I’m no expert on yoga at all, but it has been a constant throughout my life. My preschool taught us yoga and meditation, an elementary school teacher of mine had us do yoga every morning, and when I got older I started taking classes regularly at a studio. I knew the practice originated in India, but nearly every person I’d ever learned yoga from was white.
As an Indian-American girl feeling pretty out of touch with my own culture, hearing white people try to educate me about the “correct” ways to pronounce Sanskrit words and phrases was always uncomfortable at best. I grew up in dance, so I saw yoga in a similar way: a feat of athletic ability. I wanted to be able to do the next progression of a particular pose, or to hold another pose for longer, or to stop feeling so weak when I held some other one. This always seemed to be the central focus of the yoga classes I took. Sure, they’d throw in a line or two about “feeling mindful” or “reducing stress,” but I didn’t realize how much the point was being missed entirely.
As culturally out of touch as I may have felt, the irony was not lost on me that I was paying white people to teach me about a practice from my own culture that had historically been banned by white people. This past summer, I was looking into yoga teacher training programs and noticed that one studio was giving out a number of scholarships to BIPOC students to “make the practice more accessible.” How generous of them.
How did an ancient Indian practice end up being gatekept by the wealthiest in Western society? The entire history of yoga is outside the scope of this article, but even a basic understanding of its roots is enough to evoke a cringe reaction at the way yoga is presented in the West. It’s treated by many as nothing more than a fun, trendy new way to exercise in matching athletic outfits, when in reality its roots are deeply spiritual.
It’s important to think about why places that are essentially gyms with stretch classes feel the need to brand themselves as yoga studios. The solution is not to simply keep their classes the same and wipe them of any yoga-related name––that would be called stealing––but it is important to recognize their motivation for teaching only the asana part of yoga. If these studios would feel uncomfortable acknowledging and teaching the other facets of yoga, maybe that speaks to the appropriateness of them teaching asanas in the first place. Picking and choosing parts of another culture that seem valuable to capitalistic Western ideals and mass marketing them to people in a misrepresented way is quite literally the definition of cultural appropriation.
Yoga has ironically become so deeply entrenched in Western society that it seems difficult to imagine a future where its misrepresentation here is not pervasive. At home in San Diego, I have more than 10 yoga studios within a 5-mile radius of me, most (if not all) of them of the sleek-Instagram-aesthetic variety.
While I can’t tell you whether or not you should go to that yoga bonding event with your sorority next week, I can urge you to examine your motivations for going to yoga class. Did this article point out something you already kind of knew, but weren’t acknowledging? Or did you learn anything you had been completely unaware of before? Even as an Indian-American person, I have a lot of learning about yoga left to do myself.
If you are a non-Indian person practicing yoga and see yourself as exempt from this, you might want to consider why that is.
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