Every few months the question returns: who is allowed to practise yoga, and who is allowed to teach it. The debate has a settled vocabulary by now — lineage, ownership, credit, representation, harm. What it does not have is any sustained engagement with yama and niyama, the two limbs of Patañjali’s system that specify what ethical conduct in yoga actually consists of. That absence is worth thinking through carefully. The classical text has a great deal to say about ethics. Almost none of it is about who owns anything.
What the Appropriation Debate Actually Argues
The strongest version of the argument runs like this. Yoga’s vocabulary, practices, and cultural resources were extracted from South Asia under colonial conditions. They now circulate in a global wellness market that has stripped out their philosophical content and sells the remainder as fitness, therapy, and spirituality. Practitioners and teachers outside the tradition are beneficiaries of that extraction, whether or not they intended to be. Therefore they should defer, credit, compensate, or step back.
The counter-argument is that a philosophy is not property, that gatekeeping practice by ancestry is itself a harm, and that South Asian teachers frequently transmit the same distorted material.
Both sides are arguing by interpretation. Each explains what yoga is by way of what it already believes about yoga. This is not a minor methodological complaint. Interpretation folds the content of a claim into the attitude of the person holding it, and logic does not operate on attitudes — it operates on propositions. Once you explain a tradition by way of your beliefs about it, there is no way for anyone to rationally disagree with you. There is only a contest over whose standing to speak is greater. Insisting that yoga means what your lineage says it means requires inflating the value of your own opinion, including your opinion about which lineage to trust. That is why the debate does not resolve. It is not structured so that it can.
What Yama and Niyama Actually Specify
Start with something the yoga industry consistently gets backwards. The eight limbs — aṣṭāṅga — are not the core of yoga practice. They are Patañjali’s non-ideal theory (YS II.26): what a person does when there are impediments to the ideal practice. The ideal practice is kriyā yoga (YS II.1): tapas, the refusal to be bound by one’s own past choices and habits; svādhyāya, self-governance; and Īśvara praṇidhāna, devotion to the ideal of right choosing. The limbs are remedial. Treating them as a curriculum to be climbed inverts the architecture of the text.
Yama, the first limb, is a universal activist obligation. Ahiṃsā is not passive gentleness; it is the disruption of systemic harm. The rest follow from it: asteya, that no one is deprived of what they need; brahmacarya, that boundaries are respected; aparigraha, that no one is hoarding. Satya — truth — comes after these, and the ordering is doing work. Once systemic harm has been disrupted, the social facts of who has what become visible. Accurate representation follows the disruption of harm. It does not precede it.
Niyama is the commitment to the three ideal practices, held with saṃtoṣa, contentment, and śauca, purity in the commitment itself.
Read that list again against the appropriation debate. Not one of these is a rule about who may speak. But put the yama questions to the yoga industry and they cut immediately. Is anyone being deprived of what they need? Is anyone hoarding? Are boundaries respected? Those are questions about deprivation and accumulation. They are structural, they have answers, and the answers do not depend on anyone’s ancestry.
Now notice the ordering problem. The appropriation argument is, at bottom, a satya argument. It is about accurate representation: who made this, what it really means, who is misrepresenting it. Patañjali places satya fourth, after ahiṃsā. Demanding accurate representation while systemic harm continues undisturbed takes the sequence in reverse.
What This Means Practically
When you are unsure what to do, begin where the text says to begin. The limbs are the remedial layer — what practice looks like under impediment — and appropriation is precisely the sort of impediment they address. So start with yama.
Yama specifies a universal obligation. It attaches no ethnic qualification and confines the practice to no one born into it. The text states the reverse:
> जातिदेशकालसमयानवच्छिन्नाः सार्वभौमा महाव्रतम् (YS II.31) > > jāti-deśa-kāla-samayān-avacchinnāḥ sārvabhaumā mahāvratam
The yamas are the great vow, and they are sārvabhauma — universal, binding across all conditions, unrestricted by jāti (birth), deśa (place), kāla (time), or samaya (circumstance). Birth is named first and ruled out first. The obligation to disrupt systemic harm falls on everyone, equally.
Having enacted the decolonising politics of yama, the practitioner moves to niyama, the personal affirmation of the practice. Here too there is no ethnic gate: tapas, svādhyāya, and Īśvara praṇidhāna are specified for whoever undertakes them, not for a lineage.
This reverses the appropriation charge at its root. Yoga’s ethics are, in their own terms, decolonising and addressed to everyone. To recast them as the property of one group — to move the question from what yama requires to who is permitted to speak — takes something universal and repackages it as ethnic. That is the appropriation. It takes a philosophy whose content is anti-oppressive and of relevance to all, and re-presents it as the possession of some. The debate conducted against appropriation performs the very thing it opposes.
Closing
Yoga does not issue permits. It specifies practices, and it specifies what those practices are for. Whether a person’s practice is yoga is settled by whether they are practising tapas and svādhyāya — not by ancestry, and not by anyone’s opinion, including their teacher’s. The distinction between what you believe about a situation and what you can reason about it is the same distinction I work with in coaching at Philosophit, and it comes from the same place.
The appropriation debate will continue, and it will continue to be unresolvable, because interpretation cannot resolve anything. What is available instead is explication: read what the text specifies, follow the reasons, and then disagree about whether they are true. That much is open to anyone, which is the point. My research on ethics in Indian philosophy is collected at shyam.org, and the argument here is developed at length in the Yoga Moral Philosophy course at the Yoga Philosophy Institute.