San Diego and a yoga instructor go the mat over a ban on public classes

A California yoga instructor known as “Namasteve” is leveling up his warrior pose as he battles San Diego’s efforts to end his popular beachfront classes.

Steven Hubbard recently filed his third lawsuit over a 2024 city ordinance that prohibits teaching yoga to four or more people at local beaches and parks.

Hubbard, who’s been teaching yoga by the Pacific Ocean shoreline for 17 years, contends the local law violates his right to free speech because he doesn’t charge his students and instead accepts voluntary donations.

“It does set a dangerous precedent for government to be passing bans on specific types of speech that, for whatever reason, it doesn’t like,” Hubbard’s lawyer, Bryan Pease, told The Independent. “We don’t know why they decided yoga is something they want to target. They’ve never explained it, but it is concerning from a First Amendment perspective.”

Neither the San Diego mayor’s office nor the city attorney’s office replied to inquiries from The Independent.

The yoga ban is buried in a subsection of the San Diego Municipal Code that defines the “services” that are regulated at beaches and parks.

“Examples include massage, yoga, dog training, fitness classes, equipment rental, and staging for picnics, bonfires or other activities,” it says, marking the only time yoga is mentioned.

At the time the ordinance was introduced, Pease said, it was “put on the city council agenda as a sidewalk vending ordinance.”

“There was no public notice that they would be targeting the free and donation-based teaching of yoga in parks and beaches,” the lawyer said. “ I don’t even know that the city council members themselves knew what they were voting on.”

Videos posted on Hubbard’s “Namasteve Yoga” page on YouTube show scores of students following his instructions as they face the water in the Southern California sunshine.

San Diego park rangers issued Hubbard a total of 10 citations under the 2024 law, Pease said.

Some were for leading classes from his backyard while livestreaming on YouTube as students apparently watched on their devices by the beach, Pease said.

After Hubbard first challenged the 2024 ordinance in federal court, the judge overseeing the case denied a motion to block its enforcement, saying the First Amendment didn’t protect the teaching of yoga.

But that decision was reversed last year by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which ruled that Hubbard and fellow yoga teacher Amy Baack were “likely to succeed” in challenging the legality of San Diego’s public yoga ban.

“Teaching yoga is protected speech. The City’s prohibition on teaching yoga in shoreline parks is content-based and fails strict scrutiny,” according to the unanimous decision written by U.S. Circuit Judge Holly Thomas.

Hubbard has also filed two lawsuits in state court, with the most recent on June 22. It was first reported by the Times of San Diego.

It seeks unspecified damages for three tickets he received in May 2025, all of which charged him with giving a lecture without a permit.

The accusation came despite a ruling in the federal case that said requiring a permit to give a lecture “substantially overburdens” the right to free speech, according to Hubbard’s lawsuit.

All the citations issued against Hubbard were dismissed in April when the city attorney’s office didn’t appear in court to prosecute, Pease said.

Meanwhile, city lawyers have issued a series of subpoenas that seek “detailed GPS tracking information, all social media posts from all time and complete financial records for all financial transactions” involving Hubbard and Baack, Pease said.

Pease characterized the move as “pure harassment,” saying it seemed “calculated to have a chilling effect on people’s participation if they think their personal information is going to be obtained through these channels.”

“All that the city attorney has said to me about it is that it’s to prove that this is commercial activity, and they’re going to hire a financial expert to go through all these records,” he said.

A hearing on a motion to quash the subpoenas is scheduled for July 17 in state court, and pretrial discovery in the federal case is pending, with a deadline of August 28.