What's It Really All About? "Is yoga a religion?"

"If I practice Christianity can I practice yoga?" "If I practice Islam can I practice yoga?" "If I am animist can I practice yoga?"

People first started asking me this question when I was working in Burma in the IDP Camps (camps for internally displaced people). There I was working with Muslim Rohingya women on the West coast and Christian (mostly Baptist) women from minority groups in Kachin in the North. I was also working in Shan state (East & North) with women practicing Chinese folk religions and Karen - Pwo, Sgae, Bwe women from the South East, Kayin state, who practiced a unusual non-predominant form of Buddhism.

Returning to the UK over the last six years this question has come up again a number of times from different students. Often it comes from a place of genuine curiosity. Sometimes it comes from concern. Occasionally, it comes from fear.

It's an important question, because if we don't understand what yoga is, it's easy to mistake it for something it isn't.

Yoga isn't asking you to believe anything.

At its heart, yoga is not a religion. It doesn't ask you to subscribe to a creed, adopt a deity, or replace your existing faith.

Rather, yoga is a philosophy and a practice that asks timeless questions:

Who am I?

What is consciousness?

Why do I suffer?

How do I meet reality more truthfully?

These questions belong to humanity, not to any one religion.

Throughout history there have been Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus and people of no religious faith at all who have practiced yoga. For many, yoga deepens their existing faith because it cultivates presence, compassion, humility, discernment and embodiment.

Many organised religions have been deeply intertwined with political power, empire, patriarchy and social control. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism...even secular ideologies... have all been used by states to legitimise authority, justify war, establish social hierarchies and regulate behaviour.

But it's also true that each of those traditions has contained counter-cultural, mystical and liberatory movements that challenged the very institutions they emerged from. Christian mystics, Sufi Islam, Bhakti poets, Buddhist reformers, and tantric practitioners often stood in tension with institutional religion.

The Bhagavad Gītā (one of texts in yoga's historical cannon) can be seen to be reinforcing varṇa-dharma (social duty according to one's place in society). Arjuna is, after all, persuaded to fulfil his role as a warrior.

Many historians argue that the Gītā reflects a period when Brahmanical traditions were responding to the growing influence of renunciant movements (early Buddhism, Jainism, Śramaṇa traditions) that encouraged withdrawal from worldly life.

One influential interpretation is that the Gītā says:

You don't have to renounce the world. You can attain liberation through fulfilling your social duties without attachment to their fruits.

That can certainly be understood politically. It re-legitimises participation in society rather than wholesale renunciation.

Ancient yoga and control

The yoga we are often told is "ancient" by yoga teachers wasn't a single coherent tradition.

There were: Vedic ritualists; Upaniṣadic philosophers; Buddhist meditators; Jain ascetics; Śaiva tantrikas; Nāth yogis; Householder traditions; Renunciant traditions

Many of these groups disagreed profoundly.

Some rejected caste.

Some reinforced it.

Some rejected ritual.

Others embraced it.

So "ancient yoga" wasn't one thing.

The current Indian government (led by Narendra Modi) has very deliberately positioned yoga as a symbol of Indian - and specifically Hindu - national identity...

International Yoga Day.

State-sponsored yoga events.

The rhetoric of yoga as India's gift to the world.

Many scholars have argued this forms part of a broader Hindutva project, in which Hindu cultural practices become synonymous with Indian national identity.

The Origins of the Practice

When we look deep at the origins of this practice it has been suggested by many scholars that yoga came out of the Indus Valley Civilisation - most of which now sits in modern day Pakistan and northeast Afghanistan.

People often point to the famous Pashupati seal from the Indus Valley Civilisation, showing a seated figure that some interpret as being in a yogic posture or asana.

Pashupati Seal - 4,300-year-old carved stone artifact discovered at Mohenjo-daro

The problem is...

We don't actually know.

The Indus script remains undeciphered.

We don't know what that figure represents.

Ironically, the thing historians are pretty confident about is that modern postural yoga isn't particularly ancient.

Scholars like Mark Singleton, James Mallinson and Jason Birch have shown that much of what we practice today developed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through an interaction of: medieval haṭha yoga, Indian physical culture, British military gymnastics, Scandinavian gymnastics and bodybuilding.

So the "ancient unbroken lineage" narrative simply isn't historically accurate.

Like all enduring human traditions, both religion and yoga have been shaped by politics, culture and power. Throughout history they have been used both to liberate and to control. They have inspired profound compassion and justified profound oppression. Understanding this complexity allows us to engage with these traditions critically rather than romantically.

Yoga & Religion

Yoga and religion are not inherently incompatible, but tension arises when either one can become dogmatic.

If a yoga teacher insists that students must accept tantric metaphysics or Hindu cosmology as unquestionable truth, yoga begins to function like a belief system just like any other.

Likewise, if a religious community teaches that any contemplative practice outside its own tradition is inherently dangerous, the door to curiosity closes.

Dogma exists on both sides.

Yoga, in its truest sense, invites the opposite.

In my opinion yoga should be an enquiry.

So what is our yoga practice all about - this sādhana thing?

The Sanskrit word sādhana simply means spiritual practice.

From a tantric perspective, sādhana is the gradual process of aligning our internal world, our beliefs, assumptions, emotional reactions and stories.

Aligning with reality itself.

We all live inside mental constructs. We interpret the world through conditioning, memories, fears and expectations.

Sādhana is the gentle, courageous work of noticing those patterns and asking:

"Is this actually true?"

Over time, the stories that no longer serve us begin to fall away.

In its simplest form, sādhana asks us to observe without immediately judging or labelling what we experience. It asks us to become curious before becoming certain.

In non-dual traditions this is described as surrendering our stories to reality itself.

Many religious traditions would describe something remarkably similar as "surrendering to the will of God".

The language differs yet the orientation is surprisingly familiar.

Holding space isn't passive.

People often imagine holding space, as a yoga teacher, means simply being nice. It isn't.

Holding space is an active expression of clarity and compassion.

It means creating an environment that is safe enough for people to explore themselves honestly, while also introducing enough challenge... tapas, the transformative heat of practice (for growth to occur).

As teachers, we are not responsible for changing people.

Nor are we responsible for convincing anyone to adopt our worldview.

Our role is to cultivate the conditions in which people can experience themselves more deeply.

What they discover there belongs to them.

Teaching philosophy, not belief.

As a yoga teacher trainer, I believe there's an important distinction.

There is a difference between teaching yoga philosophy and teaching philosophy as unquestionable truth.

When I teach concepts such as sādhana, tapas, non-duality or Tantra I teach them as part of yoga's rich philosophical tradition.

I don't ask anyone to believe them.

I invite people to explore them.

To question them.

To test them against their own experience.

Healthy spiritual practice should strengthen your capacity for discernment, not replace it.

The purpose of yoga is not to tell you what to think.

It is to help you to ask the questions, to see more clearly.

So what's it really all about?

Ultimately, yoga (in my opinion) is not about becoming more spiritual.

It is not about collecting profound experiences.

It is not about becoming more flexible.

It is not even about becoming a "better" person.

Yoga is a lifelong practice of becoming increasingly more honest.

Honest enough to recognise when our stories no longer fit reality.

Courageous enough to let them go.

(That is the really hard bit! Trust me I know from experience).

Compassionate enough to meet ourselves without judgement.

Whether you describe that as awakening, surrendering to reality, following the will of God, or simply living with greater integrity is entirely up to you.

For me, yoga has never been about telling people what to believe.

It has always been about helping people cultivate the awareness to discover truth for themselves.

And perhaps that is what genuine spiritual practice has always been about.