Boom Bap Hip Hop Yoga 🎶🤔

I mentor a few yoga teachers, most of them abroad, who come to me to help navigate their battles as a teacher. Most of their battles are anatomical. Sometimes philosophical. It happens when a yoga teacher naturally grows beyond choreography, and it's a natural evolution of how we teach.

I've always said that yoga teachers must reinvent themselves without losing themselves to the grind. We can't teach the same way forever.

What surprises most of my students is that I have my own battle too. Mine is continuing to share what I feel is a dying art. The art of Hatha Yoga. Or as most people see it, slow and static (boring) yoga.

It's a bit like hip hop music 🎶🤔

My style is the boom bap style of 90s hip hop. The cool kids however, have all moved on to flow, the same way hip hop has moved on to trap. The purist in me wants to fight back and say trap isn't really hip hop. But it is. Same core values, different sound. And if i'm honest, pretty good 🫣.

Physical yoga is the same. It has evolved with time, and some days I feel like I'm still teaching a dated version of it.

So do I keep holding on, like a 90s rapper still releasing boom bap albums in 2026? Or do I adapt and make modern music?

Honest answer: I don't know 🤷🏾‍♂️🤔

But here's what I tell the teachers I mentor, and what I have to keep telling myself.

Teach from your heart ❤️. Be who you are. There will always be someone younger and cooler around the corner with better music and a bigger following. You won't out-cool them.

What they cannot replicate is you. Your story, your "journey", your questions and the path that brought you to yoga in the first place. That is yours alone, and it is the only place worth teaching from.

Whatever drew you to yoga, the thing that still keeps you up reading and questioning long after class has ended, follow that and not the trends. The thread that called you in the first place is the same one that will keep you walking. Trust it.

But the teacher who tries to please everyone ends up standing for nothing, and a teacher who stands for nothing has nothing worth teaching.

The teacher who is fully himself becomes a refuge for those who are searching for the same thing.

The day you start teaching yoga is the day you stop teaching people to like you.

I've often jumped to the defence of modern flow. Because when you go back and look at the history of physical yoga, what you see is a trend. One where you can't help but define yoga as an adaptive culture.

If yoga hadn't moved on from the seated meditative tradition of the early 1900s, we wouldn't be where we are today. If a certain Bikram Choudhury 🩲 hadn't taken his style to LA in the 90s, we wouldn't be where we are today. Yoga adapts. That doesn't mean it leaves things behind. Evolution doesn't leave anything in the dust - well, unless it can't stand on its own two feet.

And flow yoga done well is a beautiful thing. The way a good flow teacher links breath to movement, the way a strong sequence builds heat and intelligence in the body. That is real skill, and it's not the skill I have. I have a lot of respect for the teachers who do it well.

Flow, Vinyasa, Power. It's all an evolving practice that barely resembles its distant relative, the Hatha style. But that doesn't make it better or worse. Just an adaptation.

As I said earlier, Hatha is like 90s boom bap rap and flow is like trap music 🎧. And trap is actually pretty good once I get my head out of my 90s Cool J backside. If I don't take the time to appreciate the evolving art, I become a stone in the road watching the yoga world go by with a single tear in my eye.

The teachers at the studio embrace flow. My wife (Mrs Yoga herself) teaches it better than I ever could. I've watched her hold a room full of people in a way I genuinely can't. That isn't false modesty. It's a different skill, and she has it in abundance.

There's an old story where Parvati (the 1st ever student of yoga) watches Shiva (the 1st yogi) dance the Tandava. Wild, fierce, the cosmos shaking. She asks him to teach her. He shows her the Lasya instead. Slower, softer, more graceful. The feminine counterpart to his fire. Both dances were needed. Neither was lesser. Together they represented the universe in motion.

The new styles don't destroy the old. They're keeping the whole thing alive.

In summary, sometimes the grumpy old man in me worries that the old hatha style of yoga will become a distant memory. And it offers so much value that, for now at least, I'm going to keep holding on.

Namaskar,

Zahir

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