Has yoga teaching become a new type of yoga?

An exploratory survey on yoga through UK yoga teachers

Diego Lourenço

MA Traditions of Yoga and Meditation

This dissertation is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MA

Traditions of Yoga and Meditation of SOAS, University of London.

08 September 2019

OU Harvard Referencing

9,999 words
Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 2

ABSTRACT 3

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 4

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 5

1.1 BACKGROUND 5
1.2 RESEARCH FOCUS AND VALUE OF THIS RESEARCH 10
1.3 OVERALL AIM AND INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH OBJECTIVES 12

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 14

CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODS 19

CHAPTER 4: UK YOGA TEACHERS 23

4.1 SOCIODEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS 23

4.2 ATTITUDES TOWARDS YOGA, YOGA LEARNING AND TEACHING 26
4.3 CHARACTERISTICS OF AND INFLUENCES ON YOGA TEACHING 29
4.4 ATTITUDES TOWARDS AND OUTCOMES FROM OWN YOGA PRACTICE 32
4.5 ATTITUDES TOWARDS YOGA TEACHING VERSUS OWN YOGA PRACTICE 34
4.6 OUTCOMES FROM OWN YOGA PRACTICE 36

CHAPTER 5: MERGING FORCES, EMERGING ISSUES 38

5.2 EMERGING ISSUE: YOGA TEACHING, A PROFESSION OR AN EXPENSIVE LIFESTYLE? 41

5.3 EMERGING ISSUE: YOGA TEACHERS, PROFESSIONALS OR NICHE CONSUMERS? 42
5.4 EMERGING ISSUE: YOGA, A DISCIPLINE OR AN INSTRUMENT FOR OTHER DISCIPLINES? 42

CHAPTER 6: CONCLUDING REMARKS 44

APPENDICES 47

APPENDIX A – SAMPLE OF ACADEMIC ARTICLES FROM SCOPUS (ABSTRACT LEVEL) 47

APPENDIX B – CODING OF ACADEMIC ARTICLES USING NVIVO 12 53
APPENDIX C – PRINT SCREEN OF THE QPYYT 54

BIBLIOGRAPHY 64

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Abstract
The forces shaping contemporary yoga have yet to be properly studied. This study

presents original contributions in this regard by analysing yoga teaching in the UK.

First, it provides a bibliometric analysis of 5,102 worldwide peer-reviewed articles

related to yoga over the past 40 years. This analysis demonstrates that influences on

yoga from academia have been 91% ‘clinical’ and that yoga as a discipline has received

less attention. Second, it presents a UK national survey of 370 yoga teachers,

describing what informs their yoga learning, teaching and practice. It demonstrates

that, while respondents are moving away from gurus and rigid yoga structures and

methods, they are highly committed to traditional yogic knowledge. The study argues

that yoga teaching has become a 'soft' kind of yoga and that yoga teaching training

courses function as initiatory rites that confer a status of ‘advanced yoga practitioner’.

However, the study indicates that this is a process of belonging rather than becoming,

as many participants in these courses share several socio-economic and lifestyle

characteristics. Overall, the study argues that contemporary yoga is shaped mostly by

forces unconcerned with yoga as a discipline and suggests that yoga teaching and

teachers should actively engage with emerging issues.

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Acknowledgments

This research would not be possible without the support from The Open University

Library Resources to which I am very thankful.

Thank you, Dr Karen O’Brien-Kop, for supervising this project, improving my

methodological skills and for allowing me space to do the work I wanted to do.

Special thanks to Yoga Scotland (Kerry Cooper), British Wheel of Yoga (Gillian

Osborne-Bates), Yoga Alliance Professionals (Louise Wallace), Independent Yoga

Network (Peter Yates), Dru Yoga (Jill Whitehead), Wellbeing Insurance (Nigel

Wissett-Warner) and REPs (Jerome C.).

Many thanks to those who opened their communities to this survey: Helen Midhage

(Iyengar Yoga), Swami Saradananda (Sivananda Yoga), Julia Davis (Finchley Yoga),

Graham Burns (Yogacampus), Louise Fitzpatrick (Ashtanga Yoga), Gemma Birss

(Kundalini Yoga), Thomas Noonan-Ganley (Satyananda Yoga), Firdose Moonda

(Ourmala), Lisa Caviglia (Ashtanga Yoga), Clare Gibson (Harmonyoga) and Ruth

Westoby (Ashtanga Yoga). Thank you, Suzanne Newcombe, for the valuable insights.

I am immensely grateful to the 433 yoga teachers who responded the questionnaire.

Thank you to my students who have been patient and supportive. Special thanks to

Anne Laure Humbert, Babita Bahal and Anthony John Mason for their specialist

advice on statistics, marketing & inclusivity and GDPR & data protection.

Last but not least, thank you mom and granny in Brazil for the love and care. I dedicate

this work to you, who have never done yoga or meditation (let alone higher education)

but taught me the most important lessons.

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Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1 Background

Yoga has been on the rise worldwide in the 21st century, but the current decade has

been its golden age. During this period, it has attracted more attention from academics

and the media (Chart 1.1), gained unprecedent international attention (United

Nations, 2019), and been virtually untainted by scandals involving several of its most

charismatic figures (Remski, 2019). According to IBISWorld’s most recent financial

report,

yoga has now become part of Britain's mainstream health and fitness sector. The

growing popularity of yoga as a gentle and holistic way to exercise, relax and

disengage from working life has stimulated demand for industry services and has

pushed the industry's activities into mainstream society. (IBISWorld, 2019)

This is evident from the number of times that yoga has featured in the UK's national

newspapers in the past decades; the figure increased by more than 700% from the

2000s to the 2010s (Chart 1.1).

However, this push into the mainstream, has arguably little to do with yoga

itself – the spiritual discipline pointing towards liberation mentioned in premodern

yoga texts – and more to do with the social, cultural and historical contexts of modern

yoga, which include globalisation (Alter, 2004; Strauss, 2005), the professionalisation

of yoga teaching (Newcombe, 2019), and capitalist consumer culture (Carrette and

King, 2005; Jain, 2015). In her research on Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh, Sarah

Strauss eloquently summarises what still can be said of modern yoga:

This modern transformation represents a shift from a regional, specialized religious

discourse and practice geared toward liberation of the self from the endless cycle of

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 lives, to a transnational, secular, socially critical ideology and practice aimed at

freedom to achieve personal well-being. (Strauss, 2005, p. 22)

Yet, the absence of an agent in this sentence begs the question of whether we are still

talking about yogis and yoga when, in the new context, everything else appears to

have changed. Scholars unearthing the roots of yoga have revealed the intermingling

of various premodern traditions corroborating a history of constant, multiple, and

complex changes (Samuel, 2008; Sanderson, 2009; White, 2012; Muñoz, 2016;

Mallinson and Singleton, 2017). However, yoga’s pluralism does not extend far

outside yoga; in the yoga industry, academia and the media, yoga has a remarkably

homogeneous framework and voice1.

1
For instance, over the past 40 years, 95% of global academic publications on yoga (depicted in Chart

1.1) have been in English and only 5% in other languages especially German (1.85%), Spanish (0.68%),

French (0.51%) and Russian (0.49%).

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 On the assumption that academia and the media (public) are important forces

shaping yoga, this study departs from a meta-analysis of their publications to explore

their impact on the yoga industry. A close examination of global academic research

shows that while the number of peer-reviewed publications in the last two decades of

20th century, from the 1980s to the 1990s, did increase (Chart 1.1), the first two decades

of the 21st century saw a significant change in yoga scholarship. A surge of 448% saw

the number of publications increase to 1,761 in the 2000s and a further 240% increase

in the 2010s resulted in over 5,983 publications (Chart 1.1). This seems to represent a

whole new level of yoga research.

Although observations have been made on the nature and volume of academic

publications on yoga (De Michelis, 2007, pp. 2 and 10-16), their influence on shaping

modern yoga has not been problematised. If anything, they have been viewed largely

uncritically. A preliminary search of all original peer-reviewed articles in the Scopus

database from 1980 to the present clarified the focus of yoga research. Of the 8,268

peer-reviewed global publications presented in Chart 1.1, 5,102 met the inclusion

criteria of being an ‘original article’ while 479 were excluded as duplicates or because

they were unrelated or secondary to yoga. The remaining 4,623 were then classified

into two main categories:

•
Clinical2 - These account for 91.1% of the publications. Many are from the

medical sciences and attempt to test parts of yoga for their potential use as

health, fitness, therapeutic or occupational interventions.

2
We should avoid the term ‘scientific’ here because it can sometimes be misleading. As Crammer

posited, Indian research on yoga are 25 times more likely to reach a positive conclusion (2015, p. 269).

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 • Historical - These account for 8.9% of the publications. They attempt to

understand yoga as a whole or as a discipline, including its history, cultures,

philosophies, texts, traditions and practices. I further identified publications

(mostly within the historical category) that aimed at advancing knowledge of

yoga, including translations of premodern texts, discussions of yoga from

yoga gurus and scholars and speculative clinical research aiming at explaining

yogic practices and outcomes from within their own yogic context. These

publications were identified as Yogic, and they constituted only 2% of the total

publications.

Chart 1.2 illustrates the 4,623 global academic articles according to the three

categories, in their respective decades, indicating that although significantly more

research was conducted on yoga in the past two decades (Chart 1.1), this research was

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mainly clinical and that, proportionally, research on yoga in its context has diminished

dramatically in the 21st century. It could be said that in the past 20 years, and

especially in the current decade, academic literature on yoga has focused heavily on

validating and using parts of yoga but not so much so on understanding yoga as a

whole. This imbalance has affected how yoga is seen and practised. Clinical

publications, for instance, are objective and can often be grasped by reading an

abstract – which generally clarifies whether a technique is perceived as beneficial or

not – and thus easily incorporated and circulated as knowledge, while historical and

yogic publications are generally dense and require focused reading, deeper

engagement with yoga and are often not accessible to the general public or even the

average yoga practitioner. Importantly, contrary to historical researchers who are

required to have an in-depth understanding of yoga and its milieu, clinical researchers

are often specialists of their own field of knowledge, in the context of which yoga

practices are an isolated subject of enquiry. This is not to downplay the relevance of

each of these approaches to yoga research – we need more of both – but to ask which

has more influence on yoga and what are the consequences of this.

There is a clear correlation between the rise of clinical publications on yoga

(Chart 1.1) and the rapid growth of the ‘Yoga & Pilates Industry’ in the current decade,

from £760m in 2015 to £890m in 2020 (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2016, p. 9). This

correlation should not be teleologically interpreted as ‘modernity’ as this overlooks its

consequences for yoga. Besides, this approach suits the yoga industry, which caters

for the general yoga public who are driven by stereotypes (validated by clinical

publications and popularised by the media) of flexible, lean and healthy bodies and

who thus demand classes, products and teachers capable of fulfilling their

expectations. In this process, modern expressions of yoga might be shaped by those

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with limited or no yoga expertise but who have the power to commercially control

how yoga is to be interpreted, learned and taught.

1.2 Research Focus and Value of this Research

Although the history of yoga is intertwined with India’s long culture of royal

patronage, shifts of power and commercial privilege informing religious practices

(Pagel, 2017), yogis and their traditions seem to have had a significant amount of

power and agency over what they taught as yoga (Lamb, 2019). It is perhaps the first

time in yoga's history that knowledge about what is supposed to be yogic is flowing

not from yoga pundits to pupils but the other way around, although the ‘consumer’

of modern yoga is rarely a pupil.

As part of a commercial relationship, the general yoga student often knows

what to expect from a yoga class, how the yoga ‘service’ should be delivered and what

should be avoided in a particular class depending on the style on the menu.

Accordingly, yoga studios and organisations, as ‘suppliers’, develop yoga teacher

training (YTT) courses and hire teachers who can meet commercial demands. As a

consequence, the content of YTT courses emphasises postures (particularly those

which are more likely to be taught to beginners), body alignment, anatomy, how to

protect safe areas of the body and adapt postures to different body types, age and

health problems (Garfinkel, 2006). These, along with modules on business and

marketing, seem to be the major subjects of many YTT courses and workshops on

‘yoga’. Training modules in philosophy, history and less commercially appealing

practices appear to be mere fillers in YTT courses. In fact, these fillings later manifest

as other products of yoga education, which are sold separately: workshops, retreats

and classes promising a deeper experience or understanding of yoga. It is a clever

industry, and we cannot blame consumer culture for its impact on yoga. The general

public understandably has no a priori commitment to yoga heritage. Besides, the

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consumer market is behaving as Adam Smith described in 1776 and regulating itself

(1976). However, it is worth challenging whether the ‘hidden hand’ of the market and

those not knowledgeable about yoga should be allowed to determine what is to be

taught and practised as yoga. It is also necessary to examine the extent to which these

forces are impacting contemporary yoga and yoga teaching and what can be done to

promote more reflective yoga learning and teaching practices. We may find answers

to some of these questions from the yoga teachers.

Yoga teachers are in the intersection of overlapping worlds, navigating

between yoga 'doing' and yoga ‘selling’, negotiating – often heuristically – theory and

practice, learning and teaching, authenticity and innovation, within a demanding

industry that is worth billions but that rarely compensates them economically for their

hardship and investments. This research analyses the nature of the relationship

between yoga practitioners and teachers on the one hand and the yoga industry, the

media and academia on the other in a potentially post-lineage (Wildcroft, 2018) phase

of modern yoga and attempts to analyse the implications of this relationship for yoga

in general and yoga teaching in particular. It investigates whether yoga teaching has

become a new type of yoga, as many yoga students migrate to the front of yoga classes

to teach and may bring with them old consumer assumptions about yoga or

superimpose new ones.

By studying how yoga teachers teach and practise yoga and what informs their

learning and interpretations of the discipline, this research illuminates the impact of

academic and media articles on popular constructions of yoga learning and teaching.

It addresses questions that have not been central in academic research on yoga: How

do yoga teachers practise yoga? Does their yoga practice differ from those of general

yoga practitioners? Do they practise yoga in the same way as they teach it? How does

their yoga practice relate to that of premodern yogis? What informs their yoga

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teaching and practice? With regard to yoga practice, outside the clinical literature,

academics have mostly concentrated on the lives of yoga gurus and the general public

as followers or students of yoga, often assuming (as the yoga industry also does), that

yoga teachers are a variant of the latter, a more advanced practitioner (or niche

consumer). However, this work presents preliminary research on yoga teachers,

contending that between practitioners and gurus, there is a much more nuanced

reality taking shape and arguing that investigating yoga teachers’ experiences might

not only provide us with additional perceptions on the forces shaping contemporary

developments in yoga but also foster a discussion on yoga as a discipline in its own

right.

1.3 Overall Aim and Individual Research Objectives

The overall aim of this study is to advance knowledge of the forces shaping

contemporary yoga based on the experience of yoga teachers. However, to understand

yoga teachers’ perspectives, it is necessary to understand their context and what

informs their yoga learning, teaching and practice. The following specific objectives

form the foundations of this research:

1. Assess the major forces shaping yoga teaching and teachers in the UK.

2. Analyse critically the academic literature on yoga teachers and teaching and its

possible impact on contemporary perceptions of yoga.

3. Investigate yoga teachers’ understandings of yoga and yoga teaching to assess

what their lived experience tells us about the forces shaping contemporary yoga.

4. Demonstrate how and why the major forces might operate through yoga

teaching and identify emerging issues.

5. Evaluate the extent to which yoga teaching has become a new type of yoga in

the UK and suggest directions for further studies.

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This study combines mixed research methods to bring together a quantitative and

qualitative analysis of academic and media publications and a national survey of yoga

teachers. Objective 1 is addressed in section 1.1 and forms the basis for an extended

critical analysis of yoga teachers’ influences from academia, media and yoga industry

in the light of the findings presented in Chapters 4 and 5. Objective 2 is developed in

Chapter 2 through an in-depth literature review on yoga teachers and teaching in the

historical and clinical literature. Objective 3 relates to this project's main contribution

to knowledge, which is the collection of empirical data from 370 UK yoga teachers

through an anonymous national survey. The survey is introduced in Chapter 3 and

discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 6 directly addresses objective 5, based on

evidence from this study.

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Chapter 3: Research Methods
My initial critique of the forces shaping contemporary yoga and the lack of research

on yoga teachers and teaching guided me towards two interdependent approaches to

the research. First, departing from well-known forces informing yoga teaching, such

as academia, the general public and the yoga industry, it identifies major patterns in

publications and their correlations and impact on yoga. The research on global

academic and national UK newspaper articles was aimed at answering a number of

direct questions: What is being researched in academia as yoga? How does this

research resonate with the general public? And how does this influence developments

in yoga and yoga teaching? To approach these questions, I selected the Scopus

database, which is the largest database of multidisciplinary and international peer-

reviewed publications (Elsevier, 2019). The preliminary survey on peer-reviewed

articles involved the reading of 5,102 abstracts. For UK newspaper articles, I consulted

the LexisNexis (2019) and the content analysis was done through text-mining

although only the quantitative data fitted the scope of this survey. The findings from

both global academic and UK newspaper articles constitute the bulk of Chapter 1.

Second, I complemented my inquiry by conducting a national survey

investigating the lived experience of yoga teachers. The survey was distributed in the

form of a questionnaire as case studies and interviews would have demanded

considerably more time to implement. The questionnaire not only enabled me to study

a nationwide cross-sectional sample but also highlighted major trends and issues from

the start, which informed my simultaneous investigation of certain circumstances (e.g.

the influence of yoga organisations and academia). Based on my experience as a yoga

teacher, I developed the Questionnaire on the Practice of Yoga by Yoga Teachers

(QPYYT), which contains closed-ended questions presented mostly in Likert-type

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format. Most of the questions included a comment box for answers other than those

suggested and a ‘prefer not to say’ option for sensitive topics (See Appendix C).

Ethical approval was obtained from SOAS in March 2019 and I undertook Research

Integrity three months later. The questionnaire was pilot tested on 10 female yoga

teachers of various backgrounds to ensure face validity. This resulted in the deletion

of two questions on economic and political topics and the rewording or repositioning

of some sections. The final version of the QPYYT contains 26 questions structured in

five sections: (1) 'About your yoga teaching experience' asks participants about their

experience of practising, learning and teaching yoga and their relationship with

organisations, traditions and yoga teaching as a profession; (2) 'About your yoga

classes' contains questions on where, how often and what type of classes they teach,

as well as what informs their classes; (3) 'About the content of your classes' contains

comparative questions on how often certain elements featured in their typical yoga

class when they first started to teach and in the present; (4) 'About your own yoga

practice' enquires how, why, where and how often the respondents practise yoga,

what they practised (e.g. static postures, meditation) and what is commonly

experienced in their yoga practice; and (5) 'About you' asks sociodemographic

questions and ensures participants are from the UK. When Q25 ('In which region of

the UK do you live?') was not answered, the questionnaire was considered incomplete

and was excluded from the analysis.

Data collection took place from 10 July to 10 August 2019. Given that the

population of yoga teachers in the UK is unknown and yoga is supposedly self-

regulated by the yoga community, I started by inviting all organisations known to

offer some level of registration for yoga teaching in the UK. This initially included the

Independent Yoga Network (IYN), Yoga Alliance Professionals (YAP), the BWY and

its partners, Register of Exercise Professionals (REPs), Yoga Scotland and Yoga

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Alliance (USA), and later expanded to include as they appeared in the sample: Dru

Yoga, the British Council for Yoga Therapy, The Chartered Institute for the

Management of Sport and Physical Activity (CIMSPA), the Iyengar Yoga Association,

Art of Living, the Isha Foundation, Patanjali Yoga Peeth, the Traditional Yoga

Association and the Association for Yoga Studies. As part of the process of inviting

these organisations, I asked them to estimate the number of active yoga teachers

among their members to obtain a sense of the number of teachers in the country

and the size of sample required. In addition to this ‘top-down’ approach, I

contacted two insurance companies and over 130 randomly selected yoga studios with

an online presence via email or text message through their websites. These included

at least 10 random invitations to studios in each of the 12 regions of the UK and 10

additional invitations to studios in London. The random selection was carried out by

choosing the first 10 ‘valid’ odd entries (i.e. 1, 3, 5, 7…) for yoga teachers on Google

maps when searching those regions (e.g. ’yoga teacher in Northern Ireland’). To

comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU GDPR.org, 2019),

invitations were only issued if a non-personal email was provided on the website. This

limited the research considerably and skewed the data towards professional settings.

However, I encouraged those who replied to me to share the survey link with

yoga teachers they knew who were unlikely to be on Internet. I chose not to create a

dedicated link for the random sample as it would have differed from the official link

already in circulation through yoga organisations and might, therefore, have been

regarded as suspicious. The consequence of this choice was that it was not possible to

determine the response rate from random invitation. As an experimental, I issued an

offer of a £1 donation to charity to a London WhatsApp group for yoga teachers for

each answer received from their 103-member group. The dedicated link created for

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this purpose yielded 10 responses, and £10 was donated to Shelter England (Shelter,

2019).

Given the limitations of the survey, the estimated number of yoga teachers in

the country and the representativity of the sample cannot be confirmed. The former is

largely based on yoga organisations’ non-official accounts, which, for reasons of

confidentiality, I had no means to verify. Regarding the representativity of the sample,

the more cohesive groups naturally gathered more participation from their members.

Aware of the high risk of having one organisation dominating the survey, I made it

transparent to commercial rivals that competitors were actively engaging their

members. This, competitively motivated organisations to invite their members, which

increased the number of responses.

Furthermore, I avoided convenience sample. Except for those yoga teachers

already aware of my research at SOAS, I did not ask the department to circulate

invitations for the questionnaire among alumni as this could have compromised the

sample. Finally, it must also be considered that, for accessibility reasons, those away

from urban centres with no online presence, no commercial setting or no links to any

organisation may not be properly represented in the sample. Even though I made

extra efforts to contact religious and non-commercial teachers, responses from these

were low and the sample does not represent this segment of the population.

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Chapter 4: UK Yoga Teachers
With due attention to potential overlaps between organisations, the data from my

fieldwork suggest that the population of yoga teachers in the UK may be as high as

20,000. This is at least double the latest estimate by the BWY (Fox, 2005). Of the 433

responses to the QPYYT, only 370 were complete and could, thus, be considered for

this analysis. They originated from all 12 regions of the UK. The sample has overall

precision for a population of up 20,000 yoga teachers with a confidence level of 95%

and a confidence interval of 5.01. This chapter presents the major outcomes of the

survey. The findings are summarised in tables and relevant issues are discussed in

their respective sections. It is not possible to offer a thorough discussion of all the

major findings, but to address objectives 4 and 5 and the goal of this research, Chapters

5 and 6 identify and discuss the major relevant issues emerging from the data.

Although there is no consensus on such an approach among social scientists

(Jamieson, 2004; Norman, 2010), to facilitate the reading of the data without

compromising respondents’ answers, some responses were quantified based on their

weighted average.

4.1 Sociodemographic characteristics

Table 4.1 presents an overview of the profile of yoga teachers that emerged from the

sample. Of the participants, 89.19% identified as white, 86.76% as women, and 85.13%

were in their 40s or older; 75.67% were university educated, many (34.05% of the

sample) to postgraduate level. Considering the link between yoga in the UK and India,

it is surprising that only around 3% identified as Indian in origin. Only one teacher in

the sample identified as black (0.27%) and 10 (2.70%) described themselves as have a

mixed/multiple background. The majority of the sample described themselves as

living in England (83.22%) – mostly in London and the Southern regions – and
23
regarded the BWY, IYN and YAP as the main associations. Respondents from Wales

(3.78%) and Scotland (10.81%) demonstrated strong influences from Dru Yoga and

Yoga Scotland. Despite the vibrant online presence of yoga studios in Northern

Ireland, their participation in the sample was small (2.16%).

The religious distribution among the sample indicates that the majority of

respondents were either spiritual but not religious (SBNR) or had no religion (34.59%

and 28.92%, respectively). Since the last UK census did not account for SBNR (Office

for National Statistics, 2015), we cannot compare the number in this category to the

wider population. However, in the other categories, yoga teachers differed greatly

from the wider population. For instance, only about 15% of the sample declared

Christianity as their religion (around 60% identified as Christian in the UK census of

2011). Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism had greater representation among yoga

teachers than in the UK population at 6.5%, 4.6% and 1.9%, respectively, compared to

0.4%, 1.5% and 0.5% in the UK 2011 census (Office for National Statistics, 2015).

However, these comparisons should not be over-emphasised as the UK population

may have changed dramatically since 2011. It will be more productive to compare this

data with the findings of the UK 2021 census.

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25
4.2 Attitudes towards yoga, yoga learning and teaching

Table 4.2 shows that yoga teachers in the sample had significant experience, with 84%

of respondents practising yoga for at least 10 years and about 60% teaching yoga for

more than 5 years. In contrast with the rather ambiguous religious scenario presented

in Table 4.1, a significant majority of the sample (93.2%) viewed yoga either 'to a great

extent' or 'somewhat' as a spiritual practice in relation to their own concept of

spirituality, while only about a third saw it in the same way in relation to their

religious tradition. Besides, respondents were divided with regard to yoga as a secular

practice; about half considered yoga as secular either 'to a great extent' or 'somewhat',

which might reflect the fact that for those teaching yoga in non-religious settings – the

vast majority, according to Table 4.3 – yoga is largely taught in a secular manner.

Yoga was a secondary occupation for the largest group of the sample (about

42%). However, the second-largest group (about 35%) described yoga as their only

occupation. With regard to how participants had learnt to teach yoga as a profession,

90% had attended YTT courses. Almost half of the respondents were taught to teach

in a particular style of yoga and just under a fifth of the sample had received training

in yoga therapy. A minority of the sample reported being initiated on a yogic spiritual

path (7%), holding an academic degree on yoga (5.7%) or being self-educated in yoga

(5.7%). Just over a quarter of the respondents reported receiving individual guidance

from a yoga teacher or guru. Despite this, 52.4% identified themselves with a yoga

tradition. Although I deliberately did not define terms such as yoga, yoga class and

yoga tradition, with regard to the latter, people who replied 'yes' were asked to specify

the tradition. A significant majority (about 70%) of those who did so specified modern

yoga styles and teachers as their tradition, Iyengar being the most popular. The

remaining answers covered a broader milieu of traditions, such as Buddhism, Vedanta

or hatha yoga. One respondent replied in capital letters ‘for me yoga is yoga’.

26
 While 90% of the sample had completed a YTT course and 85% were registered

to a professional yoga organisation (Table 4.2), their relationship with such

organisations was unclear as they did not consider these organisations to be

influential with regard to their teaching (Table 4.3). Likewise, while just over a half

considered themselves traditional (Table 4.2), tradition and texts were highly rated

(Table 4.3; Fig. 5.2). Therefore, it did not seem appropriate to infer the market share of

yoga organisations based on their relationship with members, which may vary

considerably in nature and may represent an identity marker or statement – probably

less relevant than the organisations might suspect.

A large number of respondents (15% of the sample) were not linked to any

organisation. These were teachers who were not targeted but either entered the study

randomly or had informal links to yoga organisations, such as through social media.

Another possibility is that members left their organisations, which is supported by a

comment from one participant: ‘used to be BWY but left them’. There are many

reasons why someone would choose to leave an organisation or a tradition. They may

do so as a form of protest or as a result of disillusionment with professional or ethical

attitudes from the hierarchy, perhaps related to gurus and leaders involved in cases

of sexual or commercial abuse. In the case of BWY, the unpopular advance towards

the NOS seems to have been more bruising than expected. It is also likely that yoga

teachers became aware that they are not required to be affiliated to a yoga organisation

to be insured or that the so-called ‘national governing body of yoga’ is no more than

a marketing tool far from ensuring quality (Witts, 2016, p. 28). Thus, some teachers

may choose to take out their own insurance and establish their own yoga identity

independently of yoga organisations.

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28
4.3 Characteristics of and influences on yoga teaching

Table 4.3 demonstrates that most yoga teachers in the sample already work

independently. More than half reporting teaching 'always' or 'very often' in their own

rented room (54.8%), with the second-largest group doing so in their own home or

yoga studio (22.4%), followed by those who taught in gyms or fitness clubs (20%).

About the same number of teachers (around a fifth of the sample) reported teaching

'always' or 'very often' in their students’ homes (private lessons) or multi-style yoga

centres. A relatively small number of teachers taught in single-style yoga centres

(9.7%) and company offices (8.9%). A smaller group reported teaching 'always' or

'very often' in wellbeing or therapy centres or religious or spiritual centres (about 4%),

and even smaller minorities taught online (about 3%), at hospitals (about 2%) or in

prisons or rehab clinics (about 2%).

Overall, teachers in the sample taught very little. The largest group (35.95%)

taught up to two group classes a week in the past 6 months, while the second-largest

group (31.35%) taught three to five group classes a week. With regard to one-to-one

classes, the largest group taught no classes in the past 6 months (43.78%), while the

second-largest group (38.38%) taught between one and five one-to-one classes a

month in the same period. Besides group and one-to-one yoga classes, about half of

the sample had been involved in teaching a yoga workshop in the past 12 months. The

majority were not engaged in other yoga-related activities such as teaching on YTT

courses or at retreats or festivals, writing books or articles or recording yoga content.

When presented with a list of 18 factors that may have influenced their classes,

the highest importance was given to (1) 'needs and limitations of my students',

followed by (2) 'personal insight based on my experience', (3) 'guidelines from my

tradition or style', (4) 'traditional yoga texts' and (5) 'yoga workshops'. Moderate

importance was given to (6) 'guidelines from yoga organisations', such as registries,

29
(7) 'contemporary yoga books' and (8) 'academic publications on yoga'. Low

importance was given to (9) 'requirements from the place where I teach', (10) 'yoga

retreats' and (11) 'popular yoga scholars’. The remaining options were considered very

low in importance or not important at all, including, in descending order, (12) 'yoga

videos', (13) 'popular Indian gurus', (14) 'popular yoga teachers', (15) 'influences from

outside yoga', (16) 'yoga magazines and blogs', (17) 'trips to India' and (18) 'popular

Western gurus'.

30
31
4.4 Attitudes towards and outcomes from own yoga practice

Table 4.4 reveals that yoga teachers in the sample declared themselves to be highly

committed to their yoga practice. The majority practise yoga every day (35.95%),

followed by those who practise 5 days a week (24.05%) and 6 days a week (15.41%). A

significant number of teachers reported practising their yoga 'always' or 'very often'

alone (83%) and at home (88%). Around 40% of the sample practised yoga 'always' or

'very often' at yoga venues such as studios and community halls, and about the same

number practised yoga by attending other teachers’ classes. More than a quarter of

the teachers in the sample, practised their yoga while teaching their students. Some

teachers also considered their own teaching to be a kind of yoga practice (16.3%) or

perhaps another aṇga of yoga, one comment implied: ‘teaching is not my yoga

practice, but it is in itself a practice, a separate one’.

The major motivations for yoga practice among the sample were (1) a personal

interest in yoga practice, (2) a desire for health and wellbeing and (3) a wish to deepen

their knowledge about themselves. Other motivational factors were (4) lifestyle, (5) a

personal interest in yoga philosophy and (6) a spiritual path. Less important were the

ideas that (7) yoga was their destiny or (8) a way to achieve liberation. Of little or no

importance were (9) earning money, (10) uncertainty and (11) to acquire yogic powers.

32
33
4.5 Attitudes towards yoga teaching versus own yoga practice

According to the comparative Table 4.5, on average, respondents gave the same high

priority to static postures, dynamic sequences and breath control in their teaching and

their own practice. Teachers also declared that their current yoga teaching was

somewhat more focused on yoga than when they started to teach, demonstrating that

more elements were incorporated or developed in their teaching over time. This may

be a result of their becoming more experienced in teaching and practising yoga and,

therefore, more confident with the dynamics of teaching, or it may be due to an

organic effort to practise yoga more thoroughly. The latter explanation is supported

by the fact that in their personal practice, yoga teachers tend to omit elements not

traditionally relevant to yoga and focus largely on those elements that are relevant to

yoga (see p.p. 2). For instance, in contrast to their teaching, respondents’ yoga practice

includes more meditation, cleansing techniques, mantras, yogic seals and the study of

yoga texts. Furthermore, in their practice, they include less warm-ups for the joints

and significantly less relaxation techniques.

However, these are mere speculations at this point as there are practical factors

at play that could easily explain these differences. For instance, warm-ups for joints

may be used by teachers to minimise the risk of injuries to students, which makes

professional sense, while, in their own practice, teachers can choose to do only what

their body needs. In this respect, it is expected that yoga teachers have a very tuned

relationship with their bodies. On the other hand, relaxation is habitually practised at

the end of a physically demanding class, which may not be the case in personal

practice. Furthermore, based on my teaching experience, very few teachers can

practise yoganidrā productively by themselves.

34
35
4.6 Outcomes from own yoga practice

For the section of the questionnaire related to yoga teachers' experiences resulting

from their yoga practice, depicted in Table 4.6, I suggested 22 outcomes related to

various yogic traditions (without using their technical names), including outcomes

often shared by the media and the yoga industry, to obtain a sense of perceptions

among respondents. The most frequent outcomes highlighted by yoga teachers in the

sample were (1) 'physically energised', (2) 'mindfulness', (3) 'enhanced clarity of mind',

(4) 'a feeling of loving kindness towards others', (5) 'a feeling of loving kindness

towards themselves' and a (6) 'spaciousness feeling'. With the exception of the first,

which could be seen as a general outcome of postural yoga, the subsequent outcomes

are traditionally linked to or popularised as Buddhist practices. These are also

mainstream outcomes popularised in the media, academia and the yoga industry.

Less mainstream outcomes, such as (11) the haṭhayogic 'mindless state' or (19)

the tantric 'embodiment of the Divine', were not emphasised by the teachers in the

sample. Outcomes that had a bad connotation in a yoga context were also ranked low.

These included (20) 'flashback of unpleasant memories', (21) 'physically drained' and

(22) 'sexual arousal'. To this list of outcomes, some teachers added feeling ‘calm’,

‘bliss’ and in ‘peace’, while one added ‘emotional release – tears’ and another said that

‘many of the questions make no sense’.

36
37
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