What "Accessibility" Actually Means in a Yoga Class

I have been in yoga studios where the word "accessible" appeared on the website, on the welcome sign, possibly on a chalk board with a lotus flower drawn next to it — and where I nonetheless spent the entire class feeling like an intruder.

The modifications were offered. The props were in a basket by the door. Technically, everything was in place. And yet from the moment I walked in — larger-bodied, visibly uncertain, clearly not the person the room was designed for — I felt the gap between accessibility as a feature and accessibility as a culture. The two are not the same thing. Not even close.

This post is about what the difference looks like. Because I think it matters, and because I think most wellness spaces talk about inclusion in ways that stop short of the part that's actually hard — which is not the props basket. It's the people, the language, the assumptions, the unspoken expectations that fill a room long before anyone says a word.

THE RESEARCH ON WHO GETS LEFT OUT

The barriers to yoga participation are well documented, and they cluster in consistent patterns. Research examining access to yoga among low-income and minority populations has found that the primary structural barriers are familiar ones — cost, scheduling, childcare, geography. ^[1] But dig beneath the structural, and a more uncomfortable picture emerges.

Weight stigma in exercise settings is a significant and well-evidenced barrier to physical activity. Studies have found that experiences of weight-related discrimination in sport and exercise environments lead many people in larger bodies to simply self-exclude — not from movement itself, but from the settings where it's supposed to happen. ^[2] It isn't that they don't want to move. It's that the fear of being judged, watched, or made to feel out of place is a more immediate reality than any potential benefit of the class.

A systematic review confirmed that weight stigma is significantly associated with avoidance of physical activity, and called specifically for inclusive environments and explicit communication of welcome as necessary — not optional — elements of any physical activity programme that claims to serve people across diverse body sizes. ^[3]

Yoga, which positions itself so frequently as a welcoming, non-competitive, body-positive space, is not immune to this. It's often worse, in fact, because the gap between the brand promise and the lived reality is so wide.

The gap between accessibility as a feature and accessibility as a culture is not the props basket. It's the people, the language, the assumptions, the unspoken expectations that fill a room before anyone says a word.

WHAT ACCESSIBILITY IS NOT

Let me be specific, because vagueness here is part of the problem.

Accessibility is not a modifications menu. Offering a "chair option" or a "gentler version" of each pose is useful, and I'm glad when it's there. But if those modifications are offered in a tone that communicates pity, or if the student who uses them is visibly set apart from the rest of the class, the modification becomes a marker of not-quite-belonging rather than a genuine adaptation. The structure is accessible. The experience is not.

Accessibility is not a diverse photo on the website. I say this gently but directly, because representation in marketing has become so detached from practice in many spaces that it now functions as a kind of inoculation — a way of signalling inclusion without having to do the actual work of creating it. The photo on the website is not the class. The class is the class.

Accessibility is not telling people that "all bodies are welcome" and then designing every element of the session — the music, the pace, the assumed prior knowledge, the lighting, the temperature, the room layout, the language of the cues — for one very specific kind of body and one very specific kind of experience.

And accessibility is not something that happens once, at the beginning, with a quick check-in at the door. It is a continuous practice of paying attention — to who is in the room, how they're experiencing what's happening, what they're not saying, what the room itself might be communicating to them without words.

WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS

It starts before the session begins. It starts with how you describe your classes — not just what you say is included, but what assumptions your language makes about who is coming. "All levels welcome" does not communicate to a chronically ill person that they can practise on a flare day. "Beginners welcome" does not tell a larger-bodied person that they won't feel watched. Specific, honest language about who you have actually designed your classes for — and who you are genuinely prepared to meet — is a form of accessibility that costs nothing but attention.

It continues in the room. Genuine accessibility means that the person who comes in with a chronic condition, a larger body, a neurodivergent nervous system, or significant anxiety about exercise does not have to announce themselves or explain themselves or ask for special treatment. The class is already designed to include them. The modifications are not an afterthought bolted onto a standard session — they are woven into the session from the beginning, offered as choices rather than corrections, framed as equally valid options rather than lesser alternatives.

Research into social prescribing and yoga on prescription has found that one of the consistent themes in what makes yoga feel accessible and sustainable for people from marginalised or vulnerable groups is the sense of genuine community — of feeling that the space was made for them, not merely made available to them. ^[4] That distinction — made for versus made available — is the whole gap. And it is built not in the facilities but in the culture that the instructor creates, class by class, word by word, moment by moment.

THE SENSORY AND NEURODIVERGENT DIMENSION

This is the piece I see missing most often, even in studios that have done serious work on physical accessibility and body diversity — because it's the least visible and the least often named.

Many people who would benefit enormously from yoga never make it through the door of a standard class because the sensory environment alone is prohibitive. Incense. Dim, unpredictable lighting. Ambient music that shifts without warning. The physical proximity of strangers. The expectation of silence combined with the constant low-level noise of other people breathing and adjusting. The unspoken rule that you should know roughly what to do, follow along without asking, and not draw attention to yourself when you don't understand an instruction.

For a neurodivergent person — and there are far more of us in any given room than yoga studios tend to assume — each of these elements is a potential barrier. Not insurmountable, but real. And the fact that they're invisible to most instructors does not make them less real for the people experiencing them.

Sensory accessibility means thinking through the environment deliberately. It means asking: what does this room assume about the people coming into it? What does it ask of their nervous systems before the practice has even started? It means being willing to adjust — the lights, the scent, the music, the pacing, the explicitness of the instruction — based on actual feedback from actual people, rather than a theoretical notion of what a yoga class is supposed to feel like.

Accessibility means designing a class so that the person arriving already belongs — not that they're welcome to try to keep up.

WHY THIS IS HARD, AND WHY IT'S WORTH IT

I want to be honest about the fact that building a genuinely accessible practice requires more than good intentions. It requires a willingness to examine your assumptions — about bodies, about ability, about what yoga looks like and who it's for — and to keep examining them, because they don't stay examined. They creep back in the moment you stop paying attention.

It requires slowing down. A truly accessible class moves at the pace of its most cautious participant, not its most experienced one. That is a different kind of teaching. It asks more of the instructor in some ways, and less in others — less performance, more presence.

And it requires accepting that you will not always get it right. Someone will come into your class and have an experience that falls short of what you intended. The commitment is not to perfection but to responsiveness — to noticing, to asking, to adjusting, to trying again.

What I have found, over years of teaching with this intention, is that the classes built this way are the ones people come back to. Not because they're easier. Not because the practice is less demanding. But because they feel safe. And feeling safe — genuinely, not performatively safe — is the foundation on which any real practice is built.

The research on yoga in underserved communities found that community connectedness, enjoyment, and the feeling of being genuinely welcomed were consistently among the most important factors in whether people continued to practise. ^[5] Not the quality of the poses. Not the prestige of the instructor. The feeling of belonging.

WHAT UNDOD YOGA IS BUILT ON

I built Undod Yoga from the inside of all of this. As someone who spent years being excluded from wellness spaces that claimed to welcome me. As someone whose body, nervous system, and neurodivergent brain made standard classes an exercise in endurance rather than practice. As someone who knows, from lived experience, exactly what it feels like when a space says "all welcome" and means "all welcome, within certain parameters that we haven't told you about."

Every decision in how I design and teach — the language I use, the pace I keep, the sensory environment I create, the way I frame modifications, the culture of the room — is shaped by asking one question: would the person who most needs this feel that it was made for them?

Not made available to them. Not generously accommodated. Made for them.

That is what accessibility means to me. And it is what I am working towards, in every session, with every person who walks through the door.

You are one of those people. You always were.

— India