Yoga Workshop: The Body Is Not A Machine: A Workshop to Disrupt Capitalist Thinking in Yoga

This March, I was invited to provide a Knowledge Development Workshop for Yoga Outreach. Yoga Outreach is a registered charity located in the Lower Mainland and Victoria and their mission to expand access to trauma informed yoga programs to support healing and connection.

I was invited to provide a 4-hour workshop via Zoom to 13 registered attendees on the topic of disrupting capitalist thinking in yoga.

Too often we are sold yoga as a way to help us be more productive, but the intention and purpose of yoga wasn’t to keep us more obsessed with external markers of validation. 

Yoga Workshop on Spiritual Capitalism

This 4-hour workshop was an intersectional exploration into the ways in which capitalist thinking shows up in our yoga practice, both as a student and as a teacher, and provided a decolonized perspective on how we, as yoga practitioners living in a modern society, can reclaim our yoga practice with integrity. I shared how modern narratives of yoga have shifted over time, and facilitated group discussion where we critically engaged in concepts like spiritual capitalism, spiritual bypassing, and hustle culture. There will be time for breakout sessions, group discussions, journaling exercises, and light movement. 

This workshop was open to yoga seekers of all levels that have questions about the commodification of yoga and spirituality, the intersection of wellness and business, and how to be an anti-capitalist in our yoga practice. 

This workshop has been the culmination of the past few years of research and personal rumination. When we first become aware of the concept of decolonization and yoga, it’s generally a Tower moment in our practice. The Tower card in tarot is an utter wipe out, cataclysmic shift… and sometimes we need that push. We need that change in our perspective that can leave us feeling naked and raw.

But don’t forget.

After the Tower comes the Star.

This workshop was intended to focus on capitalist thinking in yoga as a way to decolonize yoga. I am proud of this workshop for providing a vital perspective on recognizing the cold, hard truth that commodified yoga isn’t just the woman in designer yoga sets, but the New Age hippie who can’t source their knowledge on chakras but believes they know what they are talking about is as much complicit to how we commodify spirituality.

Modern spirituality is a damning indictment on how toxic New Age spirituality has normalized cultural colonialism in how we consume our spirituality through objects, adornment, and ideas. And even decolonizing, like anti-capitalism, are all trends that can be co-opted by the market.

The first day of the workshop was a focus on how we got here and the second day was a focus on what do we know. This involved a discussion on accountability and transformative justice.

For anyone interested in collaborating with me on this workshop for their organization, let’s chat!

Written By: Irene Lo