Published December 15, 2025 02:56AM
You know when a yoga class feels nothing short of transcendent. Much of that is related to you showing up. Yet a lot also depends on the teacher escorting you through your practice, whether you’re a newcomer learning the poses and principles or someone who’s been showing up for years with the voices of your earliest yoga teachers still echoing through your head.
As much as yoga teachers shape your individual experience, they also hold the potential to reshape the larger experience of those in the yoga community. The following yoga teachers are each tremendously influential in their own way. Some had momentous years due to a book publishing or an award being received. Others have simply continued to contribute to their communities. And all have been on our radar for quite some time.
It goes without saying that any list of influential yoga teachers is inherently incomplete. Anyone who supports someone else showing up to themselves and to life with more awareness is, by default, profoundly influential.
8 Changemaking Yoga Teachers We Can All Learn From
The following yoga teachers share their teaching IRL as well as online. They’re listed in no particular order.
1. Reggie Hubbard
A year ago, self-described “good troublemaker” and former political activist Reggie Hubbard was recovering from a stroke and uncertain whether he could continue what he had started as founder of the nonprofit Active Peace Yoga. Yet in 2025, Hubbard has not only continued but expanded the organization’s mission to make yoga accessible to anyone, “regardless of race, gender, body type or practice level.”
Learning about yoga via Active Peace Yoga takes place through in-person and online classes in yoga, meditation, and breathwork as well as workshops, lectures, teacher trainings, and sound therapy tracks on Insight Timer. Hubbard also initiated a partnership with the Kripalu Center for Yoga in which he shares techniques that support BIPOC males as they understand how to process trauma. The collaboration includes classes and retreats as well as a training program designed for yoga teachers from traditionally marginalized populations to share the learning with their communities. It’s work that not only propagates inclusive yoga among the current generation of yoga teachers but creates potential for future generations.
Throughout it all, Hubbard has managed to maintain his sense of humor and playfulness. If you have yet to attend one of his Prince-themed yoga classes, there’s still time to change that.
2. Rodrigo Souza
In a recent Instagram post, yoga teacher Rodrigo Souza shared an insight and posed a question. “1 Billion People in the World Have Disabilities…So where are they in the yoga world?”
An adaptive and accessible yoga teacher, Souza has been quietly expanding the reach of yoga, holding classes and teacher trainings for years both in person at rehabilitation centers as well as online. And he’s been increasingly challenging stereotypes not only through his social posts but his example as a yoga teacher who leads others through their practice from a wheelchair.
Souza initially explored yoga thanks to longtime teacher Matthew Sanford and more recently has been collaborating with the Accessible Yoga community and its founder, Jivana Heyman, to bring classes as well as trainings to thousands. Souza’s background as a former DJ as well as his pointed humor come through both melodically and loud in his social posts.
3. Anjali Kamath Rao
Although her Instagram bio reads “PhD student,” Anjali Kamath Rao is perhaps equally well known as a truth teller. In 2025, the academic and yoga educator authored her first book, Yoga as Embodied Resistance: A Feminist Lens on Caste, Gender, and Sacred Resilience in Yoga History. In it she explores challenging and lesser-known truths about yoga. To say it should be considered essential reading in any teacher training is an understatement.
Similarly, her social channel and her podcast, The Love of Yoga, are spaces of quiet revolution in terms of truth being shared. As is characteristic of Rao, this is not accomplished in an othering or shaming way. Rather, what she posts can be considered straight-up lessoning, even when she’s the one posing questions. Rather than engage in spiritual bypassing, Rao shares takeaways that incur self-awareness and critical thinking in the face of reality, something the most brilliant of teachers on any topic manage to do in their own unique way.
4. Kim Richardson
In retrospect, it was almost prescient that Kim Richardson began leading yoga classes at her local public library, a place of equitable learning that’s accessible to all. “My whole goal when I became a yoga teacher was that I wanted to create a community-based yoga model,” says Richardson. “Instead of expecting people to come into yoga studios, you can take yoga into communities and meet people where they are.”
The Birmingham-based yoga therapist has spent the last several years doing exactly that. After her start at the library, Richardson organized and led yoga classes for veterans, school children, the visually impaired, those in prison, and other underserved and typically overlooked populations. She’s also launched a yoga and meditation class in conjunction with local museums and was honored as the 2024 recipient of the International Association of Yoga Therapists’ Seva Award.
Richardson prioritizes an approach to learning that emphasizes “diversity, inclusivity, accessibility, collaboration, and partnership.” She extends her service to fellow teachers through workshops on the labyrinth that is the grant-writing process based on all that she learned while acquiring funding to support community-based yoga projects. This is seva (service).
5. Bradshaw Wish
The version of yoga you experience via social media has been evolving in recent years yet it’s still partial to polished glimpses of perfect arm-balance attempts and $200 matching sets.
Enter Chicago-based yoga teacher Bradshaw Wish. His reels capture the quirky and relatable habits of students (who hasn’t sent a water bottle clanging to the floor in Savasana?) as well as behind-the-scenes insights into the unfiltered thoughts of a yoga teacher (yes, we’re silently willing all students to just try using your blocks in Pyramid Pose). His reels are basically yogic versions of improv night and reminders that although you should take your yoga practice seriously, perhaps you shouldn’t take yourself practicing yoga quite so seriously.
He’s also co-host of the podcast The Funny Thing About Yoga and co-founder of the C.A.Y.A. Yoga School with the lovely teacher Giana Gambino. Together they address the serious and the silly. Think of the entire vibe as permission to be human.
Wish, who studied under Jason Crandell, leads classes online as well as in-person with a focus on simplicity—with the exception of his upcoming annual Mariah Carey Christmas class. Stay tuned for tickets!
6. Arundhati Baitmangalkar
There’s an ongoing conversation (that’s putting it politely) among yoga teachers regarding how best to juxtapose the teachings of the ancient practice with contemporary life. There aren’t a lot of simple answers. Yet yoga teacher trainer Arundhati Baitmangalkar navigates these questions with straight talk and seeming ease and grace.
The longtime teacher and studio owner helps fledgling and experienced teachers alike take on questions as varied as why we roll onto our right side after Savasana to how to interpret the Yoga Sutras to contemporary life. Her Instagram feed is nothing but insight after insight and her podcast, Let’s Talk Yoga, brings straight talk on subtle issues with a no-nonsense approach.
7. Lucy Bishop
South London-based yoga teacher Lucy Bishop takes on an entirely different side of yoga’s portrayal on social and calls out the effects of body shaming and diet culture in the yoga space.
Her unabashed appreciation for her body is scroll-stoppingly inspiring—and a sharp rebuttal to anyone who perpetuates or falls victim to these stereotypes. At times, her posts are overtly damning of the exclusive vibe of much of yoga. Other times, Bishop finds positive and humorous ways of viewing our bodies and treating ourselves with respect in yoga studios and in life.
She’s especially effective at reminding you not to compare yourself to what you see online. As her website explains, “I hope we can have a go and a giggle in a judgement free zone and maybe leave feeling a bit more calm and connected.” That vibe definitely comes through.
8. Hearon Dickson
The typical trajectory of a yoga teacher goes something like enroll in yoga teacher training, amass dedicated students and followers, and help them make it through their days with more ease and self-awareness. Maybe even lead an international retreat or two. Retired corporate executive turned yoga teacher Hearon Dickson is no exception to that —yet he reminds us that there’s no specific timeline when it comes to fulfilling this.
Not long after Dickson started teaching yoga in 2020, he began to draw a disproportionately large number of new-to-yoga students—many of them guys. In his knowledgeable yet unpretentious manner, Dickson keeps things doable for beginners and experienced practitioners alike IRL and on his Instagram feed. There’s something exceptionally calming about pausing your scroll when you encounter his grounding voice saying, “Hey, good morning,” followed by an accompanying thought or anywhere from 60 seconds to five minutes of meditative silence.
His approach reminds yoga teachers everywhere that what matters isn’t your number of followers but how profoundly you influence them. Because sometimes it’s not just the teaching that makes a change. It’s the example.
