I've got 25 Substack drafts

and this ain't one.

For me, yoga used to be modest and humbling. Then it caught the global trade winds and Yogaland became glamoured by celebrities, Hollywood (how many of you found yoga through Madonna’s toned arms?) and once in a lifetime retreats in Bali (still never been). It’s had the same plastic coating as everything else. I love to study stuff from multiple angles, see what’s lurking under those rocks over there. Turns out… there is a vast ecosystem of untold yoga treasures one could never possibly decode in a lifetime. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t keep up turning rocks.

In those early yoga years, my mind became as malleable as my hypermobile body. I was able to put perspective around my crippling social anxiety and enter into the world like I hadn’t been able to before. I hadn’t changed as such, I was just less paralysed by the thoughts of the worst case scenario coming to life. Becoming a teacher helped me overcome my fear of public speaking. It’s still not my favourite but it’s empowering and ultimately worth it. Through yoga I’ve met absolutely wonderful teachers from all walks of life, in all corners of the globe. The ones that remind you that normal people are ultimately good, despite the horror you scroll through on your phone everyday. I’ve taken their classes, learned about yoga from their perspective and I haven’t ever attended a celebrity yoga training, retreat or workshop.

We all love to ogle celebrity land, it seems (sur)real. What, or who, we ogle is not the thrill though is it? It’s the absurdity and the spectacle. It tucks itself into a little pouch in our minds “they are just like me”. We think we know them because we see them so often but in reality we don’t know them at all. What they give us is the projection of our own desires and fears. Carefully curated to inflict relatability. Then we pull back the curtain (nee scandal) and there’s the wizard. Just an ordinary guy with some tools that grew out out of hand.

As part of the yoga journey, my mother and I went to India to see what yoga was like at the source. Western Yogis love to take the mick out of teachers travelling to India. Virtue signalling isn’t it? Living in the remote northern climes of Scotland, we sense there is something about places largely unhomogenised by globalisation that shapes things. We wanted to see where yoga was borne. An understanding that can only come from being submerged in it. We travelled round mainly sleepy rural places and the yoga we found was of the same modesty that I had first experienced as a teen. We found folk that reminded us of home, that cared about the human. Others experiencing tough lives but the humility to remain honest even though being dishonest would have increased their financial return. There were simple yoga classes on the rooftops in Goa. Meditation, pranayama, asana and wonderful home cooked meals from the local spice garden in the mountains of Munnar. We lived in a treehouse for those days, respecting natures, it is illegal to clear the trees, and the teacher's parents had been yogis. He was so proud when he talked about his family and his work.

There were many challenging experiences, I won’t romanticise it all. Our experience throughout India was largely segregated by gender and just like at home the women undertook much of the labour we saw, which I’m sure would be unpaid. In our day to day we were treated with respect.

These memories are a little melancholy. This was January of 2019, life was on an upward trajectory, I was working on community renewables projects, it was filling my cup. We were privileged to be able to travel. Everything changed a year later in March 2020 whereby indelible scars of Covid left our communities and society more polarised than ever. Scars, we haven’t massaged out yet.

My covid schedule, like so many others, was unrelenting. Teaching yoga and pilates online 5 days a week, full-time job through the day, teacher to my neurodivergent child and full-time masters student. Initially those Covid times brought us together but I fear the whiplash has made us more selfish. Log on to any social media platform and you’ll be sold course in anything you want. You’ll get rich doing it too. Online resources are not finite, there’s room for everyone. But these resources come at enormous cost. The rise of AI has sucked the fathoms of human knowledge into its digitised brain cells, stored in vast arrays of servers, in racks by the tens of thousands. Everyone is an instant expert in any subject they wish. Yoga flows, philosophy sprinkled in anywhere, scripts for meditations and yoga nidra. No one needs integrity or depth, and truthfully no one has ever asked. As an experiment, I did a 200 hour yoga training through covid and it took me 15 hours. The shiny badge I get to wear is as meaningless as it is ubiquitous. Yoga can make you money, but when it’s embedded in the same money making forms as other globalised businesses there can only ever be more losers than winners. The outside economy will always influence your business positively or negatively. Businesses that survive, must, sooner or later scale or reinvent themselves. Take yoga studios, they had to run teacher trainings to keep the doors open, but the problem is, that model ate all the yoga classes for the folks that just wanted to come to class… However, if fighting my way through a tiny local economy has taught me anything, it’s that evolution doesn’t always follow a growth trajectory. The skill is being able to identify a niche, without turning into another 'find your niche' guru. So for this autumn, I’ll test my theory out. I am going to do a simple series. Yoga for people who are satisfied with quality, sustainable basics. This will be available for Substack subscribers, wellness club members and folks on my email list that want to join in and it won’t be busting the bank.

Stay tuned for news.