The problem with this sentiment is that it reduces thousands of years of ancient wisdom and a living embodied practice down to a western metric for hyper-mobility. What should these two things have in common, (yoga and touching your toes) and how did we come to associate yoga with displays of extreme flexibility? The answer lies in a deeper conversation about the appropriation of yoga by the west, a moral question of what is (un)acceptable and what causes harm.

For justice of all kinds, climate justice and social justice, for peace and freedom for Palestine, we need to remain grounded in hope. If we have hope there’s a potential for change. It is an act of radical defiance against the mainstream media’s mission to evoke fear and inspire apathy to stand up for an alternative vision of the future.

As our current global system promises to continue proliferating trauma on a mass scale, due to climate ignorance and rising conflict and inequality, it seems obvious that we should address the cause of the fire (the root causes of these issues - such as colonialism and capitalism, requiring the imaginative power of social scientists) as well as putting out the flames (compassionately supporting the healing of those who bear the scars of trauma from having experienced war, conflict or climate devastation firsthand, which could usefully involve the spiritual community). 

We are all foreign in most parts of the world. Every time we travel, we are a guest in a new culture, and when we choose to stay, we have more of a responsibility understand that culture, even though we’ll all assimilate in different ways depending on our personal cultural backgrounds and values.

Here I am standing barefoot on the earth, eyes closed, palms open, in full trust of the process that’s unfolding. I have been blessed with the smoke of copal, brushed down with a bundle of fresh herbs, negative energies drawn out of me by the powers of an unfertilised egg, and an obsidian blade has been drawn across my energetic field to cut the remaining threads to all that I’m here to shed, all while the health of my spirit and body have been prayed for by my guide, Luzura.

A queer yoga space is about more than just tolerating or accommodating queer bodies, it’s about wholeheartedly accepting and celebrating them, in all of their forms, through all of their changes and each of their evolutions. These spaces are necessary and can be transformational.

The way the yoga industry is set up perpetuates the very same problems that yoga should mitigate: freedom, liberation, and health (both mental and physical) are all at risk when the nature of the job puts you in survival mode. We need to see a rise in freelance rates, options for part- or full-time employment, support for new teachers (mentorship schemes), more employment rights for freelance teachers and fewer barriers to entry (scholarship programmes).

Whether you have a short trip abroad planned, a gap year, sabbatical or a longer stint of travelling, here are a few useful tips to help you avoid falling into tourist traps, or pissing off the locals.

Just as yoga is not just what we do with our bodies in a room with 20 other sweaty strangers, permaculture is not just gardening. Both of these systems are philosophies or worldviews, to be integrated into a way of living, a lens through which to view the world and understand ourselves and our relationship to others. Permaculture, in its wholeness, is just what the environmental movement needs it’s activists to be practicing.

I was seeking to get involved in impactful projects, engaging in regenerative - rather than simply sustainable - tourism while travelling through Costa Rica. This was one of the key principles behind Los Higuerones: understanding that in order to heal our planet, we must first heal our relations with one another, this is climate justice in action. That requires addressing the damages inflicted on the local farming communities by setting up alternative avenues for income, with a view towards economic equality.

A shift towards regenerative tourism; a way of travelling that considers the longevity of the spaces we find ourselves in, striving to make a positive impact on the land and the communities that live there.

It’s dark. My back leans against the stone wall of a dome lined with strangers packed shoulder to shoulder. I’m hunched on the floor, knees to chest, elbows on knees, head bowing to the earth, breathing slow. I’m drenched in the sweat that is relentlessly pouring out of every pore on my body in a vain effort to stay cool in an enclosed space choked with steam. There’s drumming. And singing. I can only make out some of the words; they’re not in my mother tongue, but I understand what they are saying. My body is vibrating. A buzz running from fingertip to fingertip, all the way down to my feet.

If I asked you to envision the life of someone in their early 20s, you might imagine a time of adventuring, self-discovery, and personal growth. But you might not expect that those experiences would be delivered through numerous hospital visits, getting lost in endless brightly lit corridors at 1am and being unable to think, much less plan, more than a week in advance.

Yoga has been culturally appropriated, stripped from its roots, and re-packaged as a fitness ideal and aesthetic to meet a market of (mostly) white middle class women. Social activism, deconstructing systems of oppression and addressing inequality should all be considered within the aims and intentions of modern day Yoga, with a particular responsibility on the shoulders of those who have benefited from such power structures (white, able-bodied, middle-class folks) to do the work in dismantling them.

I felt this wave of internal discomfort at the parts of my story I chose to tell, and by extension, the parts I left out. The things I thought were relevant or that I thought you should know […] we’re all complex human beings, and we have this tendency to cling on to the stories that we use to define ourselves. These stories form themselves around, and are informed by: our memories, our trauma (we all have it in some form or another), pain, fears, secrets, dreams and desires.