The air in our house.
My grandfather, Prof. Yogacharya H. A. Rao, was a true yogi. Not the kind you see on Instagram. The kind who could do things I am still careful about repeating, because no one would believe me. He travelled the world quietly, teaching hundreds of yoga teachers in Japan, Germany and India. He refused to build an ashram. He used to say fame and walls limit a man's path to enlightenment.
When he came to Malaysia, it was usually to see us. My mother, Datin Suleiha, is a Brahmin from India who married a Malaysian. She taught yoga in Kuala Lumpur, in his lineage. From the time I was five years old, she would have me demonstrate poses in her class.
I did not choose yoga. Yoga was simply the air in our house.
My grandfather passed away when I was ten. The lineage moved one generation closer to me, and I did not yet know what that weight was.
I tried, for a while, to live a normal life.
I worked in telecommunications. Regional Project Manager, hundreds of sites across the country, 48-hour shifts, nights spent at base stations because that was the only window we could work without disrupting the network. The hours were relentless. The worst part was not the hours. It was answering to people who decided what my time was worth.
At 23, I went home and told my mother I was done. She said three words.
The studio closed. I had made my peace with it.
This is the part most teachers leave out of their stories.
I joined my mother's studio with the lineage already inside me, generations deep. The discipline was there. The teaching was there. The students came. But something underneath did not sit right with me.
The business of yoga, the membership packages, the marketing, the upselling, the urge to grow at any cost. I could not bring myself to sell a practice that was never meant to be sold. Yoga belongs to everyone. To put it behind a class card, to ration it by month, to treat it as a product the way the industry was beginning to, felt like a quiet betrayal of what my grandfather had taught.
So I let the studio go. I would rather carry the practice into people's homes, one student at a time, than dilute it inside four walls and a payment plan.
Years of teaching in living rooms.
What followed was a quiet decade. No studio name. No sign on a door. Just one mat, one breath, one student at a time. I taught out of my students' homes, and slowly the practice I had been demonstrating since I was five began to teach me back.
Not the postures. The thing underneath the postures.
I learned what my grandfather had always known. Yoga is not an exercise. It is the integration of body, mind and spirit so completely that there is no longer a difference between them. Many people reach 40 carrying years of stiffness, fatigue and old injuries from sport, work and the wear of modern life. A steady yogi at 80 is still light, breathing easily, moving without strain. The difference is not strength. It is breath.
Look at nature. Animals that breathe fast, like tigers and dogs, live short lives. Animals that breathe slow, like tortoises and elephants, live long ones. Yoga is the slowing of the breath. The slowing of the life. The conservation of what we are.
The day we needed adjectives was the day we lost it.
The world today calls many things yoga. Hatha for the body. Power yoga for the workout. Hot yoga for the sweat. Goat yoga, beer yoga, aerial yoga. The list grows longer every year and the practice grows shallower with it.
Yoga is not a category. Yoga is one thing. The day we needed adjectives in front of it was the day we lost it.
Most yoga teachers today are not actually practising yoga. They are practising postures. They are leading exercise classes with Sanskrit names. The integration of body, mind and breath that the practice was always built around has been quietly stripped out of the modern industry, because integration takes years and a class card does not.
I am not interested in being part of that. I never have been.
The lineage is still here. Held a little more carefully.
I am 40 now. I teach a small circle of students privately in Kuala Lumpur, and live online to students in Singapore, Hong Kong, the UK, Australia and beyond. I do not run a studio. I do not have hundreds of subscribers. I take the students I can serve, and I serve them properly.
My grandfather would have approved of that, I think.
The lineage he carried from India, that my mother carried in Malaysia, is still here. Held a little more carefully now. By someone who almost lost it once, and will not lose it again.
