Reclaiming the Feminine Lineages of Yoga

By Sowmya Ayyar

Many staunch yoga leaders emphatically declare that yoga has always been inclusive of gender. In theory, this is true: yogic philosophy recognizes the inherent unity and complementarity of masculine and feminine energies. In practice, the his-story and leadership of modern yoga tell a more complicated story. When we look at our present-day institutions, we find men overwhelmingly at the top of the hierarchical chains, directing lineages, founding schools, shaping narratives, and determining legitimacy. Women, meanwhile, are quickly relegated to the roles of practitioners, demonstrators, or promoters. They are visible in advertising and marketing, though rarely positioned as authoritative voices.

This unequal structure has roots in the way yoga was reframed in the twentieth century. Much of contemporary global yoga understands the practice primarily as a physical discipline, drawing from influential texts such as the Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā and interpreted through the lens of male leaders like Matsyendranath and Gorakhnath. With this backdrop, many of the most prominent modern schools of yoga emerged. B. K. S. Iyengar, Swami Sivananda, Pattabhi Jois, and Krishnamacharya were pioneers whose teachings shaped the global imagination of yoga, at a time when women’s voices were being curtailed (across the world, in a variety of fields). Although their personal philosophies encompassed devotion, discipline, breath, and ethics, the aspects of their teachings that traveled internationally were predominantly physical. As a result, modern yoga became synonymous with āsana, and āsana became synonymous with male-created systems.

Women’s lineages and feminine ways of knowing receded further in this era. In the global yoga marketplace–studios, teacher-training programs, branding, and certification systems–women constitute the majority of practitioners, yet their ancestral contributions are rarely acknowledged. The feminine aspects of yoga, which for centuries existed in household traditions, temple practices, oral teachings, and community-based sādhanā, nearly disappeared from mainstream representation.

A shift occurs when we expand our understanding of yoga beyond the physical and return to the fullness of its philosophical and devotional frameworks. Swami Vivekananda, in his landmark presentations on yoga, articulated four typologies: bhakti, karma, jñāna, and rāja. In the Bhagavad Gītā, Krishna and Arjuna explore more than eighteen yogas, including sāṅkhya, vairāgya, abhyāsa, and vijñāna. These categories open the field far beyond posture-based practice. They also reveal how deeply the feminine is embedded within yoga’s philosophical core, through metaphors of devotion, metaphysical energies, and the presence of goddesses, yoginīs, and female sages.

Women’s bodies have been addressed in modern yoga scholarship, although often narrowly. Geeta Iyengar, the daughter of B. K. S. Iyengar and one of the most respected voices on women’s practice, researched and codified important adaptations for women, especially around menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause. Her pioneering work in Yoga: A Gem for Women offers a thoughtful approach to postural practice for women’s physiologies. This influential work remains largely within the realm of āsana and physical alignment.

When we turn toward bhakti, śakti, and tantra, we encounter a far richer landscape of feminine yogic knowledge. These traditions reveal yoga as relational, intuitive, embodied, devotional, and emotionally intelligent, qualities often associated with feminine experience, though valuable to all practitioners. The yoginī traditions of Odisha and Madhya Pradesh, the devotional poetry of Āṇḍāl, Meera, Jnaneshwari, and Akka Mahadevi (among others), the tantric cosmologies of Tripurasundarī, and the household yogas practiced quietly by women for generations all gesture toward expansive forms of knowledge production and spiritual authority.

Re-centering these feminine perspectives does more than correct the imbalance. It opens a more integrated understanding of yoga, one that values the heart alongside the body, intuition alongside discipline, community alongside individuality, and lived experience alongside textual knowledge. When we reclaim these dimensions, yoga becomes a space where women are practitioners and leaders, proponents of lineages, philosophers, healers, and cultural transmitters. 

To acknowledge yoga’s feminine lineages is to acknowledge the full breadth of yoga itself. It invites us to expand how we teach, research, practice, and imagine yoga in a way that honors its plurality and restores the voices that have long sustained it.