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How the yoga community is becoming more accessible to black people

Zakiya Bishton
Zakiya Bishton

When I first started doing yoga and Pilates in my early teens, what I admired most about the instructors was the fact they were tall, thin, toned and bendy – everything I thought I was not.

During lockdown, when gyms and yoga studios closed down, I turned to the internet for my yoga workouts and began to notice something the teenage me had somehow missed: that yoga in the UK is extremely white and middle class. A 2019 survey by the British Medical Journal reinforces this observation after they found 87 per cent of yoga practitioners were women, 91 per cent were white and 71 per cent had a degree.

At £20 a class, yoga is largely inaccessible to people without a considerable amount of disposable income. Zakiya Bishton, founder of Mindwalk Yoga, a virtual yoga studio led by a team of black women, says: “We know that disproportionately the black community in the UK and ethnic minority communities generally tend to earn less or be doing the key worker roles. All these kinds of things are barriers to entry to any kind of wellness activity.”

But now some yoga studios are trying to change this. MoreYoga, which has 33 studios across London, is advertised as a reasonably priced option for aspiring yogis, a conscious decision by the company's founder Shamir Sidhu. MoreYoga also offers scholarships for teachers of colour to get training through the company.

“We set out to achieve more representation by making yoga a lot more affordable for people,” Shamir says. “It's just normal people from London here.” He notes that, at £9.99 for a class, both the teachers and clients have to forgo some of the perks that come with expensive classes. At the more lavish studios I’ve been to there might be a café, showers, several classes going on at the same time, a smorgasbord of retreats on offer and kit being sold at reception. At MoreYoga “students have to sacrifice on showers, fluffy towels, scented candles – and the teachers have to sacrifice hitting the high-end pay”.

But even if the price is right, a lack of BAME representation among the teachers also plays a big part in how welcome black people feel. People like to see themselves in the teachers and students. “Most people who haven’t done yoga before think it isn’t for them because the representation of yoga in the West is a white blonde skinny woman wearing leggings," says Zakiya.

Ava Riby-Williams, a yoga instructor of black and Indian heritage who has been teaching for six years agrees. “There has been more effort over the last year, since the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, but there's still a lot of inequity,” she says. She also offers classes to refugees and people of colour to give them the tools to process trauma. “When I started teaching, I was one of the only black yoga teachers that I knew in my training and there weren't many people of colour.

“The way yoga is taught and shared is from Indian culture. And even with that, as I was doing my teacher training, at certain times, when I pronounced names of the poses in the way my Indian grandma would, I’d be told by the white trainer that it was wrong. As an Indian, I found that racially offensive,” she says.

Ava Riby-Williams
Ava Riby-Williams

The result is that black people are also missing out on the mental health benefits that come with practices such as yoga.

The charity Rethink Mental Illness states that, compared to white people, black women are more likely to deal with anxiety and depression and black men are more likely to experience psychosis. Despite this, white people are more likely to receive treatment for mental health issues than BAME people and see better outcomes.

A study by New York University Grossman School of Medicine found that 54 per cent of participants with an anxiety disorder who practised yoga met the criteria for a significant level of improved symptoms. While yoga isn’t the only solution to a complex problem, it can contribute to better mental wellbeing.

As a person who used the pandemic to deal with my anxiousness head-on, I realised that practising yoga alongside other treatments contributed to me feeling as if I will be leaving the pandemic a better version of myself than I was before. And it’s these sort of scenarios that have led to the way Zakiya approaches Mindwalk Yoga.

“I felt like I needed to create a space where black women feel like they can prioritise their wellbeing in an environment where they're not going to be challenged and they're going to feel like they’re resonating with the person who's trying to help them heal, ” explains Zakiya.

But Zakiya, Ava and Shamir all agree there’s a lot still to be done before yoga feels like a welcoming place for people of colour. “They’ve made an effort to be diverse,” she says. But to make a real impact, more diversity is needed in the leadership teams.

“If it's one dimensional then you're just not going to serve the diverse community that is accessing what you're offering.”