I’ve been a yoga teacher for decades, but when I first became disabled, I feared that chapter of my life was over.
I couldn’t do the poses. I couldn’t lie on my back. I couldn’t even sit for very long. I kept going to classes, but I mostly just stood in the back and swayed, trying desperately to get quiet enough to hear what my body wanted. I knew there were teachers who specialized in working with disabled people, but they were all young and “healthy” — exactly who most people think of when they think of yoga.
I didn’t know a single disabled yoga teacher, and while I’ve always tried to push back on the stereotypes about who does yoga, my imagination failed in the face of my own physical vulnerability. I felt hopeless.
I was terrified of losing my identity as a yoga teacher, not because it’s a big moneymaker but because sharing yoga has been one of the greatest joys of my life. But when I started to talk to other disabled people about my plight, they pointed me in the direction of disabled yoga teachers who are doing the critical work of making the practice accessible — and changing the face of modern yoga.
“Yoga prior to my disability was yoga for the body,” says Rodrigo Souza, a yoga teacher who splits his time between Brazil and Sweden and also teaches online. “Yoga after my disability is yoga for the soul.” Souza began practicing Bikram yoga when he was 25. Less than a decade later, he was paralyzed from the chest down in a climbing accident.
“I was going through the dark night of the soul,” Souza tells me. “I was 33 years old and I was being told I was never going to walk again. Paralyzed from chest down. I was in a place that no one wants to be.”
Souza was sent to a rehabilitation center, where he was given exercises that reminded him of yoga. Something clicked. He Googled “yoga for paraplegics” and found Matthew Sanford, a prominent disabled yoga teacher who offers classes online. “I remember having this feeling of light and hope grow in my chest, just like, ‘Wow, I can actually still do yoga,’” Souza says. “Yoga is actually for me too.”
Souza practiced with Sanford remotely, became a yoga teacher, and began teaching at a rehabilitation center. Now he offers group and one-on-one classes online and leads professional training sessions for other yoga teachers who want to work with disabled people.
Although Souza doesn’t explicitly describe his work as activism, he talks about yoga in a way that centers on changing the way the practice is taught in the West.
“My passion lies in educating yoga teachers,” he says. “Yoga is for disabled folks too. We are the majority marginalized community on the planet. There are over 1 billion people [who] live with disability, but you don’t see disabled people teaching yoga anywhere. You go to Instagram, you go to Google, you type the hashtag ‘yoga’ or or you Google the word ‘yoga,’ and you don’t see a disabled person.” It is through representation and education that change will happen, says Souza.
But at the heart of Souza’s teaching lies, well, a lot of heart. Disabled people, he reminds me, rely on a medical model that treats the human body like a mechanic treats a car. They try to fix it.
“There is something wrong with us, right?” he says. “I deal with chronic pain, I deal with PTSD and like, I forget how many antidepressants they prescribed me. They even prescribed me morphine. And no one told me about yoga. It breaks my heart for my peers, the disabled community. I must, in this lifetime, through any means, make sure the disabled community knows that yoga is for them too.”
Souza believes that yoga has the potential to help disabled people heal ― not from disability itself, but from many of the pains that come with being a disabled person living in an ableist world.
“Disabled folks are the population that needs yoga the most. We have experienced trauma, systemic trauma, physical trauma, mental trauma, and we experience yoga the least. So there is this massive work that should be done,” Souza says. “Yoga will not take my pain away, will not take my disability away, but yoga will make me feel whole again.”
And the guidance that disabled yoga teachers offer isn’t just for disabled people.
“I worked at the front desk in a studio in San Francisco before becoming a yoga teacher, and I realized how inaccessible the classes were,” says Natalia Tabilo, a disabled yoga instructor in Alameda, California. When Tabilo became a full-time yoga teacher in 2018, she focused on offering yoga to people in larger bodies, but she started noticing that a lot of different kinds of people were coming to her classes.
“I started getting students who were recovering from eating disorders, who were older adults, teenagers, teenagers with anxiety, all kinds of people,” Tabilo says. She welcomed everyone, but she started to wonder what was drawing them to her classes. So she asked.
Many of Tabilo’s students told her that they came because of the freedom they felt when she offered variations. One student told Tabilo: “I don’t feel that I have to keep up with the class, and I can truly come as I am.” In other words, it’s not just disabled individuals who want that feeling of wholeness Souza describes. And it’s not just disabled folks who can’t always keep up with mainstream classes geared toward flexible, athletic white women.
Disabled yoga teachers have something crucial to offer, because we have an embodied understanding of seeking wholeness in a world that tells us we are broken, and we often cannot hide the things about us that make us feel less able to experience that wholeness. Or, in the case of folks who have invisible disabilities, we choose not to hide.
We choose to own our marginalization so we can more easily connect with others who are marginalized, and share the tools of yoga that allow us to feel whole in this fragmented world. And while the language we use to describe the practice of accessible yoga is new, there have always been — and always will be — disabled yogis. In fact, evidence suggests there were disabled yoga teachers in India as much as 3,000 years ago.
Audrey ML, a yoga instructor in Brittany, France, who teaches online, says students come to her classes “specifically because I’m disabled, because I’m chronically ill, because I’m neurodivergent, because I’m queer, because I’ve got these identities that I’m very proud of and that I use in my teaching.”
As for Tabilo, students come to her classes because of her intersectional identities, not in spite of them. And ML’s experience as a disabled person allows her to offer classes that are truly accessible — to disabled people and to anyone else craving something more inclusive than most mainstream yoga classes offer.
All of this prompts the question: Can non-disabled teachers teach yoga to disabled people? Yes, I argue.
“Ideally, all teachers should be able to teach everyone they have in front of them, but that is not the case at the moment,” says ML. There are fantastic trainings out there led by skillful teachers who have decades of experience, and ML thinks yoga teachers should definitely get educated about making yoga accessible. But, she adds, “lived experience cannot be replaced by all the training in the world.”