What is yoga supposed to mean? The word itself comes from the Sanskrit yuj, “to yoke, to unite.” Yoga is not meant to be an aerobics routine with incense, nor a fitness brand stamped on water bottles. At its heart, yoga is an act of union: union of breath and body, body and mind, self (subjective reality) and life (OBJECTIVE reality). It is the practice of becoming more present to existence as it is, messy, painful, beautiful, unresolved.

And yet, in today’s world, yoga has been hollowed out by folklore, fashion, and marketing. It is sold as a product, reduced to leggings, playlists, and brand slogans. Instead of uniting us with life, it offers escape. Instead of awakening, it delivers sedation.

This distortion becomes stark in the case of the yoga teacher who was dismissed for saying during class: “…with all the shit that is happening in the world…” His intention was clear: to acknowledge the weight of collective reality and to create a space for connection and release. But the response he received was damning: “They say they love your yoga, but you speak about life and use shocking language.”

This reproach exposes the betrayal of yoga’s very meaning. How can one claim to practice union while rejecting reality? How can you stretch the body and silence the breath while censoring the mind? To forbid a teacher from speaking of life is to amputate yoga from its soul, reducing it to mere gymnastics for the flexible bourgeoisie.

And this is not just about yoga. It is about the society that produces such contradictions. A society that sterilizes language until nothing real can be said. A society that punishes teachers for daring to name the obvious. A society that compartmentalizes existence into consumable fragments, exercise without reflection, entertainment without engagement, and information without context. Humans, reduced to functions, like machines.

History warns us of what happens when language is cleansed in this way. Totalitarian systems have always known: control speech, and you control thought. Stalin rewrote dictionaries. The Nazis perfected euphemism. Orwell gave us Newspeak (“Narrow the words, and you narrow the world”). If yoga cannot speak of life, then students cannot connect body and mind. If citizens cannot speak the truth, they eventually cannot even see it.

Into this silence enters the new deity of our age: Artificial Intelligence. Presented as all-knowing, all-seeing, always correct. An oracle without rough edges, without offense, without soul. People turn to it as once they turned to priests or to parties: “Tell us what is true.” And the masses obey.

The danger is not that AI will rebel against us. The danger is that we will follow it blindly, like a herd hypnotized, until we stand at the cliff’s edge, and step into the void without ever pausing to ask why.

The dismissal of the yoga teacher is not a minor anecdote. It is a symbol of a deeper sickness: the reduction of practices meant to awaken us into rituals that numb us. Yoga without life, language without truth, technology without wisdom. Together they lead toward the same endpoint: the robotization of consciousness.

The real question is: will we allow yoga, and with it, life itself, to be reduced to folklore and fashion, or will we reclaim it as the radical practice it was always meant to be? Will we accept to walk heads bowed, through the corridor, narrowing by the day, of language censorship, or dare look up and remember that language, raw, unruly and sometimes even offensive, is the very thing that keeps us human?