Courtney will discuss her integration of Indigenous knowledge with yoga by emphasizing the importance of honoring the land and its cultural significance. She will explore the process of how she aims to educate her community on decolonizing both land and culture, highlighting the historical context that shapes contemporary realities. Through the practice of yoga, she will demonstrate how mindfulness can empower individuals to better understand their present circumstances and take control of their future.

Did women practice yoga in premodern India? Though women are not positively enjoined to practice yoga in textual sources on early haṭha sources, Ruth Westoby reads against the grain to situate the extent to which women may have been practitioners in these sources.

The documented history of asana yoga in South Africa goes back to the 1960s, when a group of white women from the province of Kwa-Zulu Natal (which used to hold the largest Indian population outside of the subcontinent before being overtaken by the United States) traveled outside the country to the island of Mauritius and the neighbouring state of Botswana to learn from BKS Iyengar. They began to teach in home studios and gradually grew a student base among white female contemporaries, who became the major demographic of yoga practitioners post-democracy and into the modern age. While this is not entirely different from the yoga practicing population in the Global North, in a country where the majority of the population is of colour, it highlights an elitism based on race and class and raises questions about accessibility, inclusion and the wellness gap in a developing country. In this paper, Firdose will consider the practices of health and healing across a range of South African cultures, with a focus on the Indian diaspora and consider to what extent they are represented in contemporary yoga.

Martha Henson and Ruth McNeil have been examining the impact of pursuing an MA in yoga studies on individuals with a background in yoga teaching. Martha will be presenting our joint early findings from interviews with MA students and yoga teachers that reveal a disconnection between scholarship and practice. This pursuit of yoga studies with the academy appears to destabilise some students, fundamentally challenging their existing perspectives and understanding of yoga. Many of these students end up feeling the need to renegotiate their yoga practice and teaching, or even to leave it altogether, unable to reconcile their original training with what they have learned in the MA.

We will share our own experiences of undergoing this process, both the initial disorientation it caused and the struggle to rationalise and integrate this new understanding. But also how destabilisation eventually became liberation. We will also consider how the destabilisation effect could or should be recognised and factored into the sharing of yoga scholarship. What can or should yoga practitioners and teachers do with the research findings of yoga scholarship? How could this be a genuinely collaborative process, potentially bringing insight back into academia as well? We will share what we learned from our attempts to do this in workshops with small groups of local yoga teachers and enthusiasts on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra.

The newly-published Yoga Studies in Five Minutes  (Wildcroft and Sojkova 2025) provides an accessible guide to the diverse and growing field of research into yoga as a social, historical and cultural phenomenon. Both leading scholars and innovative researchers offer 60 brief responses to questions that offer insights into the study of yoga, such as: Who was the first teacher of yoga? Is yoga Indian? What is paramparā? Are there holy texts in yoga? What are the goals of yoga? Why do yogis hold their breath?

The collection covers ancient history, modern developments, and contemporary issues, considers the diverse practices and philosophies of yoga in a range of contexts, and uses a range of approaches, from philology to anthropology to art history. The book is an ideal starting point for both independent study and the classroom.

For this panel, Theo and Barbora will introduce the book, describe the rationale for the ‘In Five Minutes’ series, and discuss the process of producing the book. This will lead to a broader discussion of the costs and opportunities of disseminating accessible, high-quality research to yoga practitioners via print, online media and taught courses.

Wildcroft, Theo, and Barbora Sojkova. 2025. Yoga Studies in Five Minutes (Equinox Publishing: Sheffield).

Barbora Sojkova holds a DPhil in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (Sanskrit) from Balliol College, University of Oxford, where her research focused on human-animal relationships in Vedic Sanskrit literature. She is a qualified librarian (PgDip in Library and Information Studies, UCL, 2024) and has previously worked at All Souls College and the Bodleian Library, Oxford. She was a postdoctoral researcher in the MANTRAMS Project at the University of Oxford, working on the history of mantra in Vedic. She is also a certified yoga teacher and trainer focusing on history and philosophy of yoga.

Theo Wildcroft, PhD is a yoga teacher-trainer, writer and scholar who is interested in the democratization of yoga post-lineage, somatic literacy, meaning-making and the counter-culture. She is an Associate Lecturer at the Open University, UK, Visiting Lecturer in Dharmic Worldviews at the University of Chester, Fellow of the HEA, former Coordinator of the SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies, editor of the BASR Bulletin, an honorary member of the British Wheel of Yoga, member of the IAYT, a continuing professional development trainer and consultant for Yoga Alliance (E-RYT® 500, YACEP®), and Council Member for the American Yoga Council. She is the author of Post-lineage yoga: from guru to #metoo, co-writer of Leading Safe and Simple Yoga Nidras (coming soon), editor of Religion and the Sense of Self (also coming soon), and co-editor of The Yoga Teachers’ Survival Guide and Yoga Studies in Five Minutes.