The Borrowers?
There is a particular kind of confidence that exists inside modern wellness culture. A soft confidence. A confidence wrapped in low lighting, slow speech, spiritual language and the reassuring suggestion that what is being offered is both ancient and unquestionably true.
The older I’ve become as a teacher, the more suspicious I’ve become of certainty presented in that tone.
Not because practices themselves are inherently bad. Not because people are malicious. But because wellness has a remarkable ability to take complex systems, soften their edges, simplify their histories and then hand them back to us as coherent truths. The seams disappear. The contradictions disappear. Eventually the origin story disappears too.
What remains is something polished enough to feel timeless.
And perhaps nowhere is that process more visible than in one of the most popular slow movement practices of the modern yoga industry, yin yoga.
The history itself is relatively recent and unusually traceable. Unlike many modern yoga systems which disappear into mythology and vague references to “ancient traditions,” this one still contains identifiable living people, identifiable transitions and visible adaptations.
So let’s recap it’s background a little. A Chinese martial artist and teacher develops a broad Daoist movement system rooted in internal arts, animal forms, flexibility, energetics and long-held postures. A Western yoga teacher studies with him briefly, extracts one particular aspect of the practice and reframes it through anatomy and skeletal variation. Another teacher later layers in Buddhist psychology, mindfulness language and therapeutic spirituality. Alongside this come references to Traditional Chinese Medicine, meridians, fascia research and nervous system regulation. Over time the practice becomes institutionalised through yoga studios, teacher trainings and commercial wellness culture.
There is a lot of the unspoken here too, belief that it sat so uncomfortably with the originator that it was all enough for him to become a serious recluse for many years due to the impact of his practice being taken to make a system.
What fascinates me is not whether this process was intentionally exploitative. I do not think most people involved believed they were stealing anything. In many ways that is exactly the point.
The Borrowers, the children’s novel, was built around a family who quietly took items from the house above them. They did not consider themselves thieves. They considered themselves borrowers. The language itself softened the act. Borrowing sounded gentler. Temporary. Harmless. Necessary, even.
That framing feels strangely relevant to modern wellness because so much of contemporary wellness culture operates through a kind of cultural collage. Traditions are not necessarily studied in their full historical or philosophical complexity. Instead, elements are selected, translated and recombined into systems that feel spiritually coherent to modern Western audiences.
Daoism becomes flow.
Buddhism becomes mindfulness.
Yoga becomes embodiment.
Traditional Chinese Medicine becomes energy balance.
Neuroscience becomes regulation.
Trauma language becomes legitimacy.
Eventually all of these systems begin to blur together into one broad aesthetic category: healing.
The problem is not cultural exchange itself. Human beings have always borrowed from one another. Practices evolve. Ideas move across borders. Systems adapt. That is not new.
What feels more uncomfortable is the flattening.
Distinct traditions with entirely different histories, philosophies and cosmologies begin to function as interchangeable symbolic ingredients in a modern wellness recipe. A little Daoism. A little Buddhism. Some anatomy. Some spirituality. Some therapeutic language. Combined together carefully enough and the final product begins to feel ancient, holistic and universal.
But universal to whom?
I often think about how strange this would sound in any other context. It would be like describing the entirety of spiritual life in Britain simply as Christianity, ignoring centuries of distinction, tension, class, region and identity. Yet Asian traditions are routinely compressed into one broad spiritual category within wellness culture, particularly when translated for Western audiences.
And this raises another uncomfortable question.
Why did this practice need to become yoga at all?
Not everything has to become yoga.
There are movement systems, stretching systems, martial systems and meditative systems all over the world which are allowed to exist under their own names without requiring validation through a yoga label. Yet in the modern wellness economy, yoga functions almost like a cultural passport. Yoga studios already existed. Yoga had legitimacy. Yoga teacher trainings had infrastructure. Yoga sold.
So perhaps the question is not simply whether this practice belongs under the yoga umbrella. Physically speaking, of course it can exist inside a yoga class. Modern yoga itself already contains enormous amounts of passive stretching, adaptation and hybridisation.
The more interesting question is why the yoga label became so important in the first place.
Once something is successfully absorbed into yoga culture, a fascinating transformation begins to happen. What was once fluid becomes fixed. What was once experimental becomes orthodox. What was once assembled becomes treated as though it emerged fully formed from an ancient lineage… and then, inevitably, hierarchy appears.
Who is qualified to teach it.
Who studied with whom.
Who holds authority.
Who belongs inside the lineage.
Who has misunderstood the method.
Who is “doing it properly.”
I have always found some of this slightly uncomfortable. Not because education lacks value but because the certainty sometimes feels disproportionate to the historical reality beneath it. There can be a surprising amount of snobbery surrounding a practice whose own foundations are comparatively modern, hybridised and philosophically assembled.
That tension fascinates and slightly repulses me.
Especially because many of the people involved have also contributed genuinely valuable work. It would be intellectually lazy to pretend otherwise. Anatomical education around skeletal variation, for example, changed yoga teaching profoundly for the better. Many teachers became safer, less aesthetic-driven and more compassionate because of that work. For years yoga culture was dominated by visual ideals disguised as universal alignment principles. Important challenges to those ideas emerged from this movement.
Two things can be true at once.
Someone can contribute enormously to education while still participating in a process of cultural translation that deserves scrutiny.
That nuance matters because modern wellness often struggles with complexity. We tend to divide people into heroes and villains far too quickly. But most systems are not built through evil intentions. More often they emerge through enthusiasm, adaptation, commercial opportunity, limited cultural literacy and the sincere belief that integration itself is inherently positive.
For a long time, wellness culture celebrated synthesis almost unquestioningly.
The more traditions combined together, the more enlightened a system appeared. A little Zen. A little somatics. Some breathwork. Some Jung. Some Chinese medicine. Some neuroscience. Eclecticism itself became a marker of depth.
I wonder if we have become more culturally literate since then. Or at least more cautious.
If a brand new movement system launched tomorrow combining Hindu philosophy, Daoism, Buddhism, fascia science and nervous system regulation into one spiritually integrated method, I suspect many people would ask harder questions now.
Who is this for?
Who benefits from it?
What is being simplified?
What has been removed?
What authority allows these traditions to be blended together?
And why do certain forms of cultural borrowing become legitimised while others are criticised?
I suspect these conversations would be sharper today precisely because people have become more aware of how power operates inside wellness culture. Perhaps that awareness should extend beyond philosophy and into science too.
One of the more interesting shifts over the last decade is how quickly information itself has changed. Fascia research evolved. Anatomy conversations evolved. Educational access exploded online. Teachers no longer rely exclusively on a handful of senior figures or expensive trainings to access information. Ideas that once circulated almost unquestioned now sit inside a much larger ecosystem of debate, research and reinterpretation.
Which makes me wonder whether some of our attachment to certainty inside these practices is emotional rather than intellectual because certainty feels good.
Ancient feels good.
Lineage feels good.
Rules feel good.
Being one of the people who “really understands” feels good too.
But if this practice was assembled through adaptation from the very beginning, perhaps evolution is not betrayal. Perhaps evolution is the most honest thing about it.
Maybe we do not need to defend it as ancient, pure or philosophically unified in order for it to remain meaningful.
Maybe it is enough to admit that modern wellness systems are often constructed in real time from fragments of culture, science, spirituality and commerce. Maybe it is enough to admit that some of those constructions have helped people enormously while still carrying contradictions worth examining.
