The Hidden Sickness in “Healing” Spaces: When the Yoga Studio Becomes a False Sanctuary

You don’t walk into a church expecting to be kicked out. You don’t enter a temple assuming you’ll be dismissed for staying too long in silence. And yet, many of today’s yoga studios — marketed as modern sanctuaries for healing, growth, and inner peace — are doing just that.

They’re not sacred spaces.

They’re systems of subtle harm.

And I know this not because I came in wide-eyed, looking for someone to save me. I came in as someone who had already done decades of deep work, only to be met with something far more insidious than spiritual ignorance: spiritual performance.

For those of us who walk in with sincerity — already attuned, already sensitive, already teaching, already holding space — what we encounter isn’t reverence. It’s resistance. Not the kind that challenges us to grow, but the kind that tries to shrink us back down. These spaces often carry an energy of “know your place,” dressed up in soft voices and sanskrit chants. They peddle workshops in Ayurveda and Yoga Nidra while enforcing unspoken hierarchies that have nothing to do with union — and everything to do with institutionalized, conditional kindness.

Let’s talk about the ick.

You may not know how to name it at first. You walk into a yoga studio and something doesn’t sit right. The people smile, but the energy is brittle. The teaching sounds profound, but the air is heavy. You keep wondering why you don’t feel safe, even though the room is full of people talking about holding space.

The ick is real.

It’s the residue of a culture more invested in appearances than truth. It’s the murk that arises when spiritual language is used to bypass real emotion, when pain is pathologized instead of witnessed, and when teachers demand loyalty while offering no reciprocity. It’s the way you’re asked to keep paying for certifications, for community, for proximity to the inner circle — when all you ever wanted was to deepen your path and share it.

What’s dangerous about these “false sanctuaries” is that they lure in people who are genuinely seeking healing. People who may be coming out of trauma, chronic illness, or spiritual awakening. These aren’t places for transformation; they’re places for entrapment. And the loop looks like this: you come in open and hopeful, you’re slowly conditioned to question your own inner knowing, and when you finally burn out or speak up, you’re subtly shamed or pushed out.

You might be told you’re “too sensitive,” or “projecting.” That you need more therapy. That you’re just not ready. But really, what’s happening is you’re no longer willing to dim your light for their comfort.

And here’s the part that hits hardest: when you finally walk away, that’s when the real healing begins.

It’s taken me over a decade to express the verbiage that what I was looking for in those studios — the reverence, the rigor, the rhythm — was never going to be shared with me. Because it was always mine to begin with. I wasn’t a seeker looking for a path. I was a keeper of one. But the structures in place had no interest in seeing me clearly. To acknowledge my presence as a peer would dismantle the hierarchy they needed to maintain the illusion of authority.

I’ve studied movement, Ayurveda, subtle anatomy, trauma, and energy for more years than many “master teachers” have been practicing. I’ve healed in silence, built systems, rituals, and rhythms that work with my body and my knowing. And every time I entered one of these spaces hoping to share, I was met with condescension, projection, or worse — erasure.

Not because I wasn’t ready.

Because they weren’t.

These institutional spaces survive by selling a loop of lack — courses you’ll never be done with, teachers you’re never quite equal to, and healing that is always just out of reach. But real yoga doesn’t operate that way. Real healing isn’t something you need to keep buying. It’s a remembering. A return. And it begins the moment you decide that you don’t need to be initiated by a system that never saw you.

To anyone wondering why yoga studios don’t resonate, or why you feel a deep inner no that you can’t quite name: that’s your clarity, not your confusion.

You’re not too sensitive.

You’re not broken.

You’re not projecting.

You’re perceiving what’s real — and finally giving yourself permission to walk away from what isn’t.

-N