We live in a culture that worships youth, productivity, and visible strength. “Forever young” is sold as an achievement. Aging is framed as decline. Disability is treated as deviation. And a very narrow kind of ability is positioned as virtue. Slowness is suspect. Needing support is implied as weakness. Adaptation is mistaken for failure.

The yoga world has not been immune.

You’ll find promises to reverse aging, sculpt the perfect body, stay forever flexible. As if yoga were an insurance policy against mortality.

It is not.

We are all aging. Every one of us is moving toward limitation. Toward dependence. Toward a body that will not always perform the way it once did. This is not a personal failure. It is the human condition.

And this is precisely why yoga matters.

Long before it was packaged as fitness, yoga was a philosophy rooted in connection, integration, and compassion. Nothing is meant to stay fixed. Not strength. Not identity. Not capacity. Not life itself.

Yoga was never about preserving youth. It was about relating wisely to impermanence.

It teaches us to adapt instead of dominate. To strengthen what can be. To release what must be let go. To recognize that rest is not laziness. To understand that every body belongs.

In a culture shaped by patriarchy, capitalism, ageism, and the normalization of dehumanization, some bodies are treated as if they matter more than others.

Yoga challenges that belief.

Not through slogans, but through practice.

When we honor the aging body, we push back against a culture obsessed with youth. When we make space for disabled bodies, we challenge narrow definitions of worth and capability. When we acknowledge menopause, grief, and vulnerability, we refuse the silence around change. When we recognize that the dying body belongs, too, we step out of the fantasy that we are exempt from mortality.

None of us are separate from these realities. We are all part of the same human arc.

The aging body belongs.
The disabled body belongs.
The menopausal body belongs.
The grieving body belongs.
The dying body belongs.

If yoga is anything, it is a practice of remembering that.