The Shala Daily

She teaches six days a week, adjusts with precision, and hasn’t missed a Mysore practice in three years. She’s also been on tirzepatide for eight months.

She hasn’t told anyone.

Not her teacher. Not her students. Not her practice partner who shares a cup of chai with her every Saturday. When someone compliments her “discipline” or asks about her “transformation,” she deflects to “clean eating” and “consistency.” The lie tastes like ash, but the alternative—admitting she’s on a GLP-1 agonist—feels impossible in a culture that treats pharmacological support as spiritual failure.

She’s not alone.

🤫 The Substances We Don’t Discuss

Across yoga studios and Mysore rooms, practitioners are quietly managing their bodies with tools they cannot name aloud: peptides for tendon healing, biologics for autoimmune conditions, medications for metabolic dysfunction. The gap between our public discourse about “natural” practice and our private pharmaceutical realities has become a chasm—and in that chasm, shame breeds.

GLP-1 agonists like tirzepatide and semaglutide have become widespread for metabolic support. Healing peptides like BPC-157 help practitioners recover from chronic injuries. Biologics keep those with autoimmune conditions functional enough to practice. Hormone replacement supports practitioners navigating perimenopause and age-related decline.

None of these substances are inherently problematic. What’s problematic is the culture that makes them unspeakable.

⚖️ Satya vs. Secrecy

Return to our teacher. She genuinely struggled for years—with appetite, with weight, with the metabolic consequences of PCOS. She tried everything the yoga world recommended: Ayurvedic protocols, elimination diets, more practice, different practice, fasting, not fasting. Some things helped temporarily. Nothing resolved the underlying dysfunction.

When her doctor suggested tirzepatide, she resisted for months. It felt like giving up. It felt like admitting her practice wasn’t “enough.” When she finally started, the change was significant—not just in her body, but in her relationship with food, with hunger, with the exhausting daily negotiation that had consumed so much mental energy.

She’s a better teacher now. More present. Less preoccupied.

But she teaches about satya—truthfulness—while living in concealment. When students ask how she “did it,” she offers partial truths that function as lies.

🔍 The Philosophy Gets Complicated

Satya doesn’t require public disclosure of every medical decision. We’re not obligated to share our health histories with students. Ahimsa (non-harming) sometimes means protecting our own privacy. There’s nothing unethical about keeping personal medical information personal.

But when a student asks “How did you do it?” and the teacher says “Clean eating and consistency,” that’s not privacy—it’s misdirection. The student walks away with false information, likely to pursue the same insufficient approaches the teacher already tried and failed with. The student may internalize their own eventual “failure” as a lack of discipline, not recognizing that the model they’re following was incomplete from the start.

Multiplied across a community, this creates a collective delusion: the belief that bodies can be managed through willpower and “natural” methods alone, and that those who struggle simply aren’t trying hard enough.

The problem isn’t that individual teachers keep their medications private. The problem is that everyone keeps their medications private, creating a systematic misrepresentation of what’s actually happening in practitioner bodies.

Tomorrow: What tapas actually means—and whether suffering is really the goal.