I have decided to resign my membership of the British Wheel of Yoga (BWY). I have been a member since 2002. I was given the BWY Community Champion 2023 award for my yoga community outreach work with the Brighton Yoga Festival and Foundation, which I founded.

I am resigning because of the disgraceful decisions of the current BWY leadership: first, to expel Paul Fox, one of the country’s foremost yoga community outreach exponents, and then to ignore the majority vote at its recent Annual General Meeting (AGM) for binding mediation to resolve the dispute. These decisions have been extremely damaging to support for and the reputation of BWY. The current BWY leadership seems oblivious and uninterested in this damage, and has focused instead on its vindictive campaign against Paul Fox.

Paul was a former Chair of BWY from 2016 -2018, and was expelled four years later by the BWY for alleged conflicts of interest and governance failures during his period as Chair. These charges had previously been dismissed by the previous BWY leadership, but were resurrected by the current leadership and referred to an independent consultant to review. This review was deeply flawed: the accused was completely unaware of its existence and unable to present any evidence to it, until AFTER the review had been completed and the BWY recommended his expulsion!

Following a campaign for Paul’s reinstatement which gathered over 500 signatures from members across the UK yoga community, a resolution was drafted for its AGM earlier this year calling for binding mediation to resolve the dispute. This motion was carried at the AGM with 58% of voting members supporting it – but the BWY leadership has refused to accept the result. It has dismissed a further letter with over 100 prominent yoga teachers demanding that they implement the AGM result.

Over recent years there has been an explosion of interest in yoga, particularly in taking yoga to those people and communities who would benefit the most. After my award from BWY for my community outreach activities, I began exploratory discussions about how BWY could tap into this interest and to develop this work. Yet bizarrely, the BWY leadership has focused on expelling Paul Fox, one of the most respected practitioners in this very same field of work for his outstanding contribution to building the Yoga in Healthcare Alliance. 

It is extraordinary that despite the huge growth of interest in yoga, the BWY organisation, pre-occupied with this expulsion, is actually in serious decline: from over 8000 members when Paul Fox was chair, to 6,800 three years ago and now down to less than 5000 members. And it has made losses of almost half a million pounds over the last 3 years. Any leadership of a charity with that appalling track record would normally have the decency to resign.

It gives me no pleasure to conclude that the BWY under its current leadership has no future. I am not alone in that opinion. Recently one of the most widely respected and experienced scholars and practitioners in the UK yoga community, Graham Burns, resigned his life-long membership of BWY for the same reasons. Many others are considering doing the same. There are many good people who are members of BWY. But I think they have to ask themselves whether under the current BWY leadership there really is any point in remaining so. 

Reversing the famous Marx (Groucho, not Karl!) dictum about clubs, if the BWY doesn’t want Paul Fox as a member, then I and many others have decided that we don’t want to be members either.