From the outside, Tara Yoga Centre looks like a normal, welcoming yoga studio. A pleasant building in an expensive east London postcode, with another popular branch on an Oxford high street. There are positive, even gushing, Google reviews. The website is professional, with photos of smiling people stretching on matching purple yoga mats. It promises “rapid and integral transformation”, as well as “an invitation to awaken now”.
When Miranda, from Oxford – who has asked to go only by her first name – was in her late 20s, she visited India to practise yoga. It was 2015 and yoga was already a booming industry in the UK. She was working as an English teacher at a London school and gravitated to yoga for the same reason that it’s recommended by health bodies from the World Health Organization to local GPs: healing, exercise and mental wellbeing.
