Why I Don't Celebrate International Yoga Day

Every June 21^st, the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, the day Adiyogi supposedly turned south and handed yoga to the seven sages, my feed turns into a parade of rolled-out mats in city squares, officials mid-sun-salutation, and the same glowing hashtag about global unity. And

every year, I quietly close the app and sit it out.

Not because I don't love yoga. I have built an entire business, a life, around this practice. The breath, the stillness, the eight limbs that ask infinitely more of us than a deep backbend ever could. Believe me, it pains me a little every year to opt out of a "global day of yoga." But I keep coming back to one stubborn, very Cancer-rising question: true to whom, exactly? I sit this one out because I can't separate the holiday from the hand that built it, and that hand has a record I'm not willing to look past just because the cause is one I love.

Here's the thing people forget: International Yoga Day isn't ancient. It's not handed down from the sages along with everything else. It's young, younger than some may think. It exists because Narendra Modi stood up at the UN General Assembly in September 2014, months into his first term as India's prime minister, and proposed it himself. The resolution passed that December with a record number of co-sponsoring nations. By 2015 he was leading thousands through sun salutations on Rajpath in Delhi, and he's been front and center every year since, most recently leading the 2026 observance in Kolkata. This isn't yoga being recognized by the world. This is one man's name stitched permanently into a global calendar date, dressed up as ancient tradition. I can't unsee the stitching once I notice it. Once I noticed, I went looking at what else his hands have been doing, and It is not pretty, loves.

Since Modi took office in 2014, his government's human rights record has steadily worsened by the accounts of the people who track these things for a living, not by anyone's political spin. Human Rights Watch's most recent World Report describes a government that suppressed dissent through media takedowns and prosecutions of journalists and academics, that demolished homes of people merely accused of crimes, even after the Supreme Court had barred the practice, and that did little to stop mob violence against Muslims, particularly Kashmiri students and workers, fueled by inflammatory rhetoric on national broadcast networks. India now sits at 157th out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index, a six-spot drop from the year before. Sweden's V-Dem Institute has labeled India an "electoral autocracy" for nine consecutive years running, citing shrinking free expression and deepening persecution of religious and caste minorities. None of this is whispered-about, fringe-conspiracy stuff. It's in the annual reports. It's sitting right there in the open, the way Saturn sits in a chart whether you want to look at that house or not.

This isn't a new chapter, either, it's the same book, further along. Before he was prime minister, Modi was barred from entering the United States over his role in the 2002 Gujarat riots, in which roughly a thousand people, most of them Muslim, were killed. That ban wasn't subtle. The U.S. government looked at the evidence and decided he wasn't welcome. Since taking power, his government has stripped Kashmir of its autonomy, passed a citizenship law that explicitly excludes Muslim asylum seekers, and presided over ongoing violence in Manipur that has killed hundreds and destroyed houses of worship across multiple faiths. When a Wall Street Journal reporter asked him directly about discrimination against religious minorities, he denied any discrimination exists in India "on basis of caste, creed, or age." When a Norwegian journalist asked the same question more recently, he didn't even bother with the denial. He just turned and walked away. I keep thinking about that, a man who'll lead a televised sun salutation in three different countries but won't stand still for one honest question.

Here's where it gets a bit personal for me, the part I can't logic my way around. Ahimsa, non-harm, is the first ethical limb yoga asks of us. It's the foundation everything else is supposedly built on top of. You don't get to the breathwork, the postures, the meditation, without first reckoning with that one. So, when a head of state with this kind of documented record becomes the literal poster boy for a "global day of yoga," I feel the disconnect somewhere lower than my brain, somewhere in the gut, the place that knows when something's off before the mind has finished arguing about it. It's not that yoga belongs to any single political figure, it doesn't, and it never will, no matter how many Guinness World Records get set in his name. It's that I don't want my participation, even a small symbolic one, to read as a nod of approval toward the person who's made himself synonymous with the holiday.

So, on June 21st, I'll still practice. I'll still teach if I have a class on the books. I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and I'm definitely not throwing out 5,000 years of lineage because one government found a clever way to brand it. I just won't post the hashtag, share the UN graphics, or call it International Yoga Day inside my studio. My ahimsa starts at home, with not lending my voice to something I can't square with my values, even when the thing wrapped around it is something I love down to my bones.

I know plenty of people in this community see it differently, and I genuinely respect that. For a lot of practitioners, the day has become truly separate from its origin, a free, global, non-commercial invitation to just breathe together. I don't think that view is wrong. I just can't get there myself, not yet, not with what I know now. Once you've seen the stitching, it's hard to unsee it.

If you practice yoga today, in any form, on any mat, in any country, that's beautiful, and I mean that. I'm just going to call it the longest, brightest day I get this year to come home to my own breath.