Your Yoga Class: Got Wabi Sabi?

Note: For those of you who don’t come to class, Buddhist and Yogic principles overlap deeply. Before the Buddha was a Buddha, he was a Yogi. Both traditions value meditation, and Hatha Yoga uses physical poses—or asana—as tools for inner awareness.

The Japanese term wabi-sabi is working its way into the pop-culture lexicon. You’ll find it in Architectural Digest and all over #Insta, where it’s touted as a trending design aesthetic. Let’s start there.

Wabi-Sabi in Design

On Instagram, design influencer @mrphoenixgrey calls wabi-sabi “a philosophical approach to imperfect pieces.” He urges us to replace minimalism’s cold perfection with warm texture—limewashed walls, raw wood, chipped ceramics. “Slants, tilts, and irregularities” add coziness. “Stay away from clean-cut lines,” he says. “Make it old and fun.”

Ironically, he describes wabi-sabi while dressed in a tight silk suit—young, glossy, and very kirei (the Japanese ideal of sleek beauty). But he gets the essence: true beauty is not symmetrical or pristine; it’s soulful, textured, and a little worn-in.

If you’re familiar with sashiko (mending clothes with visible stitching) or kintsugi (repairing pottery with gold), you already understand the wabi-sabi worldview: repair, honor, and reveal imperfection—not hide it.

Wabi-Sabi in Zen

Wabi-sabi is a Zen aesthetic, and for a deeper definition, we turn from Instagram to Suzuki Daisetz, the Zen monk who brought meditation to the West. Wabi, he writes, means something like “poverty”—not just having little, but being content with it. Think Thoreau in his cabin. You live simply and are at peace without needing more.

Sabi shares a root with sabishi (lonely). It describes solitary things with quiet beauty—aged, imperfect, patinated. It’s choosing the chipped vase with a story, not the shiny new pair from Pottery Barn.

Suzuki describes the ideal Zen mind as “devoid of dichotomies… body and soul, gain and loss, good and evil.” It echoes the yogic idea of nirodha—an equanimity beyond striving, judgment, or duality.

So What Does Wabi Sabi Have to Do with Yoga?

Yoga means “union,” and in Hatha Yoga we begin with the body—the external form. The trap, of course, is attachment to how that form looks. In our mirror-lined, performance-driven culture, the external too often becomes the focus.

Are you in a class where the instructor performs a “perfect” pose few others should even attempt? Are mirrors encouraging you to compare yourself to others—or to your younger self?

Taking a page out of Zen, we can achieve understanding by understanding what wabi sabi is NOT: most stock photos pertaining to yoga! Why because yoga marketeers know yoga is aspirational which lends itself to the opposite of wabi sabi, or kirei. This manifests in matching outfits and matching bodies as below.

What if we applied wabi-sabi to yoga?

We’d acknowledge the truth: human bodies are asymmetrical, aged, quirky. Long legs, short arms. Big joints, old injuries. People have… patina. Trying to “polish” that away isn’t just unkind—it’s dangerous. Just ask Yoga Therapist Larry Payne, who jokes that he owes his Maui house to the injury-prone Ashtanga scene.

Instead of chasing ideal forms, what if you saw your body as a treasured flea-market find—worthy, weathered, and needing thoughtful care? You’d want a class that celebrates different bodies, that offers examples, not modifications (as if anything outside the norm is abnormal). Because let’s be honest: most classes cater to the 20%, not the 80%.

A wabi-sabi yoga class meets you where you are. It helps you explore your body—not fix it. It replaces performance with presence. It sees beauty in the “flaws.” And over time, it brings you closer to that psychosphere Suzuki described—where the mind quiets, and the body finally gets to feel.

This Is the Yoga We Practice

YogaHotDish classes have no mirrors. No blasting music. No model poses. Just breath, quiet, and a teacher (me) offering unscripted guidance, gentle assists, and a space where you’re safe to be exactly who you are.

Students range from 30 to 70+. They show up—through snow, through heat—because they’ve discovered something deeper. They track sensations, not metrics. They listen inward. They laugh when one side of a pose is nothing like the other. They mend themselves—sashiko-style—without apology.

You won’t see perfect, matching poses on my website. That uniformity, while “kirei,” is the opposite of Zen. Yoga rooted in classical wisdom has no time for that.

To borrow from Suzuki again: “Zen has no taste for the complexities that lie on the surface of life.” Nor should yoga.

So next time you step onto your mat, ask yourself, not, “Did I do it right;” but rather, “Was I here for it?

Because wabi-sabi isn’t just for interiors. It belongs in your inner world, too.