On an exploration into the world of TikTok, a place my children and others hip to the modern ways, recommended I take a trip, I discovered something I’ve seen before—but never so much of. I was looking at yoga posts. Because I am a yoga teacher. And that’s what’s interesting to me. But I was not seeing yoga the way that I practice it, in this well-lived body with my well-worn Salvation Army flexy-pants.

I mean, I suppose these women were not humping their yoga mats as they demonstrated postures. By the technical definition of humping. But the images struck me as entirely not so vaguely pornographic. These were images of women who wanted to look sexy wearing clothes that one could easily describe as sexy, doing yoga poses—they were yoga poses—but in a way that made it seem like they were seducing either their yoga mats or the camera, possibly both.

Now, I don’t know everything about yoga—not by a long shot. But in my almost forty years of practicing yoga, I’ve never considered it a sexual activity. In many important ways, it’s very much an un-sexy activity.

Back when I was at Yale Divinity School I had a neighbor. He knew I practiced yoga as we often spoke about it. I invited him to a class. He politely declined. “I like to practice alone,” he explained. “You know. Because.” I didn’t exactly “know because” so I pressed him for more information. “That’s the nature of yoga, right?” He said. “You need to pass wind while you practice. Belch, fart, that kind of thing. That’s the point.”

If belching and farting is the point, then this point has never reached the yoginis of the contemporary social media realm. When they mount their mats and aim a firmly sculpted bottom in the direction of their camera, they are NOT just about to fart as a way of affirming the intestinal benefits of wind-relieving pose. 

Let’s face it. It’s not just what I saw. It’s everywhere, this beautiful people beautiful kind of yoga. I love a pretty photograph as much as the next person, but most of us who do yoga do NOT do it on a beach, do NOT do it outside at sunset, do NOT do it while licking our lips and do NOT do it in order to arouse another person, or for that matter ourselves.

The kind of arousal that yoga is meant to inspire is the arousal of our spirits. I love bodies, don’t get me wrong. Also, sex is awesome. I am pro-sex. And yoga is for our bodies, not just our mind/heart/spirit. So it should and it does contribute to our wholeness as people. I teach a workshop called Yoga for Better Sex. I think yoga can help us have better sex because it can help us have a better relationship with our own bodies and our own experience of pleasure.

But what was happening in those images was the OPPOSITE of feeling better in our bodies.

It played out a stereotypical expression of sexuality from the male-gaze for an audience. For the millionth but never the last time, yoga is about how you FEEL, it is not about how you LOOK. And while we’re on the topic, sex is about how you FEEL, it is not about how you LOOK.

Of all the many things that are wrong with this conflating of sexuality and yoga(yoga is sexy! I look good practicing!), the most wrong part is certainly the loss of one of the best teachings any of us ever receives from a yoga posture practice: the ability to dive within. 

For most of us, so much of the time, we live an external life. We think of ourselves through the lens of others. This is partly the problem with pornography; it is not at all about what’s going on within. It is entirely about the external. The question for life, for sex and for yoga is: how do you feel? When you do that pose, how do you feel? Do you feel strong? Alive? Weak? Empowered? 

The women who are sharing these images of themselves as a way of sharing yoga have over-laid everything that’s wrong with the patriarchal gaze onto a practice that is neither sexual nor belonging to a world of sex or gender. Images that divide us from our humanity—by removing us from our experience of ourselves as people (because we are not objects, images, or body parts meant for another to view or consume), work directly against the motive of yoga. Yoga means to yoke. Yoke means to join.

Everyone loves that Rumi quote: out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field, I’ll meet you there. It’s lovely and you’ve probably heard it in a yoga class you took once. But that field isn’t just absent of wrong and right, it’s absent of male and female. It’s absent of all the distinctions that separate us from our life-force and life-Source.

I want these yoga-people to liberate their viewers, not bind them up more fully. We should all be sending people, as many as we can reach, over to this field of Rumi’s. Humping yoga mats might bring in the views, the comments, the subscribers, the likes, but it is not yoga.

Before she passed, I was at a workshop with the incomparable Tao Porchon-Lynch. One of her students demonstrated a series of choreographed poses to a very fast piece of popular music. At the end, Tao said, “Beautiful. It wasn’t yoga, but it was beautiful.”

They may look good. They may be sexy. They may even be beautiful. But it isn’t yoga. If it was, you’d know it, because it would bring you up higher by drawing you in closer to the version of yourself that’s already hanging out in the field, waving at you, and not interested at all in what anyone is wearing, or how sexy they may or may not be while they open their hip flexors.

What do you think? Have you seen these images? What’s your definition of yoga?

Watch the video version of this post: https://youtu.be/DhRISdmxObk.