Yoga is Peak Experience: 2025 Wrap Up
Yoga is Peak Experience
We don’t need to explain consciousness to someone who’s just tasted it. The experience itself becomes the teaching, the proof, the communication. Yoga is inherently pluralistic, constantly borrowed and reused, yet rooted in something undeniable. This makes it resilient and dangerous to the ego and its status quo. A call to expansion beyond known boundaries.
Everything we build follows this pattern. Frameworks, credentials, partnerships are permission slips leading to direct experience. Yogis hold the power; these structures just open doors. Eventually the scaffolding becomes unnecessary and the practice remains.
Our job is to create conditions where profound encounters can occur, and that understanding has guided everything we’ve done in 2025.
Living System
Around the world, organisations like us evolve laterally across culture, striving to be adequate organs for yoga’s expression. This year, we’ve seen that evolution accelerate.
Membership grew more this year than at any time since the Covid upheaval. Our financial position is strong, with a healthy surplus projected for 2026, and a skilled team now has the tools and systems to deliver what members actually need. That foundation creates freedom to pursue advocacy and international partnerships, to build something that serves yoga for the next quarter century.
Connection
Five years ago our website was neglected and our social media reach was negligible. Now people find us through what we put out, and they stay because it speaks to something real in their lives as yoga students and teachers.
This year we signed an agreement with the Indian Yoga Association and maintained research collaborations with Deakin, ECU, and Macquarie. We’ve built working relationships with IAYT, Pilates Australia, government ministers, and the private health funds now implementing reinstatement.
Yoga Australia has become a switchboard. We make introductions, broker conversations, and amplify information for those who would benefit.
Private Health
A decade ago, yoga was removed from the private health insurance regime along with other natural therapies, pending a review of the clinical evidence. That review is now complete, and the findings confirmed what practitioners have long experienced: yoga helps with hypertension, anxiety, depression, and chronic pain. As of July 2025, the Federal Government has implemented the recommendations and reinstatement is underway.
Work is now well advanced on frameworks to recognise individual yoga teachers as eligible providers. Our tiered registration system positions Yoga Australia members well for this moment, particularly those who can demonstrate substantial training and years of teaching experience. If you’re working toward higher levels of registration, now is the time to ensure your documentation is current.
Yoga Therapy
In March, a record number of practitioners joined our Mental Health Summit, following strong demand the year before for our Menopause Summit. These events draw people from across multiple professions because the topics cut to what people are actually navigating.
We bring lineage holders and contemporary researchers into the same room, blend traditional wisdom with Australian realities and current science, address what’s unfolding right now in clinics, studios, and living rooms. Ancient technique meeting emerging need. This is the work that keeps an ancient practice alive across multiple landscapes.
Our accreditation framework recognises both mentor-lineage training and modern programs, and conversations with the NDIS about recognition for yoga therapy are ongoing.
The Just Breathe Summit in March 2026 brings traditional prānāyāma teachers alongside clinical researchers and breathing educators to explore what yoga has always understood about breath and what modern practice still gets wrong. Yoga teachers are already well-placed to teach safe, effective breathing, and this summit will give them the confidence to claim that ground.
Ekagra
एकाग्र means one-pointedness, and this has become our strategic orientation. Yoga Australia functions as a convener, a switchboard, a gardener rather than a gatekeeper. We broker contact between traditional teachers who may never leave India and their Australian counterparts hungry for that depth. We connect university researchers with lineage-trained therapists, policymakers with practitioners who want yoga recognised as something more than stretching in activewear.
Less pretence of policing and more space for authentic practice to flourish. Each collaboration, each introduction, each resource shared becomes part of something larger than any single organisation can build alone. Yoga needs camaraderie and room to breathe.
Our People
It’s serendipitous when energy and experience arrive together. A strong practice, few competing demands, and the right managerial and educational background have made me well-suited to this role, but nothing here is solo work. These years have been defined by close collaboration with members, staff, and volunteers. Of everything the role asks, writing on behalf of yoga in Australia remains the deepest privilege.
Much of what we publish is authored by senior members, and if you have ideas for articles, short courses, or events, the door is open for collaboration.
Danielle Gordon and Merridy Woodroffe retire from the board this year after terms beginning in 2021 and 2022 respectively. They put the shovel in the soil: governance oversight, corporate risk, professionalism, and most importantly, collegiate harmony and respect at board level. That culture naturally reflects in all relationships. Our thanks to them both.
Among the staff, Gabrielle and Sami move on to new chapters, and Whitney joins us. A small team, but vibrant, skilled, and ready for the adventure ahead.
As we close 2025 and look toward 2026, we thank our members for being part of this living system. Together, we’re participating in a divine paradox: the timeless expressing itself through time.
About the Author
Josh Pryor is CEO of Yoga Australia and a Level 3 Registered Teacher. A specialist in Mysore Style yoga, Josh’s approach is light-hearted and enthusiastic. Josh is an author of books including a new translation and commentary of Yoga Tārāvalī and Dṛg Dṛśya Viveka.
