This week, dozens of the world’s leading yoga scholars gather in Paris to wrestle with a question almost every modern practitioner has felt at some point: what actually counts as “real” yoga?
The 4th International Yoga Darśana Yoga Sādhana (YDYS) Conference opens Wednesday, May 27 at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris and runs through Friday, May 29. Co-organised with the Centre d’études sud-asiatiques et himalayennes (CESAH), the three-day gathering carries the theme “Authenticity, Authority and Adaptation” — a deliberate choice that puts modern yoga’s most uncomfortable question front and centre.
What’s Happening In Paris This Week
YDYS is a triennial academic conference convened by yoga studies scholars to examine the tradition’s textual, historical and contemporary dimensions. The 2026 edition draws an international slate of presenters from universities including SOAS (London), EFEO (Paris), and the University of Washington, along with practitioner-scholars from India, Europe and North America.
Three keynotes anchor the programme. Dominic Goodall (École française d’Extrême-Orient) opens proceedings with the earliest textual concepts of kuṇḍalinī — a topic most contemporary yoga teachers introduce confidently but few have traced to its tantric roots. Mark Singleton (SOAS) launches his new book, Yoga Machine: Technology, Transhumanism and Transcendence. And Sunila Kale and Christian Novetzke (University of Washington) present “Sovereignty, Boycott and Struggle: The Three Registers of Political Yoga.”
For those who can’t make Paris, SOAS Yoga Studies Online is offering a paid live stream of the keynote sessions, an unusually open arrangement for an academic gathering of this size.
Why The “Authenticity” Question Matters Now
Anyone who has scrolled an Instagram yoga feed, watched a hot-yoga class adapted into a HIIT format, or seen a 200-hour teacher training advertised as “ancient lineage” has bumped into the same tension that YDYS is built around: yoga as practised in 2026 looks very different from the textual yoga of Patañjali, the haṭha yoga of the 15th-century Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā, or even the early-20th-century modern yoga that emerged in India under teachers like Krishnamacharya and his students.
That gap matters because authority claims in modern yoga — who gets to certify, who gets to interpret a sutra, who gets to decide whether a chair-yoga class is “yoga” at all — often rely on the assumption of a continuous, authentic tradition. Scholars like Singleton have spent two decades documenting how patchy and recently constructed many of those claims actually are.
That doesn’t make modern yoga “fake.” It does mean that the question of authority — who or what decides what’s legitimate — is more open than most studios let on. The YDYS programme treats this not as a culture-war flashpoint but as a research problem worth careful, multi-disciplinary attention.
Mark Singleton’s “Yoga Machine”
The book launch likely to draw the widest attention belongs to Mark Singleton, whose 2010 study Yoga Body reshaped how scholars (and many teachers) talk about the origins of modern postural yoga. His new title, Yoga Machine: Technology, Transhumanism and Transcendence, asks how yoga is being reframed in an age of wearables, AI coaches, sleep-stage trackers and biohacking communities.
Singleton’s argument, signalled in the book’s framing, is that the contemporary “self-optimising” body — the one wearing a continuous glucose monitor, ranking its HRV, and meditating with a brain-sensing headband — has begun to merge with practices once framed as paths to liberation. Whether that merger is faithful to yoga’s older soteriological aims, or a kind of category drift, is the kind of question YDYS is built to surface.
What “Political Yoga” Adds To The Conversation
The Kale and Novetzke keynote — on “political yoga” — pushes in a different direction. Their research traces how yoga has functioned as a register of political identity in modern India, from anti-colonial freedom movements to contemporary state-led wellness diplomacy. The Indian government’s 2014 establishment of the International Day of Yoga, and last year’s recognition of Yogasana as a competitive sport, are both moves that sit in this lineage of yoga-as-statecraft.
The point isn’t to be dismissive of those moves, but to notice that they constitute a third kind of “authority” claim — neither textual nor lineage-based, but sovereign — and to ask what that does to the practice in the long run.
What This Means For Your Practice
You don’t have to read a single scholarly paper to benefit from what YDYS is doing. Three practical takeaways for anyone who steps onto a mat:
- Stop asking “is this authentic?” — start asking “authentic to what?” Patañjali’s eight-limbed path, haṭha yoga’s tantric postures, and the modern asana class are all “real” yoga, but they answer different questions and serve different goals.
- Treat lineage claims with curiosity rather than reverence. A teacher saying they trained in a “5,000-year-old tradition” is often making a true claim about influence and an inflated claim about continuity. Both can be useful to know.
- Notice where your practice is being optimised, and for whom. Wearables, AI form-correctors, and engagement-driven studio formats aren’t neutral. Singleton’s framing suggests it’s worth being explicit about whether you’re seeking performance, regulation, or something more transformative.
None of that requires abandoning a class you love. It just means meeting the practice as it actually is, rather than as the marketing copy says it is.
Key Takeaways
- The 4th International Yoga Darśana Yoga Sādhana Conference runs May 27–29, 2026, at EHESS Paris, themed “Authenticity, Authority and Adaptation.”
- Keynotes from Dominic Goodall (kuṇḍalinī), Mark Singleton (“Yoga Machine”) and Kale/Novetzke (“Political Yoga”) will set the conversation.
- The conference treats yoga’s modern identity not as an attack on tradition but as a serious research problem.
- Live-stream access to keynotes is being offered via SOAS Yoga Studies Online for practitioners outside academia.
For readers wanting to ground today’s debates in yoga’s textual history, our walkthroughs of Patañjali’s Eight Limbs and Yoga Sutra 1.22 are good starting points. For the contemporary side of the same conversation, our coverage of the 2026 World Yogasana Championship traces how yoga is being formalised as a competitive sport, while our explainer on the three granthis goes deeper into the kuṇḍalinī material Goodall is presenting.
Related update: A live example of what the Paris scholars are debating: the 2026 IYNAUS Convention in Philadelphia (May 22–27) is being led by Abhijata Iyengar, B.K.S. Iyengar’s granddaughter — one of the more clearly traceable transmissions of a modern yoga method, exactly the kind of lineage Heinrich Zürcher and Karin Steiner argue for in their conference paper.Sources: 4th International Yoga Darśana Yoga Sādhana Conference (ydys2026.sciencesconf.org); Yoga Research (yogaresearch.org/ydys-paris-2026); SOAS Yoga Studies Online.
