‘A place where people escape’

Yogalands: In Search of Practice on the Mat and in the World
by Paul Bramadat

Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025
$29.95  /  9780228023746

Reviewed by Petra Chambers

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When Paul Bramadat moved from Winnipeg to Victoria in 2008, he was determined not to turn vegan or start doing yoga. Fortunately, he didn’t keep the second half of that promise and instead went all-in, first by developing a robust postural yoga practice and then by turning his researcher’s eye toward “Yogaland.”

“Yogaland” is a subculture, a parallel world that exists in almost all Canadian and American neighbourhoods that are frequented by white people with disposable income. “Yogaland” is an “anti-world” with its own conventions, beliefs, and aesthetics; a place where people escape to heal and manage the overwhelmingness of modern life.

As a university professor, and the director of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at UVic from 2008 to 2025, Bramadat brings an experienced qualitative researcher’s curiosity to the cultural phenomenon of yoga in the west. The critical lens he turns toward this complex topic challenges the “innocent approach” that most North Americans take toward their yoga practice. He does not try to debunk anyone’s cherished notions but instead is interested in how practitioners respond to inquiry into the core assumptions and stories of “Yogaland.”

The results are fascinating.

Bramadat digs into cultural appropriation; sexual misconduct and abuse; feminism; privilege; racism; transphobia; the idealization of India; how colonial humiliation impacted the transmission of postural yoga from India to the West; the irony of the idea that yoga is “spiritual but not religious”; the murky hybrid roots of modern yoga; yogalebrities; and what the Sanskrit chants and Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (one of the core texts of “Yogaland”) are really about.

With the help of a research assistant, Bramadat interviewed 117 yogis across North America. Eighty-three of these were in-depth formal interviews with experienced teachers. He and his assistant also conducted focus groups, engaged in extensive observations, practised at almost every studio they visited, and did an unquantified amount of what Bramadat refers to as “deep hanging out” with the denizens of “Yogaland.” In addition, Bramadat completed a 200-hour yoga teacher training for research purposes.

He admits that this level of personal involvement in the subject of his research is new territory and explains that “for the first time in my professional life, I am not just an observer. Now I am also the object of my own gaze.” Being the object of one’s own gaze is a yogi-ish thing to say, and this personal involvement is one of the strengths of this book. Throughout, Bramadat reflects on his privilege; his social location as the son of an Indo-Trinidadian immigrant father and Anglo-Celtic mother; his experience as a reasonably hard-core practitioner of Ashtanga yoga; his ethical struggles with aspects of Yogaland culture; and other facets of his backstory, including an experience with racism as a child that led to the instigating event that brought him to yoga in the first place.

Bramadat is a self-revealing storyteller, sharing not only personal facts and analysis, but also his flaws, doubts, and egoic missteps. He is relatable and likeable as a narrator, and I have the feeling that he was, at times, enjoying himself enormously while writing this book. He chose a smart but not scholarly tone for Yogalands, and throughout he writes with the bemused humility of a person whose views have been both challenged and informed by Millennial and Gen Zed university students for decades.

You don’t need to care a whit for yoga to enjoy and be edified by this book. It is fascinating as sociology, touches on most of the unprecedented challenges North Americans are facing in the early 21^st century, and does not offer yoga as a solution. Instead, it illuminates what practitioners are trying to find, escape from, and heal towards through their practice, and therefore uses yoga– and “Yogaland” – as a foil to understand the complex challenges we are all trying to manage, one way or another, in the modern world.

I am a lapsed practitioner of postural yoga. I had no plans to return to my practice when I started this book, but after reading it, I find myself strangely intrigued again. Bramadat shines light into the awkward nooks and crannies of “Yogaland,” some of which felt problematic to me, even if I didn’t fully understand why, and others that I was blissfully unaware of. He refers to a “yoga for adults” that is “post-innocent,” and makes his position clear in the introduction:

I for one am not interested in maintaining a practice if the convictions to which it might be connected wither under scrutiny. I suspect that practitioners who have come this far in the book will also be confident that their passion for postural yoga can withstand and perhaps be strengthened by outside inquiry. It seems to me that a post-innocence yoga, or a yoga for adults, may permit a more profound pursuit of the deeper potential of practice.

A post-innocence yoga, or a yoga for adults, is a yoga I can see myself returning to.

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Petra Chambers (she/her) lives in the traditional territory of the PE’ntlatc People and K’ómoks Nation. She writes creative nonfiction, poetry, fiction, and hybrid forms. Her work has been published by PRISM International, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, Best Canadian Poetry 2026, and Best Canadian Stories 2026. [Editor’s Note: Petra Chambers has reviewed books by Mandi Em, Sarah Marie Wiebe, and RJ McDaniel for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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