Part 1: Not Just the Poses
Hello Americans. Yoga isn’t what you see on Instagram.
It’s not just the poses.
Yoga helps us connect our breath and our body and our spirit.
It’s a way of living and being. It’s guidelines for living well and a path to freedom. It’s a practice to help us calm our racing minds by learning to observe our thoughts.
It’s a practice to help us connect to our breath and to become comfortable with quiet and stillness so we may connect to our highest inner knowing. Yoga is creating unity - within ourselves, in our community, and with all beings.
In addition to all this, there is a physical practice (asana) that can promote flexibility and physical strength while helping us along the path.
Knowing and practicing a yoga that is all of these things honors yoga’s roots and heritage, which is important in demonstrating cultural appreciation instead of cultural appropriation. And it makes yoga more accessible to all of us.
What are the images that come to mind when you think “yoga?” What are some of the reasons you believe yoga isn’t for you?
Despite social media content and common perceptions, yoga is not just exercise for women or a demonstration of fitness for young, white, fit, slender bodies in tight clothes. Yoga can include these things, but we run into trouble when asana and looking a certain way is prized and centered above the other aspects of yoga, as it so often is in America.
It unleashes the It’s not for me, I can’t do it, I don’t fit in narrative for those of us with different types of bodies and physical abilities and it promotes an idea of yoga that mostly excludes Indians and South Asians, whose ancestors created and codified this practice, who served as stewards of the knowledge, organizing and communicating, keeping it alive and safe for thousands of years, making it possible to pass it down to all of us.
We have selected the one aspect of yoga that appeals to our white American values - a good workout, how a body looks, thinness and fitness - and then we ignore or downplay the aspects that do not support American hustle culture, like stillness and meditation and breathwork and the ethics of truthfulness, non-violence, non-excess, and the power of self-study and non-attachment. This is appropriation - we pick and choose to soothe our American preferences and call it yoga. We sell yoga short. We sell ourselves short.
When we honor yoga’s roots and take the time to learn what it really is, yoga’s wisdom and teachings and transformative benefits can be accessible for all of us.
Okay. We’ll discuss the beauty of asana in Part 2.