Can we really call ourselves Yogis?

The question has been rattling around in my head for a while, but it caught me off guard yesterday. I was driving to London and back—a round trip of several hours for the sole purpose of collecting an IKEA item from Wembley that, for reasons known only to IKEA's inventory system, couldn’t be delivered any closer to Nottingham.

Somewhere between the M1, the motorway services coffee, and questioning my life choices, I found myself thinking about yoga. More specifically, I found myself thinking about the word yogi.

It's a question I'd come across before—in articles, books and conversations about yoga philosophy—but I'd never really stopped to interrogate it.

But am I actually a yogi?

The question sounds simple until you sit with it for more than a few minutes.

My first instinct was to answer, “Well, yes. Of course.”

I practise yoga. I teach yoga. I read about yoga far more than most people would consider normal. I try, however imperfectly, to live by some of its teachings. Given how much space yoga occupies in my life, it seems reasonable to assume that makes me a yogi.

But somewhere between Nottingham and Wembley, the answer stopped feeling quite so obvious.

In most yoga spaces, the term is used pretty casually. If you practise yoga, you’re a yogi. Just as someone who runs is a runner, or someone who paints is a painter. It’s an identity linked to an activity.

Is yoga just an activity?

About 15 years ago, when I first came to yoga, I was interested in movement. Like many people, my entry point was the physical practice. The philosophy came about seven years later. Then the history. Then the culture. Then the slightly uncomfortable realisation that the deeper I went, the more complicated yoga became.

Traditionally, a yogi is not simply someone who attends classes a few times a week or could float back into Chaturanga. A yogi was someone dedicated to a spiritual path. Someone who organised their life around practice rather than fitting practice around the rest of their life.

That distinction gave me a pause.

If a yogi is someone committed to self-study, discipline, service and ultimately liberation, then we’re talking about something far deeper than a weekly class or even a daily asana practice.

We’re talking about an entire way of being in the world.

And if that’s the case, I’m suddenly much less certain about where I fit.

By that definition, I might not be a yogi at all.

After all, my days don't look particularly yogic in the traditional sense. They involve a full-time job, a side hustle teaching yoga (another existential crisis for another week: can we really call ourselves yoga teachers?), answering emails, juggling deadlines, walking Lily, my beloved cocker spaniel, making two different dinners, navigating the daily puzzle of allergies, intolerances and food preferences, and catching myself scrolling on my phone more than I would like to admit.

I don't live in an ashram.

I don't spend hours each day in meditation and contemplation.

And I certainly haven’t renounced as many worldly attachments as I would like to.

In fact, one of the reasons I practise yoga is because I’m still very much entangled in the messiness of ordinary life.

And perhaps that’s why this question has stayed with me.

If we’re honest, most of us aren’t trying to become enlightened ascetics. We’re trying to navigate modern life with a little more grace. We’re trying to be kinder to ourselves, less reactive in difficult situations and a bit more comfortable in our own skin.

That's not insignificant.

Is this enough to make us yogis?

The deeper I’ve gone down the yoga rabbit hole, the more cautious I’ve become about calling myself a yogi. Not because I practise less, but because I’ve started to understand just how much history, philosophy and culture sit behind that seemingly simple word.

Yoga today is everywhere. There are yoga leggings, yoga holidays, yoga influencers and yoga brands. There are yoga-themed water bottles, yoga retreats with infinity pools and yoga experiences that cost more than my first car.

There are countless ways in which yoga has become more accessible, and while that has undoubtedly brought some challenges, it has also allowed many more people—including me—to encounter the practice.

After all, I probably wouldn’t be writing this if yoga hadn’t travelled beyond its original cultural context.

But there is also something else worth acknowledging.

Sometimes, in making yoga accessible, we have also made it simpler.

We borrow Sanskrit words. We (myself included) quote teachings we've heard in class. We throw around terms like dharma, samskara, vairagya and namaste—especially namaste—with varying degrees of confidence.

One of the most humbling things about studying yoga is realising how little you actually know. Just when you think you’ve understood something, another layer appears.

Maybe that's why, after spending most of yesterday driving to IKEA, I couldn’t shake the feeling that yoga looks a bit like an IKEA wardrobe. It seems straightforward until you start unpacking it.

For all my discomfort with the term, I also struggle with the idea that being a yogi is reserved only for people who dedicate their entire lives to spiritual practice.

Because if that's the case, where does that leave the rest of us?

What about the parent trying to remain patient when they're exhausted? The person who catches themselves before sending an angry text? The practitioner who returns to their mat after a difficult week, not because they’re disciplined, but because they’re struggling?

What about those of us who are simply trying to be a little more aware, a little kinder, and a little less reactive than we were yesterday?

Those efforts may not look anything like the image many of us have of a traditional yogi. But I can’t help feeling that they’re part of the practice too.

And that’s why I’ve never quite settled on an answer.

Can we really call ourselves yogis?

Honestly, I don't know.

Some days I think the term has become so detached from its origins that we should use it more carefully. Other days I think that if yoga genuinely shapes the way we live, perhaps we’ve earned the right to use it.

Most of the time, I find myself somewhere in between.

Perhaps the problem is that we’re looking for a binary answer to a much more complicated question.

Because whether I use the term or not changes very little about what I actually do. This morning I still got on my mat. Tomorrow I'll still teach my class. I'll still read, study, practise and, quite inevitably, get things wrong from time to time.

For me, the question has become less about whether I've earned a particular title and more about whether yoga is actually influencing the way I live.

Am I becoming more patient? More compassionate? More present? More willing to sit with discomfort instead of immediately trying to escape it?

Because if yoga isn't changing how I move through the world, then what is all those hours on the mat actually for?

As I drove back up the M1 yesterday, exhausted and longing to be home, I was thinking about patience, perspective and whether I could laugh at the absurdity of spending £80 on fuel to collect a £30 wardrobe door.

Those moments will probably tell me more about my practice than my ability to hold a handstand or recite Sanskrit ever could.

I still don’t know whether I can really call myself a yogi.

But I do know that yoga continues to ask something of me. To pay attention. To be more curious. More compassionate. Less certain that I’ve got it all figured out.

Maybe that's enough.

Or perhaps that’s the point.

After all, whether we call ourselves yogis matters far less than how we show up in the world when nobody is watching.