Breathing deeply, holding and exhaling, I feel more present than I have all week. I recognise the sensation of the mat below me, where the supple plastic connects with my bare feet. I smell the heady smoke of Palo Santo as it wafts lazily through the studio. I hear my own soft heartbeat and begin to feel the patient ache from an unprepared gym session begin to politely announce its presence in my legs. I open my eyes to see my position mirrored in ten to fifteen other young women, still dwelling inside themselves at the end of a shared yoga session. For 50 minutes, it cost us twenty euros each. 

For my entire adult life, I have been practicing yoga. During that time, I have striven towards improvement, endeavoured towards a moment where I can catch myself between motion and stillness and feel grounded amongst the chaos of outside responsibilities. What comforts me about it is the inside-ness of it. The acceptance that, for just shy of an hour, I do not have to open letters of rejection from job applications, passive-aggressive housemate texts or 150+ messages in a muted Whatsapp group chat. In this moment, all I must focus on and respond to is that which I can immediately sense, fencing my inner world off and  hoarding it as I greedily contemplate the feeling I’m experiencing from every angle possible.

It feels luxurious and indulgent to focus on the present when so much of modern life demands our attention to the future. Fear-inducing headlines calling for the necessity of militarisation and a circus of notifications about impending Career’s Fairs and Networking Events (you too can benefit from an increase in defence spending!), and the knowledge that in order to Get Everything Done you would be crazy not to have your next fortnight planned out by the minute.

The need for constant planning means little time is left to reflect on the past. Despite the prevalence of yoga in my daily life, I rarely stop to think about how it became such a fixture for so many people in my position .Until recently, little thought had been given to the migration of yoga to the West. What incidences have occurred to crystallise the practice as both a staple of the optimisation of individual wellbeing, and a consumable good that can (typically) be accessed through the exchange of capital? Particularly, how have these been linked to political movements, either through justification of a hierarchical ideology, or to patch up gaps in harmful systems?

I came across Fascist Yoga by Stewart Home while scrolling through Instagram some time last year. It was being promoted among the trendy art-scene bookstores I followed without ever visiting or giving money to. I was intrigued because, considering the minimalist, curated (note: highly ordered and controlled) setting the book was being displayed in, it wasn’t immediately clear whether this was a condemnation of or a guide to yoga of the fascist variety. Months later, after seeing it on the bookshelf of a friend, I finally gave it a chance.

Home, a historian of counter- and sub-cultures, makes the argument that modern Western postural practice, while inspired by something that truly and tangibly originated in India, has largely been invented between Europe and the United States in the way it is currently practiced today. He goes as far as to claim that it is “19th century European gymnastics with a sprinkling of orientalist fairy dust” (in interview with El Pais magazine, 2025). While it has faced criticism on the basis of its focus on the negative historicity of the practice while ignoring the positive, profound and ‘legitimate’, the point of this endeavour is to specifically focus on the former. In doing so, Home allows us to question the appropriation and repackaging of the sacred in order to recognise harmfulness and hidden agendas.

Home begins his explanation with an outline of fascist fans of the tradition, such as those within the British Union of Fascists, far-right militarians in Italy and Nazi party members. A red thread uniting such characters’ affinity to the practice is the concept of self-optimisation and personal ascension within a spiritual hierarchy, inspired by India’s caste system. Appropriation of the term ‘Aryan’, originating to designate ethnic Indo-Iranians in the Vedic period, was popular within such circles to describe a Caucasian ‘master race’ supposedly attributed to Indo-Europeans, creating a launchpad for scientific research of a racially biased nature (Home, 2024).

While such bogus racially hierarchised hypotheses have since been disproved, the tenet of individual advancement, betterness within wellness, can still be seen within modern practices centred around wellbeing. Home refers to this as the “yogic obsession with personal transformation at the expense of genuine social change” (Home, 2024: 39). Marketable self-help processes promote the notion of the body as a project that harbours the potential to be constantly finessed and improved (Dworkin and Wachs, 2009).

Rachel Sanders, writing for Body & Society in the cultural analysis of body-studies, references philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of the ‘technologies of the self’ to consider the relationship modern individuals experience to that which allows them to transform themselves (Sanders, 2017: 4). This can be thought of in terms of marketable products, such as fitness watches that allow the user to track their sleep, caloric intake and exercise. It can also be considered in terms of extracted practices that offer self-betterment, such as yoga classes or gym memberships. Tied to these paid processes is a promise of individual self improvement. 

Sociologists Nehring and Röcke identify an overarching societal goal of self-perfection and optimisation as originating in Western society particularly from the 1950s onwards, solidifying in the 1970s (Nehring and Röcke, 2024: 1074). In utilising ‘technologies of the self’, Foucault argues that individuals seek to optimise themselves to achieve a purer and more ideal body state (in Sanders, 2017: 4). A difficult end to realise, people who strive towards this may get the sense they are constantly falling behind, a fear that can be capitalised on and marketed to by the wellness industry.

Nehring and Röcke recognise a connection between the ‘aspirationally-optimised’ self and the ‘belabored’ or ‘entrepreneurial’ self (2024: 1076). Thus, a cyclical trend emerges. Individuals apply the fruits of wage labour to consume self-optimisation technologies, using them to conduct more labour in order to inhabit the spirit of an optimal work-in-progress self. This could be seen as embodiment, not of sensorial fulfillment but of market-driven desires. 

This argument aligns with the consideration of health-focused geographers Andrews and Duff, of the emergence of wellbeing as a focus in the age of new capitalism. They consider a posthumanist theoretical lens of approaching wellbeing, wherein assemblages of non-human and nonindividual entities work internally and externally to register the feeling of wellbeing in individual bodies. They extend this to question how wellbeing is produced in neoliberal society, wherein personal wellbeing is primarily the responsibility of the individual rather than the state. In such a situation, movements towards health and bodily autonomy, while advertised freely, can be obstructed due to environmental issues of cost and unequal distribution of resources (Andrews and Duff, 2020).

Sanders references the promotion of individual self-care as a tool to fill the gaps left in the absence of cohesive state welfare models, wherein “biopower must commission non-state forms of authority to carry out [the] prerogatives” formerly in the hands of state authority (Sanders, 2017:5). As she notes, this can fuel marketisation of body projects through goods such as fitness-tracking devices. She questions how individuals who engage in these practices can “resist the ‘recycling of their newfound capacities [for self-care and optimisation] back into normalizing regimes” (Sanders, 2017:19).

Andrews and Duff draw on Thrift’s argument that the very nature of new capitalism is based on the ‘production and consumption of affects – motion, sensation, pleasure, displeasure’ existing as circulating values that mobilise individuals to act, vote and consume (Andrews and Duff, 2020). Anthropologist Sara Ahmed gives the example of the circulation of negative descriptive words in association with social groups in media as invoking subconscious fears regarding the group in question. She references fear as being a powerful currency with which people’s perceptions can be bought, the body of the scapegoated ‘Other’ charged with the very essence of fear. This has allowed, she states, the War on Terror to appear justified by utilisation of a ‘Global Economy of Fear’ (Ahmed, 2004). Like the fascist endeavour to promote positive self-optimisation to reinforce hierarchies, this can be seen as an example of an evocation of senses to justify political and social projects.

Are wellness and self-optimisation a placebic antidote to the loss of control and autonomy we face in modern neoliberal society? Does dwelling on what we can immediately see, smell and touch blind us to the structural injustices occurring around us? Does a focus on our bodily feelings centre us, or make us self-centred? How can we regulate our senses without becoming careless to the needs of others?

I draw again on Sanders, who imagines the capability of a goal-unoriented counter-normative liberatory body project, wherein those who engage in practices of sensory and bodily advancement do so not in a bounded sense towards a socially and individually fixed ideal, but to expand forward into new possibilities (Sanders, 2017: 21). Relating this to the practice of yoga, I imagine a practice untethered to financial restrictions and cognisant of the role it has played in fascist historical movements. Without disregarding it completely as a form of connection with the self, I consider instead a transcendence, moving beyond the individual rather than within it. This could begin with community-led trainings for prospective yogis in free spaces, grounded in the possibility of postural practice to be a portable tool for sensory regulation rather than something typically accessed with adequate capital.