Divya Bala, a respected yoga teacher, wellness coach, and digital creator based in New York City, is making waves on Instagram for challenging what she calls the “algorithmic erasure” of South Asian voices in modern yoga culture.
In a post and accompanying video that has gone viral since Friday, May 23, Divya took aim at the wellness industry’s overwhelming preference for white influencers, despite yoga’s deep South Asian roots.
“Why are mediocre white women the face of yoga—an inherently South Asian practice?” Divya asks in the video shared on her @divyabala Instagram account.
A longtime practitioner with over 20 years of experience and more than six years as a content creator, Divya says she’s poured her heart into producing free, high-quality yoga resources—from YouTube classes to podcasts—yet consistently sees lower engagement compared to white creators offering far less substance; noting:
“They are summarizing complex concepts, using trends to stay current, paying attention to production value—all while offering incredibly valuable resources, for free,” Divya wrote of fellow yoga creators of color. “Yet their accounts are almost always relatively small with less engagement.”
Meanwhile, she notes, the most promoted content by social media algorithms often features what she describes as “basic vinyasa flows” or “hypersexualized expressions of a posture” performed by white women—or muscular white men co-opting the aesthetic of Eastern spirituality with performative reverence.
“These are the people who are always peddling some manifestation course or program to get a ‘yoga body’ (whatever that means),” she said.
Divya argues this disparity is no accident but rather a reflection of systemic racial bias built into the fabric of both the wellness industry and social media platforms.
“This is by design,” she says. “Which means we can change it — but it will take a continuous and collective effort.”
In her video, Divya calls on viewers to actively support authentic South Asian voices in the yoga space by engaging more intentionally with their content—liking, sharing, and following—as a form of digital resistance against the whitewashed commercialization of the practice.
Her message has struck a chord among many in the yoga and wellness community, igniting conversations about cultural appropriation, algorithmic bias, and the importance of uplifting the voices of those rooted in the spiritual traditions being commodified.
“Thank you. This message is important and we need to keep hearing it,” one person said.
