Paul Fox

Paul Fox is a British yoga teacher. He became chair of the British Wheel of Yoga, and then chief executive officer of the Yoga in Healthcare Alliance. He was responsible for enabling National Health Service doctors to prescribe yoga in lieu of medicines.

Career

Fox spent 23 years working as a network news journalist for BBC Radio 4. He holds a postgraduate certificate in education, and worked for some time as a yoga teacher trainer. He has taught yoga to Taunton Town football club and Cambridge United football club.

Regulation of yoga teaching

In 2016, Fox, while chair of the British Wheel of Yoga, ran a one-year consultation on the regulation of yoga teaching and the introduction of national occupational standards. Fox stated that there was an issue with poor or dangerous yoga teaching, which risked causing injuries to pupils. He added that at the first meeting to discuss the proposals, the mood among yoga teacher trainers was "rather un-yogic". Genevieve Roberts, writing in The i Paper, noted that Fox had said the minimum benchmark of competence and knowledge for yoga teachers" would not be compulsory. She stated that the proposals had "angered many yogis, upset at the idea of benchmarking the ancient spriritual practice". She questioned whether it was possible to "benchmark spirituality". The yoga author Matthew Remski wrote in The Guardian that Fox's statements about yoga's benefits "via expert instruction" and injury from poor instruction sounded "reasonable" but were based on "thin" evidence. In Remski's view, practitioners should trust their instincts and those of other practitioners, rather than rely on bureaucratic rules.

Dispute with British Wheel of Yoga

In 2018, Fox resigned from his position in the British Wheel of Yoga (as did his deputy, Shelagh Mackenzie) following "repeated clashes" with the body's national executive committee. Fox cited the committee's desire to relax yoga teacher qualifications, especially at the highest grade, called Level 4 qualifications. He further stated that the committee held "illegal meetings" to which he and Mackenzie were not invited.

Fox was "expelled" from the British Wheel of Yoga in 2022 after what he states was a "four-and-a-half-year complaints process". A motion to expel him, put to the National Executive Committee in 2019, was defeated but the process continued. The dispute concerned Fox's signing an agreement between the British Wheel of Yoga and the National Health Service to hold an award of £250,000 given to the Yoga in Healthcare Alliance for a "yoga social prescribing pathway" for NHS doctors to provide to patients in lieu of medicines. Fox became a project manager at the Yoga in Healthcare Alliance four months later.

In May 2024, a motion calling for an independent mediator to review Fox's "expulsion" resulted in a 58.5% majority, falling short of the 75% needed to achieve the desired action.

The yoga teacher trainer Theo Wildcroft commented that Fox had "gambled his position on a whole raft of reforms he wanted to make at the [British] Wheel [of Yoga]". A founder of the Brighton Yoga Festival, Davy Jones, explaining his resignation from the British Wheel of Yoga, described its decisions as "disgraceful",

Awards and distinctions

In 2024, Fox won an "Our Health Heroes Awards" silver medal from Skills for Health for his volunteering of weekly yoga classes for NHS staff in Ely, Cambridgeshire.

Books

2016 Yoga Quest. Amazon Self Publishing Partnership. ASIN 1785450956. 2022 (with Heather Mason) Yoga on Prescription: The Yoga4Health Social Prescribing Protocol. Jessica Kingsley Publishers. ISBN 978-1787759756.