Full Practice of Yoga
A complete yoga practice includes the body, but it also includes the mind, the breath, the quality of our relationships, the way we speak, the way we listen, and the way we meet our own inner experience with honesty and care.
When these elements are genuinely integrated:
posture supports stability and inner awareness rather than performance or aesthetics
breath becomes a living tool for regulation, energy and the refinement of conciousness
attention becomes more steadier and more discerning
the practice begins to illuminate daily life, not only time spent on the mat
This is where yoga begins to reveal its extraordinary depth. And this is what I have dedicated my life and my teaching to making accessible, for serious practitioners and yoga teachers who want to go deeper, and for anyone ready to meet this tradition on its own terms.
A Living Tradition
Yoga’s teachings are not fixed in time. They are living, breathing, and, in the right conditions, continuously revealing.
But that aliveness depends on the integrity of transmission. It depends on lineage. It depends on teachers who have themselves been shaped by the tradition in its fullness, and who transmit it with the care, rigor, and reverence it deserves.
Decolonizing yoga is, at its heart, an act of love for the tradition. It is the insistence that this extraordinary system of knowledge be met with the depth it carries; not reduced, not commodified, not made palatable at the cost of its soul.
When we engage with yoga in its wholeness, with humility, sincerity, and a genuine willingness to be transformed, we do not simply deepen our own practice. We become part of preserving something sacred for the generations who will come after us.
That is a responsibility I take seriously. I hope you will too.
Read My Article on Elephant Journal
This blog post is a short reflection on a wider conversation around yoga, modern practice, and context.
You can read the article here:
