It’s been several years since South Asian yoga practitioners opened a dialogue around what has become the status quo in yoga—its lack of color.

　　Although the numbers of those from traditionally marginalized communities who practice and teach yoga have been increasing, there remains considerable underrepresentation, particularly in the Black community.

　　According to Yoga Alliance’s recent survey published in November, Black teachers and studio owners make up a fraction of a fraction of the yoga space.  Although the number of yoga studios owned by Black yoga teachers has been on the rise, we’re still far more underrepresented than makes sense proportionate to the larger population.

　　As the founder and owner of a yoga studio and a Black woman, I ask, “Black folks, why aren’t we owning more yoga studios?”

　　After speaking with a number of Black teachers, the answer appears to be, “Because we don’t want to.”

　　A Community-Centered Model I founded my studio in 2020 in the Houston Southside, a traditionally Black part of the city, to give displaced yogis a temporary home. I can attest to the difficulties of trying to operate a business in an increasingly crowded yoga space. Little by little, students and trainees who had never missed a class when I was teaching in an affluent part of town became less willing to make the trek to the new space. Far removed from where other yoga studios were located, my studio was failing because I was drawing on my former yoga community when I really needed to be focusing on the people right in my neighborhood.

　　Accessible yoga is about location, motivation, and connection as much as it is about adaptive shapes, tiered pricing, and inclusive spaces, suggests Dr. Gail Parker, psychologist, certified yoga therapist, author, and President of the Black Yoga Teachers’ Alliance Board of Directors from 2020 through 2023. “We can teach wherever we are,” she says. Dr. Parker finds that many Black yoga teachers create yoga spaces within their neighborhoods—churches, community centers, beauty salons, homes, online, and other collective spaces that don’t require that people travel outside their communities to practice.

　　Offering yoga in these “nontraditional” spaces can actually be considered more traditional than studios, according to the indigenous South Asian framework of yoga, where the practice has historically been shared in cultural centers, schools, ashrams, and other places where community is centered.

　　Reggie Hubbard, founder of Maryland-based Active Peace Yoga, offers a mixture of online and in-person yoga practice, meditation, breathwork, sound, and wisdom in service to collective well-being. Although some of his in-person offerings take place in a studio, his aspirations don’t include owning a traditional space.

　　“I may open a studio in the model of a retreat center that teaches embodied practice or activist training,” says Hubbard, who is a presenter at Kripalu, Sedona Yoga Festival, and BhaktiFest. “But I’ll likely never own a traditional studio because it would take me away from my mission of taking yoga and peace practices to non-traditional communities primarily.”

　　Community Can Be Different Than Inclusivity Inclusion is not the same as feeling that you belong. Teaching through the lens of community repair requires operating very differently.

　　Studios and spaces owned and/or operated by Black teachers often focus on advocacy, community events, and rest. Ashe Yoga, the virtual studio I founded in 2021, was largely run by a small group of dedicated volunteers with all funds directed to the teachers. It has now transitioned into a yoga collective in which the teachers manage and run the offerings on a donation or sliding-scale basis while equitably profit sharing. Operating in this way has nurtured a community that is looking for people who think like them, look like them, and care about what is important to them.

　　Oya Heart Warrior, creator of U.K.-based Unapologetically Black Yoga, argues for the importance of a practice that celebrates our bodies and wanting to be together. “Black people are often repelled by a yoga that tries to bend us into performative poses wearing tight, expensive, clothing,” she says. In contrast, Warrior describes  her offerings as “a tender practice of moving meditation and collective rest, to mobilize our joy and metabolize our pain, without a mat or linear movement.”

　　As Black yogis search for community online, it makes sense that her approach has amassed a virtual following of more than 53,000 in the last year alone.

　　Tiffany Baskett agrees with the need for spaces where Black bodies are affirmed and accepted, minds are shaped, and souls liberated. The Atlanta-based owner of True Align Wholistic Life runs a multidisciplinary studio that’s only five minutes from where she went to high school. Baskett bridges working in the community with studio ownership.

　　“I get the opportunity to share the healing powers of yoga in the place where we feel most comfortable—our own backyards,” she says. “Overall, it’s worth it to me to help create a ripple for generational healing,” says Baskett.

　　The Quest for Community For many teachers from traditionally marginalized backgrounds, sharing yoga strategically within the community is in service to personal and collective liberation.

　　“Belonging, community, and uplift are exactly why Black Yoga Teachers Alliance Facebook group was established in 2009, and why it was incorporated as a membership organization in 2016,” says Dr. Parker. “Although it is documented that Black yoga practitioners in the United States have been around since the early 1920s, we haven’t always been acknowledged. The Facebook group and organization were formed to create a sense of community in response to Black yoga teachers’ feelings of isolation and feeling invisible in the larger yoga community.”

　　When the question “What is your biggest challenge as a yoga teacher?” was posed in the BYTA Facebook group, the overwhelming response was the feeling of isolation. Baskett asks, “If I didn’t open a studio as a Black woman who cares about Black people, who would?”

　　Providing for ourselves has historically been a motivating factor to organize and create within the Black community. Yet it could also be a contributing factor to the lower numbers of studio ownership.

　　The Role of Religion Culturally, there are still problematic conflations of yoga as religion or as a function of religious dogma that preclude many from practicing yoga.

　　But is yoga synonymous with hinduism and is hinduism the foundation of yoga?

　　“Yoga predates organized religion,” explains Anjali Rao, a yoga educator and Board President of the Accessible Yoga Association. The recontextualizing of yoga’s expansiveness, a movement being led by South Asian voices, is helpful for Black yoga teachers who are working toward an inclusive lens of sharing the teachings of yoga.

　　As the American Black  community is 76 percent Christian, Black yoga teachers often find themselves as educators about yoga’s connection to a broader spirituality and philosophy that is inclusive of any religious practice. Arguments and accusations of blasphemy regarding teaching yoga sutras rather than Bible scripture are rife within the Black yoga community. Clarifying yogic studies as philosophical study helps bring spaciousness to a constrictive understanding of yoga.

　　Rao asserts that the “religious fundamentalism prevalent in yoga spaces should be dismantled.” Her work includes offering critical indigenous insight into the yoga stories and histories that have been obscured by Brahminism, heteronormative patriarchy, and colonization.

　　Isolation Takes Many Forms The isolation experienced by people of color in yoga spaces can be seen as parallel to the isolation of the Black population on a larger scale. Historically and statistically, the Black population faces inequitable access to healthcare, education, and land. Because structural racism exists, reduced access to desirable land ownership also exists, thanks to redlining and eminent domain policies, particularly in wealthier neighborhoods.

　　A sobering statistic from the 1990 census showed that 78 percent of White people lived in predominantly White neighborhoods. That shifted to 44 percent as of the 2020 consensus (Washington Post), yet affluence remains largely unchanged. Black Americans represent just 1.7 percent of the population in the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country (Bloomberg).

　　Studios usually lie within wealthier neighborhoods, with some intentional exceptions such as Brick City Yoga in St. Louis and The Tree Yoga Cooperative in South Los Angeles. Because affluence and race are, unfortunately, still tethered, yoga studios and practitioners of color are driven apart.

　　When Black yoga teachers and practitioners teach at studios, they are largely going outside of their communities—both in terms of location and identity—to practice and teach. At a recent training I attended, a yoga teacher lamented that most yoga teachers of color can’t afford to live in the areas in which they teach. This creates other problems that call out traditional social positioning of power, such as the potential for yoga teachers being seen as service personnel. It also creates a vacuum of yoga intellect being extracted from one part of the city into another.

　　Systemic Inequality Plays a Role Brooklyn-based Mia James, a yoga teacher and financial wellness consultant, cites access to capital as a primary barrier to entry for owning a yoga studio. Studio owners have to be willing to not make money for a long while. “Small businesses don’t really make money for the first five years,” explains James. “Not everyone can afford not to pay themselves, which is common, because they pay the team first.”

　　For Black yoga teachers who do endeavor to own studios, lack of generational wealth leads to the necessity to find funding, which introduces other unfortunate statistics. Black business owners are less likely to receive funding from financial institutions, according to the Federal Reserve. Of the $215 billion in venture capital raised by companies in 2022, just one percent of those startup dollars was allocated to Black founders, according to Crunchbase.

　　James states that it is essential that studio owners, like any small business owner, find other sources of revenue to sustain the business. “One has to understand what is the real cost of running the business and how one supports oneself when the revenue isn’t coming in.” For a community that is already at a disadvantage for access to funding, the quest for financial security could mean finding an alternative method of delivering the teachings.

　　The Realities of Studio Ownership The typical studio model is not one to which all aspire, especially when it’s not necessary to share the practice of yoga.

　　“I feel that some of the joy would get mired in the grind of making the rent, paying a staff, etc,” states Ashley Rideaux, a sought-after LA-based teacher trainer for Center for Yoga LA and creator of her own online platform.

　　“Owning a traditional yoga studio has never been of interest to me,” she explains. “I love showing up for students, holding space, and teaching. Of course, there is still the business side of things when it comes to running my own online platform, but the overhead isn’t overwhelming, which means I am able to offer my classes at a rate that is more accessible than the average studio.”

　　This is hugely important to Rideaux, as yoga has become more and more cost prohibitive throughout the years.

　　Crystal Wickliffe intentionally shares yoga through offering retreats instead of working at a yoga studio, much less owning one. “Hosting retreats allows me to creatively design how I want to show up in the wellness space and gives me agency over my time,” says the Houston-based certified yoga teacher and creator of F.E.E.L. Daily.

　　“I know better than to never say never…but as yet, I have no desire for the overhead nor trusting the fickle nature of the human condition as a means of serving dharma,” says Hubbard. Working from nearly anywhere allows him to engage meaningfully without needing a large physical space. “I personally never saw the business sense in seeking to operate according to the traditional model,” he says.

　　Although the playing field appears to have been leveled with yoga studios’ ability to operate fully online, the new challenge is finding one’s community in a very crowded space. Without even addressing financing the necessary technology to make for a strong user experience, investing large amounts of money in marketing creates the same inequities as rental space. This may not present a barrier to entry, but rather a barrier to survival.

　　Collective Care and Personal Liberation Are Not Limited to a Yoga Studio The incredible amount of labor required to establish and run a studio in the face of financial, cultural, and historical pressures provides context to why so few yoga studios are owned by Black yoga teachers.

　　Yet, there are those of us doing it because it’s important and we love it. From my experience, having pivoted to a studio community that is intentionally BIPOC-affirming provides all of the nurturance and belonging that I hoped for, but never truly found, in other places.

　　Tiffany Baskett concurs. Baskett’s students have shared that they have somewhere where they can explore alternative ways of being, ask questions and be in observation mode. Baskett stresses how important it is for the Black community to have a place where they can let go, do more, and rest.

　　“They get to walk into a sacred space curated by someone who looks like them and has them in mind,” says Baskett. Seeing oneself in the teacher, studio community, and ownership empowers people who have a shared experience of erasure and isolation. “It brings me joy to hear how beneficial having somewhere to feel at peace has been for them.”

　　While it is an act of profound resilience to bring yoga to a larger community in spite of, and alongside, these issues, what would be better is not to have to be so resilient. A yoga community that practices self study is likely becoming curious about these disparities.

　　But also, maybe many of us just don’t want or need to own yoga studios because we don’t have to. Collective care and personal liberation aren’t limited to traditional yoga studios. Whether or not yoga takes place in a studio setting, there is hope for more expansive yoga spaces throughout America.

　　In the meantime, Black yoga teachers and students will continue to find one another in various spaces as we create expansive ways of experiencing our bodies, breath, and being.

　　About Our Contributor

　　Tamika Caston-Miller, E-RYT 500, curates yoga experiences and trainings in service of collective healing and community repair. Having begun her yoga journey in 2001 with a home practice, she now holds advanced certifications and training in Trauma-informed Yoga, Somatics, Yin Yoga, Restorative Yoga, and Yoga Nidra. Tamika’s journey has been informed by chronic pain and injuries, social justice for QTBIPOC communities, the battle between shame and compassion and quest for ancestral healing, and the love for the practice and philosophy of yoga.