The Forgetting: Yoga’s Western Expansion

There was a time when yoga meant very few things. A teacher. A room. A lineage passed down through bodies that knew what they were carrying. You learned what was there to be learned, and you learned it slowly.

That has changed. Beautifully, messily, and completely.

The Great Unfolding

Over the last ten years, yoga in the West has become almost unrecognisable to the traditions it came from, and perhaps that is the point. Where once it lived in ashrams and small studios with doors that stuck in the humidity, it now fills gyms, corporate wellness programmes, hospital waiting rooms, and Instagram feeds. It has been absorbed, adapted, translated, sometimes distorted, and often, genuinely loved.

Is this a good thing?

It depends who you ask. And more importantly, where in their body they are asking from.

What the Expansion Gave Us

Yoga reached people it was never meant to reach, people who would never have walked into a traditional studio. People who carry trauma in places they didn’t yet have language for. Yoga became something you could find when you were lost, not when you were already on a path. There is something quietly sacred about that.

The nervous system conversation, which barely existed in western yoga ten years ago, has entered the mainstream. People now understand that what we call yoga is not really exercise. It is regulation. It is the body remembering how to feel safe inside itself. That was always what yoga was, even when we didn’t have those words.

What We Lost Along the Way

But something else happened too. The more yoga spread, the more it was reshaped to fit what western audiences were comfortable digesting. It became faster. It became fitness-adjacent. It became something you could sweat through and then move on with your day, checking it off like a workout.

Vinyasa flow became the default. And there is nothing wrong with flow, when it is what you need. But when flow becomes the only language yoga speaks, we lose something older. Something quieter. Hatha yoga, the pure, deliberate, hold-it-until-something-shifts practice, got pushed to the margins. The practice that asks you to stay. To be bored. To be uncomfortable. To be present without the cushion of constant movement.

Hatha doesn’t let you hide in motion.

Back to the Source

I don’t think the expansion of yoga has been the problem. I think the forgetting has. We forgot that yoga was never about how many times you could link breath to movement. It was about what happened when you stopped moving altogether.

The chakras understood this. Each energy centre in the body responds not to more, but to presence. To stillness. To the willingness to inhabit yourself fully, without performance, without reaching for the next thing.

That is what yoga was always pointing toward. Not the flow. The finding.