Meet tejal + Jesal
Yoga is Dead was years in the making…
We met years ago in a training in NYC. Each of us was relieved to finally make a Desi yoga teacher friend who could relate to the other’s experiences with yoga in America vs. yoga in India, and to have someone to bitch to about the cultural appropriation, racism, exploitation and general belittling that we experienced in that training and in many others. But after a few years of having these conversations in hushed tones so as not to offend our white colleagues, we decided it was high time our voices and experiences were heard. We created the Yoga is Dead podcast as a way to jumpstart critical conversations, elevate oppressed voices and perspectives and to expose the problems felt by anyone who isn’t in the “in” crowd of the yoga industry.
Tejal Patel
Tejal quit her consumer finance job a year after her first teacher training. After returning from six months of travel and more yoga study, she learned how to budget on way lower pay (thanks to 10yrs of excel!) and dove into teaching yoga. During that first year, she worked at countless studios while creating and growing her own yoga offerings at tejalyoga.com - something she felt opened the doors of yoga to more people. The good outweighed the bad by far, but she was shocked to work in an industry seemingly of peace and love and discover a very pervasive culture of spiritual by-passing, greed, racism, narcissism, and abuse of power & privilege. She decided to use this newfound knowledge to empower herself and others.
She is trained in trauma-informed mindfulness based practices through the Lineage Project, studies Prenatal techniques and pelvic floor with Living Now Yoga, and traveled from NY to Kerala, India for several yoga teacher trainings focused on vinyasa, hatha, and restorative yoga.
She started POC + Allies Collective Yoga to honor inclusivity and diversity and leads free Yoga for All in The Battery in New York's landmark 25-acre public park, now in its sixth year. She leads retreats with topics covering asana workshops, trauma informed practices, and pelvic floor anatomy. She is the creator of abcdyogi village, an international community for any born conscientious desi yogi of South Asian descent to reclaim the yoga and mindfulness space by sharing their personal stories and practices with the world. She was featured as 19 Women of Color to Watch in the Yoga World in 2019. Tejal also offers group vinyasa and restorative yoga classes at Humming Puppy NYC and private yoga and reiki sessions.
See everything Tejal is working on at www.tejalyoga.com/now
Jesal Parikh
Jesal (she/they) is a first generation Indian-American yoga teacher, podcaster, movement educator, author, and disrupter working on creative solutions for equity in yoga. Her mission is to uplift those of us who are feeling isolated and marginalized by the yoga industry.
In 2010, received her formal yoga teaching education from S-VYASA University in Bangalore. Shortly thereafter, she began teaching yoga in New York City. She soon learned that this new career path came with a shocking measure of racism, cultural appropriation, unprofessionalism, exploitative business practices and sexual harassment. The hypocrisy of the yoga community mixed with her personal experiences feeling dismissed, excluded and oppressed by the yoga industry prompted her to join Tejal to co-create the Yoga is Dead podcast.
As a yoga teacher and mentor, Jesal provides all her classes, workshops, movement education, and coaching through the Yogawalla website. She also uses this platform to provide valuable content on how to bring all aspects of yoga to your everyday life. You can get a snapshot of all her latest work by going here.
