Namaste… But Make It Weird: What Happens When We Dress Yoga Up and Call It Something It Isn’t

Let me be clear about something before I say what I’m about to say: I am not the fun police. If you want to sip a glass of rosé on your patio after a long week, live your life. If your dog crawls into your lap while you’re trying to meditate, that’s adorable. I am not here to take things away from you.

But I am here to talk about what happens when we slap the word yoga on something — and what we lose in the process.

Because yoga has ethics. Actual, written-down, thousands-of-years-old ethics. And a lot of what’s being marketed as yoga right now is running directly against them.

The Sutras Aren’t Suggestions

Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras give us the eight-limbed path — and the very first two limbs, the Yamas and Niyamas, are a behavioral and ethical framework for how we show up in the world and in our own lives. Among them: ahimsa (non-harm), saucha (cleanliness and purity), pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses inward), and dharana (focused concentration).

These aren’t spiritual extras you add on when you feel like it. They’re the foundation.

Everything else — the asana, the breath work, the meditation — is built on top of them.

So when we design yoga experiences that systematically dismantle every single one of those principles, we’re not doing yoga. We’re doing something else. Which is fine. Just say that.

Let’s Talk About the Animals

Goat yoga became a thing around 2016, went viral, and spawned an entire genre. Now we have puppy yoga. Bunny yoga. Kitten yoga. The premise is always the same: cute animal plus yoga class equals content, connection, and ticket sales.

Here’s what nobody’s talking about: the animals.

The Goat

Of all the animals being drafted into yoga classes, the goat is arguably the most equipped to handle it. Goats are social, curious, and physically built for climbing — so a human back in Child’s Pose is, to a goat, just an interesting hill. They are sturdy, they are bold, and they have some tolerance for novel environments.

And yet. Even goats have stress thresholds. Even goats can be overwhelmed by noise, crowding, and relentless handling. Even goats will tell you with their bodies when they’re done — and most yoga students don’t speak goat.

When an animal is overwhelmed, their nervous system does what nervous systems do.

They eliminate. That pooping and peeing that everyone thinks is so funny and chaotic?

That’s a stress response. That’s the animal’s body saying I am not okay. And now it’s on your mat. Which brings us to saucha — cleanliness, purity, one of the Niyamas. Yoga mats are porous. I’ll leave it there.

The Puppy

Puppies seem like a natural fit for this trend because puppies are chaos incarnate anyway, right? Tumbling, mouthing, wiggling — they don’t care where they are. Except that’s not actually true, and the developmental science here is important.

Puppies between eight and sixteen weeks are in their critical socialization window. What happens to them during this period — who handles them, how they’re handled, what environments they’re exposed to — shapes their nervous systems for life. Mass handling by rotating strangers in a loud, unfamiliar space, done poorly or done too much, can create lasting anxiety and fear responses in a dog that follows them into adulthood.

A puppy whimpering, trembling, or trying to escape a lap gets read as cute. It is not cute. It is a dog telling you it is not okay. A puppy that goes limp and still isn’t relaxed — it may be shutting down from overstimulation, which is its own form of distress. Puppies also cannot regulate their body temperature well, tire quickly, and have no mechanism for saying I need a break that humans reliably recognize.

We are potentially shaping a dog’s nervous system in a negative direction — in a room full of people who are supposedly there to practice ahimsa.

The Bunny

This is where I need you to really hear me: bunnies should not be in yoga classes. Full stop.

Rabbits are prey animals. Their entire evolutionary design is built around threat detection and survival. In the wild, a rabbit that relaxes completely in an open space is a rabbit that gets eaten. So their baseline state — even in domestic settings — involves a constant, low-level vigilance that most people mistake for calmness.

When a rabbit freezes in your lap during yoga, it is almost certainly not relaxed. It is in a fear-freeze response. It is playing dead because its nervous system has decided that’s the safest option. The “calm” bunny being passed around the class is likely terrified.

And this is not a small concern: rabbits can die from acute stress. Cardiac arrest from fright is documented. Being held incorrectly — which most people do, because most people have never been taught how to hold a rabbit — can cause them to kick, fracture their own spine, and die. A yoga class full of well-meaning strangers picking up bunnies and nestling them against their chests while they flow through a sequence is a genuinely dangerous environment for that animal.

We are practicing ahimsa — non-harm — while potentially frightening an animal to death.

That sentence should bother us. It bothers me.

Alcohol and the Nervous System: A Love Story Yoga Doesn’t Want

Beer yoga. Wine yoga. Rage yoga with profanity and shots. These exist. They are popular. People love them.

And I get it. Yoga has an image problem in some circles — too serious, too spiritual, too much chanting and not enough permission to just be a regular human who likes beer. So someone said: what if we combined the thing people are intimidated by with the thing people love? Brilliant marketing. Genuinely.

But here’s what alcohol actually does to your body: it impairs proprioception — your ability to sense where your body is in space. It disrupts breath quality. It dampens the nervous system’s ability to regulate itself, which is literally what yoga is trying to train you to do better.

The parasympathetic nervous system — rest, digest, recover, integrate — is what yoga is attempting to activate and strengthen. Alcohol is a depressant that creates the illusion of relaxation by suppressing neural activity. That is not the same thing. Not even close.

Pratyahara is the withdrawal of the senses inward — learning to quiet external noise and turn your attention toward what’s happening inside. Alcohol makes that impossible. You are not dropping inward. You are numbing. And numbing and awareness are not synonyms.

Again — drink your wine. But call the class what it is: a social movement experience with a yoga-inspired playlist. That’s actually a fun thing. It doesn’t need to be yoga to be worth doing.

Sensory Chaos and the Myth of the “Accessible” Class

Blacklight yoga. Silent disco yoga. Rage yoga. Disco yoga. All of these operate on the premise that yoga is more accessible when it’s louder, brighter, more stimulating — more like the world we’re supposedly trying to quiet down in order to come to the mat.

Here’s the issue: yoga is not asking you to add more. It is asking you to subtract. The entire arc of the practice is toward stillness — not the stillness of boredom, but the stillness of a mind that has learned to be present with itself without needing constant input.

You cannot practice sensory withdrawal in a room full of strobing lights. You cannot practice concentration when there are ten external stimuli competing for your attention every thirty seconds. You’re not building a skill — you’re bypassing the discomfort that comes right before the skill develops.

And that discomfort? That’s the actual work.

The Real Problem Isn’t Fun. It’s the Label.

Here’s where I land: none of this is inherently wrong as a fitness experience or a social experience or even a wellness experience. Animals are joyful — when they are safe and handled well and not conscripted into a hot room full of strangers. Alcohol lowers social inhibitions in ways that can make movement feel more accessible. High-energy sensory environments can make exercise feel less like a chore.

But when we call all of it yoga, we dilute what the word means. We tell people who come to it for the first time that yoga is chaotic and external and entertainment-based — and then when they encounter a real practice that asks them to be quiet with themselves, they don’t recognize it. They think they’ve been sold something boring.

More than that, we tell people that the difficult parts of yoga — the sitting with discomfort, the returning to breath, the learning to be in your body without distraction — are optional. That yoga is only worth doing if we make it palatable enough.

It isn’t. And it was never meant to be.

Yoga has survived thousands of years because it works. Not because it’s fun. Because it fundamentally changes how you relate to your own mind, your own body, your own nervous system. And that work requires presence, not performance.

You want to do goat fitness? Amazing. You want to drink wine and stretch? I support you. You want to dance in a blacklit room? Let’s go.

But let’s call it what it is. Because yoga — the real thing, the hard thing, the thing that actually asks something of you — deserves better than a costume.

And so do the bunnies.