Cultural Appropriation, Yoga, and You

(Because all great titles are a list of three things. #ThingsILearnedInAcademia)

This is not a post about what cultural appropriation is (to learn about what cultural appropriation is, see my past post here or my recent academic article, “Eating the Other Yogi,” here). This is not a post about whether or not cultural appropriation happens in modern postural yoga. Hint: it happens all the time. This post is an exploration of why and how cultural appropriation happens in yoga, and what this means for those of us who are yoga practitioners or teachers. Where do we go from here? How do we deal when we are trying to be good people (aka, not appropriative) while continuing on a yogic path?

Across my dissertation research, I’ve grown to realize that most of the yoga practiced in the Western world is culturally appropriative. That statement will likely piss off a lot of people who are very attached to their practice and don’t want to believe this. In fact, it took me a long time to come to grips with this fact too, and to really understand what that meant. But you know what? Too bad. To say that most yoga in the West is appropriative is to speak the truth (satya, anyone?), and while truth is sometimes hard and uncomfortable to face (especially for those with privilege in the yoga world, including myself) I believe wholeheartedly that people always deserve the truth, and that the truth will ultimately set us free. Also, side note, a deep practice of yoga is a practice of truth (not the truth as you want it to be, but the Truth as it is, which is a moving target most of the time). The practice of yoga is also a profound practice of non-attachment even to yoga itself, so if you are still up in arms about the claim cultural appropriation happens all the time in yoga, I suggest taking some time to reflect on why that bothers you so much.

Consuming Yoga

The fact is that cultural appropriation is often done with the best of intentions by the appropriator. If it wasn’t enjoyable, pleasurable, and desirable, it wouldn’t happen. Period. So please don’t give me the “I don’t appropriate yoga because I love it” speech. I’ve heard it before in my line of work, more times than I can count. You can be a “good” person, have the best of intentions, and still do bad things, like engaging in cultural appropriation. People culturally appropriate because they are drawn to something. They consume other cultures often with the best of intentions, out of genuine interest in the cultures they appropriate. But they also often seek out these cultures from a place of power and privilege, and without a proper understanding of the cultures they are engaging with, and this is a dangerous line to walk, often resulting in appropriating the cultures they revere. According to work by bell hooks (1992:24,26), the appropriator often sees “their willingness to openly name their desire for the Other as affirmation of cultural plurality… they believe their desire for contact represents a progressive change… [they believe] the Other can provide life-sustaining alternatives.”

In the Western yoga world today, most people desire such life-sustaining alternatives to the often demoralizing, alienating, isolating, and damaging capitalist societies we live in (especially the USA). People are drawn to yoga because they think it offers a solution, a way to mitigate the pain and suffering they are experiencing in their day to day lives. They desire it. And they are actively encouraged to desire it by an industry that sells yoga to the masses as a quick fix to underlying, systemic conditions.

Stuck in a job that requires more than 40 hours of work a week, doesn’t provide paid holiday/sick leave, and doesn’t give you any maternity/paternity leave? Do yoga! Experiencing secondary trauma from the seemingly never-ending video evidence of murders of black/brown people by police? Do yoga! Stuck in the prison system that dehumanizes non-violent offenders locked up for life because of crap mandatory minimum sentencing and three-strike laws? Do yoga! Can modern postural yoga actually solve these issues? No. Not all all. It will take systemic changes to actually solve these problems. But we are encouraged to use yoga as a stop-gap measure, as a way of treating the symptoms of a much larger and more complex disease. Because when you can treat the symptoms (for a cost) but never cure the disease, it’s possible to make a shit-ton of money. Cue: yoga is a booming $16 billion dollar industry.

This is no coincidence. As yoga became more popular in the West with the countercultural movements of the 1960s, yoga became appropriated and reinterpreted through a Western lens that imposed ideas of individualism, capitalism, and consumerism on the practice. It was turned into a “profession,” as something to be bought and sold–it was turned into a commodity. We are taught to consume yoga, to find pleasure in it despite the fact that yoga is not about finding pleasure. We are sold yoga as a “30 day transformation” and as a way to “find your bliss” and “manifest joy.” We are never actually sold yoga. We are sold an appropriative misrepresentation of the practice designed to get us in the door and spending money.

This is exacerbated by the professionalization of yoga as a career. The “job” became predicated on a prescribed set of skills that we can look up via a quick google search for “yoga teacher job description.” Take a look at some of these gems garnered from just such a search:

Yoga aims to create balance in the mind and body through exercise, breathing and meditation. As a yoga teacher, you will teach yoga as a form of exercise that increases fitness and wellbeing. (National Careers Service UK)

As a LifePower Yoga Instructor, you will provide various Yoga training services that offer members programs to maximize workout efficiency, improve fitness, increase stamina, enjoy their fitness experience and improve overall sense of well-being. (A job listing from Monster.com)

Yoga instructors help to guide students in yoga through a variety of postures, or asanas, and breathing exercises referred to as pranayama. Instructors provide hands-on direction to make sure students are performing movements properly and applying the breathing techniques. Yoga instructors may work in a class or in a one-on-one setting. (LiveStrong)

Are we teaching yoga, or are we just physical fitness trainers? At least the first description mentions meditation and “breathing” (did they mean pranayama here? Because I hate to break it to them, but that’s not exactly what the sanskrit term means). Although of course the description of what a teacher actually does has nothing to do with either of those, and only discusses yoga as “exercise” and “fitness.” And LiveStrong at least mentions pranayama, although again defines it incorrectly as just breathing. This next one from Best Sample Resume is probably the most ridiculous (cue laugh-cry):

Yoga is an ancient form of exercise originating from the country of India. Yoga has been known to help people exercise without straining themselves. It is quite fast and effective and this is the reason why it has become so popular in the west. Many gymnasiums now offer yoga as a form of exercise with other unconventional exercises like aerobics, pilates, etc…

Duties and Responsibilities of a Yoga Instructor

• Yoga instructors have to teach their students about the various yogic positions…
• They have to take into account the health problems of the students and teach them accordingly
• They also have to take the age of each student into account as their students can be anyone
• They have to monitor each of them carefully to ensure that they are doing the position properly
• They have to be experts themselves and have to be in great shape
• They can even offer dietary advice to their students but they can do it only after consultation with a dietician
• They mostly teach their students proper breathing techniques as they are most important aspect of yoga [yet of course this “most important aspect of yoga” is mentioned as a site note in the last bullet of the job description”, talk about hypocritical!]

Because clearly yoga was just ancient exercise. That was sarcasm, in case it didn’t come across right. And don’t even get me started on the statement that yoga instructors “have to be in great shape” comment.

What is so troubling about these descriptions of the job description for a yoga instructor is that we have defined the skills and activities of such teaching primarily on asana alone, or postures, and more specifically on the teaching of those postures in a group class setting (or less common, but more lucrative, private classes). Breathing is sometimes mentioned, but often misrepresented in these descriptions. The profession of yoga is predicated on a job that isn’t actually teaching yoga, but is just teaching a fitness class in the vein of Jane Fonda’s workout videos of the 80s.

The industry supports this, with most “yoga studios” only offering group fitness classes and rarely incorporating other aspects of the practice in their classes, workshops, or retreats. Add in yoga products that present the practice as something that you “do” at a set time, in a set place, through consumption (buy the mat, buy the props, buy the clothes, buy the class). Oh, sure, in these settings you may have a mention here or there of some philosophical aspects of the practice, and a breathing technique or two. But these are out of context, usually incredibly brief, and may not even be completely understood by the people teaching it.

Ex: alternative nostril breathing is a practice often taught completely devoid of the philosophical roots, meaning a yoga instructor will walk you through how to do it but won’t explain why. In fact, the teacher might not even know the philosophical, energetic and tantric reasons behind what they are trying to teach as most TT programs only offer 20 total hours of philosophy, pranayama, and history of yoga combined. And it’s optional how TT programs divvy that time up (usually pranayama is the first to be cut, as it is the most complex and requires the most background to understand). In short, the vast majority of what we are taught to teach, and subsequently get to teach via the yoga industry is group fitness classes that without more context and background are, at their heart, at their essence, culturally appropriative. And if someone wants to go into teaching yoga as a career they will likely be locked into this system where if they want to earn a living in said industry, that is what they have to teach. It’s risky for one’s career to actually teach yoga. But it’s big business to teach yoga fitness classes that are appropriative and that commodify the practice.

So we are stuck, consuming yoga even as we appropriate it horribly.

But isn’t yoga just a moving target, anyway?

A recent facebook post by Matthew Remski drew attention to this paradox many yoga teachers face today, but it also proposed a disturbing solution.

“Honestly, I don’t know whether what I’m teaching is yoga anymore.”

If I had a dollar for every time I heard this sentence from the fantastically skilled yoga teachers I talk to, I’d be able to afford the rent on a yoga studio in a gentrified neighbourhood. Just joking.

Seriously: they pause after they say it. Something between fear and equanimity is hanging in that pause.

Here’s a composite of the speaker: a highly sensitive and generous teacher who after ten to fifteen years of study, training, and teaching feels an oncoming crisis in self and cultural identity, presenting ambivalence along a number of yoga vectors. They love the sensations, aesthetics, and meanings of vinyasa, but they’re increasingly aware of repetitive stress [injuries]. They love postures, but they’re also learning about functional movement. They’re inspired by the ancient wisdom literature but they also know they’re living in a world that scripture cannot have imagined. They cherish the feeling of practice transmitting an essential wisdom through timeless techniques, but they’ve also read Singleton. (Shakes fist.)

They know they’ve benefited deeply from the solitude of self-work but they’re bothered that yoga is mostly the refuge of a privileged class that often wants consolation more than justice. They know self-regulation is essential but that it won’t address climate change or help BLM directly.

They teach in neighbourhoods that used to feel locally vibrant. As their skills increased with age, they were able to offer richer programming. But they also had to charge more for it, because gentrification. Sometimes they feel themselves locked into a consumerist feedback loop that is growing further and further away from the community they originally intended to serve, but which is also disappearing.

They know that some devotees define moksha as the goal that makes yoga yoga. They’re inspired by this, but wonder how many ways there might be to feel freedom. They don’t associate their practice with religion, but the cultural appropriation discussion has made the religious roots of practice — and their love for or aversion to this — undeniable.

They know that therapeutic goals and transcendent aspirations can pull the limbs in opposite directions on the yoga mat.

Sometimes the person utters the sentence with an enigmatic smile, and seem okay with it. That’s cool. But there are those who seem distressed by the problem, and are wondering whether they have to quit to retain their integrity, I feel a prickle, and I just figured it out.

I’m thinking: “But isn’t that just it?”

Isn’t practicing with equal parts of hope and doubt — along with the creativity of their friction — a movement towards freedom? Isn’t the self-inquiry that cuts right down to the nub — about everything — exactly what you wanted? Didn’t you always want to improvise the most skillful response to any given stimulus, regardless of whether it’s been taught or written about?.. Maybe not being able to name what you’re doing is a sign you’re doing that rare thing to which the sages, whoever they were, gave a provisional name.

My issue with this approach is that it argues it doesn’t matter what we do with the practice so long as we, personally, feel that it is yoga. Remski argues that this doubt that people experience because they are finally coming to realize their practice is appropriative is just totally fine, don’t worry about it. Look, I get that learning is always an uncertain process where we are confronted by doubt. This is especially true when the things we learn are polluted by culturally appropriative histories, commodification, and consumerism, not to mention colonialism (both past and present, because colonialism isn’t ancient history, folks–just ask the Native Americans involved in protesting the DAPL). It’s harder to wade through the mess of appropriative, commodified yoga to a deep understanding of what the underlying practice is. But there is an underlying practice.

Yes, yoga has been part and parcel of many different traditions, across a variety of religious, spiritual, and atheist demographics throughout its very diverse history. But there is an underlying unity in the philosophical aims of yoga and in aspects of the practices used that it is possible to point to. Sure there is diversity in how we interpret this underlying unity, but that doesn’t negate the fact that there is something underneath it all. While Andrea R. Jain (in her book Selling Yoga) and many other researchers like Georg Feuerstein (in his book Yoga Traditions) do make it a point to talk about how yoga has taken many forms depending on the time and the social group in question, they admit it is still possible to point to an underlying shape of this thing “yoga”; in other words, it’s not just anything we want it to be (cue: white desires that spur and subsequently justify appropriation), there is something we can trace called “yoga,” otherwise these histories of the practice couldn’t exist.

For me, I like to think of yoga using the metaphor of a blob. And yes, I’m still working on a better comparison, but bear with me. We can think of yoga as a shape made up of a set of practices, beliefs, values, norms, etc. (a cultural object), that are bound together in a networked, fluid form. It is constantly shifting as the circumstances of where that shape is in space and time change, as it adapts to it’s environment, but at the same time as the outer edges shift and change shape, the center of the blob for the most part remains the same over time. So although yoga does shift a bit in different settings, as all cultural objects do (because we consume and produce cultural products differently across space/time to make them relevant to our needs in that moment, this is what makes cultural objects living history), in general the ways we consume and produce yoga do have similarities across space/time that allow us to point to this blob and call it “yoga” across space, across time. We are able to trace this thing called “yoga” because there is an underlying essence to trace.

So trying to argue that as many western yogis finally begin to realize that the thing they have practiced and taught for so long might just be a commodified, appropriative version of something much deeper and greater creates a doubt that isn’t justified somehow because yoga has evolved over time is an attempt to justify appropriation because we don’t want to believe we are appropriating yoga. It’s not truth. We can’t come away from discussions of cultural appropriation in yoga with the claim that appropriation doesn’t matter, that we should just not care, or that anything is yoga because yoga doesn’t exist at all, or that to doubt that what we are doing is yoga is actually what the underlying practice of yoga is at its essence. This doubt many yogis today feel reflects a deep disconnect between a commodified, appropriative version of yoga taught in the West, and a realization that this is not what yoga is at its heart, that the underlying essence of yoga is much, much more.

Sure, this doubt a symptom that they are finally breaking through the nonsensical constructions of the practice that have arisen in recent decades. They’ve entered a deep stage of the learning process where we learn to doubt what we once believed, where we come to deconstruct false conceptions. This is a necessary and difficult part of learning–it is the uncovering of samskara and falsehoods that become embedded in our selves and lives. But that doesn’t mean the doubt and confusion of that stage in the learning process is what the practice is, or what the practice is about, or that we should just ignore it because it doesn’t really matter.

Remski’s post captures some very profound and important developing debates about the westernized yoga most people practice and teach today. But just giving up and saying “who cares, it’s all yoga” and that “if your confused, that’s what yoga is, so just stop worrying and keep doing what you are doing anyway” is not the solution, and not even a yogic solution to those questions. Instead of turning away from the confusion and doubt because it’s uncomfortable, or just living there in that doubt because we are afraid of what may come, we instead need to plot a course that takes us straight into that feeling so that we come out the other side with deeper faith, a better understanding and sense of the practice, and a better sense of how to engage in the practice in a way that is socially just and doesn’t damage this thing we love and live.

In other words, we need to work through the discomfort to actually learn how to practice and teach in ways that aren’t appropriative and aren’t continuing the commodification and watering down of yoga. Because let’s face it, in the West today we have watered down the practice so much it’s possible for students with over a decade of practice to enroll in a TT and not even understanding that meditation and yoga aren’t separate (no joke, that’s straight from my field notes, y’all). Imagine, studying for over ten years but never even realizing that yoga is a practice of meditation. That’s the yoga world we live in, because that ten plus years of study took place in an industry that doesn’t actually teach yoga, but instead teaches group fitness classes and calls it “yoga” to make it more desirable. To make it easier to sell.

Where do we go from here?

Obviously, the practice has changed dramatically over the last 100 years. That blob has transformed so much I think we do need to ask the question, “Is this still yoga?” Because most of these recent changes have been driven by commodification and appropriation of the practice in ways that water the practice down monumentally and turn it into a fitness craze, and this is intimately tied to practices of colonialism and white privilege (hence, appropriative).

The scary thing is that this endangers the survival of the practice as something more than just an exercise regimen. I often compare this process of slow death by appropriation to the appropriation of Native American traditions. Entire tribal cultures have died out through various forms of oppression, both physical but also cultural (appropriation). It’s a shame, it’s unfair, and honestly we are starting to see this happen in yoga, where the appropriative and commodified versions of the practice are being sold back to places like India and are replacing the more traditional understanding of what yoga is, even for native populations. Obviously the case of appropriation of yoga is not as extreme as the case of Native American traditions/cultures which has been going on for far longer, but I truly believe it could become as extreme unless we start to make efforts to retain the heart of the practice in ways that allow it to be protected, even as we also allow it to shift over time to serve the needs of the modern world (because all cultural objects need to evolve, it’s what allows culture to retain its relevancy). But we do need to engage in a mindful evolution of yoga in a way that consciously works toward doing no harm not just to ourselves, or to others, but also to yoga itself.

I get that it’s easy to misinterpret all of this as an argument for Hindu nationalism (which many yogis, especially white, non-Hindu yogis, think claims of cultural appropriation are arguing). But that’s not the case either. Because we can acknowledge the religious (multiple) roots of yoga traditions and practice in ways that are not appropriative without having to ascribe to a specific religion. Saying that cultural appropriation is widespread in yoga doesn’t mean we can’t practice it as white people, or that we have to suddenly support Hindu nationalism. What all this means is that we need to respect the roots of yoga, and begin to teach in ways that honor those traditions, history, and philosophy even as we do make it relevant for us today.

I honestly don’t think this is too much to ask of people who really love the practice and want to share it, and who want to live it (ahimsa, y’all, it’s a thing, look it up, and it also applies to doing the practice no harm too). It’s just that the way the industry is set up right now, if people want to make money teaching yoga it’s incredibly difficult to actually represent yoga accurately in a way that is not appropriative. Especially when most students of yoga think of it as “just exercise” (especially for women, white people, and affluent people, let’s get real). That’s essentially how most people think of yoga today. As a workout. Because: appropriation of the practice. These things are not separate.

If individual yogis and teachers want to resist engaging in appropriation within yoga, I hate to break it to you but they do need to change some of the ways they teach. We can’t just keep doing what we have been doing because we like it, find pleasure in it, or just don’t want to face the discomfort of change. We need to represent yoga more holistically, incorporating actual teachings on the history and philosophy of the practice(s). Does this mean students need to convert? No. But I think it’s a valid expectation that students should learn about where yoga comes from, and about the philosophy that is ultimately the practice (it’s not just asana, y’all). Teachers need to start offering more than just group fitness classes, and when they do offer asana classes they need to begin speaking about why not just how in a way that gets beyond, “because it makes you feel good” or “because it will help you lose weight” (barf), and instead talk about the energetic and philosophical reasons behind the physical practices.

Let’s be frank here. For most teachers out there in the commodified, appropriative yoga world today who have only experienced brief stints of Westernized TT certification programs, this might mean maybe you just don’t know enough to teach yoga yet without appropriating the practice, and if being a yoga teacher is the path you really want to walk maybe you need to go back and study more. Perhaps you need to rethink whether or not you are really, truly qualified to teach. Are you? Really? Truly? Why do you want to be a yoga teacher, really, truly? If, in asking yourself these questions, you realize all you wanted to be is a positive life coach or physical fitness trainer, maybe you need to switch fields and go into those professions. Again, I don’t intend to be cruel here, but if you really want to teach yoga, and really want to be truthful, and really want to engage in non-harm, and really want to live your yoga practice, these are the types of deep reflection that the practice requires of us. These are the types of difficult, uncomfortable questions we need to ask ourselves. Believe me, I know, because I’ve been grappling with them for years.

And heck, if you think that’s asking a lot, get this: the more difficult thing is that most teachers, if they want to earn a living at this and avoid appropriation, also need to push back against the system and industry that makes it difficult to teach yoga for realsies, not just yoga fitness classes in the vein of Jane Fonda. In other words, asking those questions at the individual level isn’t enough, because even if someone comes away from those questions with a resounding “YES I AM QUALIFIED AND I’M GOING TO TEACH YOGA DAMMIT” they are still going to have to do so in an industry that will fight them every step of the way. If someone really wants to teach yoga, and be truthful about that teaching, and engage in non-harm, and live the essence of yoga, they are also going to have to start pushing back against the industry that has commodified and appropriated it.

And that’s where we get to this crisis and doubt that Remski spoke about in his post (despite the really weird, white privileged denial of the problem at the end). The paradox arises, the crisis arises, the doubt arises because it’s hard to make money at yoga and also present it deeply, holistically, and accurately. How do you sell a practice that is difficult, that asks us to face the darkest most disturbing parts of ourselves? That asks us to do so over and over, constantly, until the day we pass on from this life? That Patanjali himself argued is painful? Because 2.15 says: “To one of discrimination, everything is painful indeed, due to its consequences: the anxiety and fear over losing what is gained; the resulting impressions left in the mind to create renewed cravings; and the constant conflict among the three gunas, which control the mind.” How do you market that? How do you sell that? It’s hard to teach yet not appropriate in an industry based on appropriation/commodification of the practice, based on a lie of what yoga is at its essence. It’s so much easier just to say, who cares, to use our privilege and succumb to our attachment and desire for this thing we have created that is not yoga, but is called yoga anyway.

But hey, no one said yoga was easy, right?

Oh wait, I guess the yoga industry did that when they appropriated and sold “yoga” to us as a quick fix to all life’s ills (for a cost).

Love, light, and… yoga ❤

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White Fragility in Yoga: Privilege, Power, and Posts

Today I’m breaking off from my usual blog, and sharing a post I wrote for a social media group. I’ve only recently (within the last year or so) discovered the use of facebook groups in the yoga world. I think on a whole they can serve as excellent resources for yogis and as a way to build community. There is power in groups! But, this is also the point of this post, which is about how these groups (as things that are both made up of individuals but also bigger than individual members) can be a site of power and privilege, and how the nature of posting itself can be a learning opportunity as well as a means of oppression.

For those who aren’t on the Yoga and Movement Research group, it’s a new facebook group with the intention to share and integrate movement research into yoga practice (particularly asana practice). Over the weekend, there was apparently some serious drama as someone brought up the fact that some of this practice of integrating functional movement systems and biomechanical research into the practice was appropriating the practice and perhaps not adequately representing the roots of yoga as spiritual. The topic of privilege and cultural appropriation were brought up, names were called, all hell broke loose, and as anyone who has been on the internet long enough to imagine, it got ugly.

After this drama happened, the entire thread was deleted by the administrators and the “bully” who had originally broached these topics blocked from the group. Then there was a post from the admins that was even more epic drama, as many people hailed the “victory” over the “bully,” who had been added back into the group by a friend, ensuing discussion of how the person should be banned and any of her friends “closely watched” and potentially blocked too (for the sin of adding her back in and apparently being friendly). To see this post (which gives a good sense of what went down in the group earlier), go here. However, it turned out that not everyone was okay with the post being deleted and the few people who spoke up with concerns were pretty much either ignored, told to “go away” or “get a life.” In other words, further silenced and marginalized. Drama!

I wrote a post in response to this explaining why I was concerned about this reaction from administrators. What follows is my discussion of white fragility in the yoga world, how white fragility applies here, and why discussions of power, privilege, and cultural appropriation are important for all of us yogis, especially those interested in movement research, to have.

Even if you aren’t interested in the specifics, I think this post grapples with a dilemma every yoga should have in their practice. How do we make the practice relevant and meaningful to us, in other words, make it uniquely “ours”, authentically “ours,” while still remaining true to the heart of the practice? How can we modify the practice to be more just, equitable, and modern even as we acknowledge and honor the roots of the tradition of yoga? Read on, if you dare to. I hope you gain something from what was for me a therapeutic way to deal with the emotional disturbance and frustration I felt upon learning about what occurred.

A Plea for Dialogue

Hi y’all. So I missed the drama on this group, but feel like I should express some concerns I have about what went down, and try to explain why I have these concerns. I wish I could find the original thread to get a better understanding of what happened. I was out of town this weekend and unfortunately missed the drama, but I have read what’s around since then and have got the gist from various comments and posts since. So I want to clarify that I know I am coming to writing and responding to this experience that happened in ways that emotionally affected all involved without a perfect understanding of everything that was said. I know this. But I still think we need to reflect more deeply on what happened as a group and why it is important for all of us to reflect on and educate ourselves about these topics.

Because here’s the thing: I can no longer go back and see what happened as the post was deleted. So there is no record. Although, I understand there are screenshots (garnered from reading other posts since then). As someone who cares very much about the issues that were addressed and would have liked to learn more through the thread (if only in a “what not to do on social media to avoid drama” way), I think this it is a shame it was deleted, and am actually quite grateful there is a record somewhere. I would love to see those screenshots, because this record is important and is a testimony to us as individual people who we may be experiencing moments of challenge and difficulty and growth (one hopes, for everyone involved); these threads and moments like the one that happened are a testimony of our community, to this group, and ultimately to the yoga world as a whole, because we are a microcosm of this world even as we are unique within it. The issues that were discussed were powerful, emotional, and important. How else could they spark such reactions? Such passion? So I am saddened by the fact that the post is no longer available given that these are topics worth discussing and that this group is for and made by all of us, even though it was started by Diane (thank you!), and as such the thread was a valuable record for all of us to learn from. I’m especially concerned that it was deleted so quickly, before many people in this group even had an opportunity to view it at all, myself included.

I have some thoughts I would like to share about why I am disturbed about this situation. Please realize that this post is coming from my heart and that I have contemplated and grappled very deeply with the topics I am about to write about here for many years as an educator and researcher on these issues. I think that this group, and all of us (myself included) need to be able to think critically and deeply, and dare I say meditate in a truly yogic way (aka, deep absorption per yogic philosophy) about what we are doing in our attempt to integrate more biomechanical and movement research into our practice. And I think that part of this meditation must include critically thinking about what it is we are doing, how we are doing it, and the way in which our actions may be appropriative.

This group, Yoga and Movement Research is about integrating movement research into our yoga practice. It’s about increasing safety, and about yoga as more than asana in that integrating current movement research can help us better align with yogic philosophy, including the practices of ahimsa, non-harm, and so on. In application to the body, this means utilizing functional movement and biomechanical research to insure that we practice safely in ways that do not harm us across a lifetime. These are valuable and noble goals. But we have to recognize that what we are doing isn’t just “fun,” or “safer,” it is also political.

What we are doing is political because it ties into the yoga industry and the ways asana has become commodified, tied to a type of practice that can be potentially injurious across a lifetime for many people. Clearly many people have experienced this in this group, including Diane, whose story is a powerful reminder of why what we are doing here is important and potentially life changing for many. Ultimately what we do in many ways aligns us against an industry that is set up to sell a style of practice to people who may actually be injured by that same practice. It aligns us against the tradition, against the commodification, and against the mindless perpetuation of practices that may not be serving us. Many members in this group have talked about the push-back you have gotten from mainstream yoga. This push-back is because what we do is political. There is no denying it. It is revolutionary.

More importantly for this discussion, what we do is also rooted in and tied to issues of cultural appropriation, because in many ways the integration of functional movement research and systems into our practice is changing the practice, and is changing what we think of as yoga. So to say, “I am not particularity interested in politics as it pertains to yoga, the decolonization and appropriation of yoga,” (this is a direct quote from an admin in this group) just cannot and doesn’t make sense to me, because that’s a complete denial, purposeful ignoring, and misunderstanding of the fact that what we are potentially doing in this very group and our interest in yoga and movement research IS political and is also potentially culturally appropriative (#noshadejusttruth). We are trying to change the practice, and anytime we do this, especially when we are coming from places of privilege (which most of us in this group are, #noshadejusttruth) we are in danger of engaging in cultural appropriation. As such we have to be EXTRA careful to ensure we don’t unintentionally cause harm and engage in appropriative practices without intending to.

We have to make the extra effort to learn about these issues, especially if we want to take our practice off the mat and use it to transform our lives and our selves, which is what yoga asks of all of us. It means we must be open to difficult, challenging, and disconcerting learning opportunities. It means we must seek truth, not just in terms of research on the body, but in research on how privilege and power ARE embodied. How we enact power and privilege through our bodies, and our voices, through our language and the way our fingers type words into the keyboard. It means we have to be aware of how what we do can affect bodies in deep and emotional ways, that will then show up in the way we move, which ties back directly in a crazy and complex and profound cycle to the purpose and intention of this group, rethinking movement. The body, trauma and history are intertwined. We cannot separate these things. Separation is an illusion. Cultural appropriation is a topic we should be open to addressing in this group, and I hope that we continue to discuss. Issues of cultural appropriation are important to what this group does, because we have to be very careful as people of privilege about the ways we take this practice, reinterpret it, and change it can actually reproduce and perpetuate appropriative practices that have been very prevalent in yoga during the last 100 years as the practice began to enter the West under colonialism.

All this means we need to educate ourselves on these topics, to avoid doing harm and damage (because, hey, ahimsa). And this is where I am disturbed by this conversation thread being deleted. Because deleting this thread is, at its heart, an act of privilege, an act of power. I understand we need to regulate spam and actual, justified and legitimate threats (like real, legal harassment). But I would probably, by utilizing a more removed perspective (pratipaksha bhavanam, anyone?), call the thread that occurred a pretty typical lively social media debate from what I have garnered about what happened, although I can’t be sure, because again the thread has since been deleted, which is part of the problem. Let’s face it, it’s social media, and it’s just impossible to get our points across clearly so there is usually a heightened tension and ease of misunderstanding on the internet. This is not new, it is not surprising, and ultimately if you think someone’s comment is rude the best course of action is simply to ignore it, not try and delete every rude thing that is ever said. I think it’s illuminating that across the history of this group, and the many heated debates that have been had, it is a conversation about appropriation and privilege that is the one that is deleted. It says a lot about the underlying, likely unconscious reasons why this post in particular made people uncomfortable to the point where erasing the record seemed to be the appropriate response.

The point is that the ability and decision to remove a post is an act of power and an act of silencing, which is by definition an act of privilege. In fact, research shows that in discussions of race and/or privilege, those who are privileged often react in one of three ways. This is discussed in a piece by DiAngelo that the person who has been called a “bully,” “troll,” and so on in various comments has since then shared in another thread (you can access DiAngelo’s work here, with a more succinct summary here). I get that a lot of name-calling was from both sides, and I think that’s on both parties (in all fairness, #noshadejusttruth). But the reactions where people with privilege often feel bullied and attacked when these topics come up is one of the most common reactions DiAngelo found as part of what she termed “white fragility.” And the act of deleting the post afterwards is similarly another common reaction DiAngelo discusses (and ironically enough, a klesha, or obstacle identified by Patanjali, avoidance).

DiAngelo defines “white fragility” as “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.” And this is exactly what happened in this group. People with privilege are almost always in a position of comfort, and when they are challenged, whites “typically respond as if something is ‘wrong,’ and blame the person or event that triggered their discomfort… [resulting] in a socially-sanctioned array of counter-moved against the perceived source of the discomfort, including: penalization, retaliation, isolation, ostracization, and refusal to continue engagement” (DiAngelo 61).

If all this sounds familiar, it’s because this is exactly the response that occurred in this group, where those who were challenged to think critically and reflect on their privilege instead penalized the supposed “offender” (blocking them from the group), retaliated (by name calling, etc., by openly requesting that the person be “nicer,” and also threatening to block the friend who did nothing but add the “offender” to the group and then readd them, which honestly I think is fair considering conversations were still going on about that same person that if it were me, I would have wanted to at least be able to see). Members of this group also isolated others who brought up concerns about what happened (such as the numerous examples on the threads since where people have spoken up with concerns only to be isolated and told this isn’t the purpose of the group and that they just need to “live with it” or “get over it” or “move on”), and most obviously a complete refusal to continue engagement (by deleting the post and blocking the “offender”).

I want to make a couple more points. First, I want to make it clear that cultural appropriation is not a simple thing, and is a term that is often misunderstood and misused in our society. Please, y’all, just because you have heard this term does not mean you understand what cultural appropriation is, how it works, and how to avoid it. Just because you know the definition of the term, doesn’t mean you understand the concept.

Let me explain. I teach sociology at the university level, and cultural sociology is my particular expertise and area of study. So I teach about cultural appropriation in my college courses. It takes me a whole week of lecture to adequately introduce this topic. Which means it takes me a good three hour lecture just to barely scratch the surface of this concept. My students often still struggle to understand this topic even with the lecture and additional reading assigned. And note that this is three hours of a lecture that I have carefully compiled and concisely organized to allow my students a general overview of this concept, and that pulls from material based on untold hours I have spent studying, reading, and researching these topics (e.g., I have a peer-review paper coming out on cultural appropriation of body positivity in yoga within the next month that has literally been in the works for almost two years). I am not saying this to brag, or to try and make you all feel like this topic is unapproachable. With a good teacher and when you take some time to do that reading and studying it is completely possible to understand, apply, and begin to overcome cultural appropriation in our lives and practice. It is my sincere hope that you all will seek out this knowledge, as again, it is very relevant for this group and all concerned with integrating movement research into yoga, even if you aren’t actively dealing with issues of racial diversity, etc. in yoga. But know that this topic is complex, and takes time to learn about, and we have to be willing to be students and to say “I don’t know” and to listen to those who are trying to educate us on these things. If you all are interested I’d be willing to put together an online course on cultural appropriation in yoga, PM me if you are interested. I have had a few requests in the past to do so, but never enough people to justify the time/energy/work on my end, but if there are enough people who may be interested I’m open to doing so despite how busy I am because I do care deeply on these issues and feel they are important.

Also, I think it is ironic that the person who was blocked is an expert on the very issues discussed, but can no longer serve as a resource if she is blocked. So not only is deleting the thread problematic, but so is blocking the person as there aren’t as many people out there who study and teach on these topics. I get that the debate got heated to the point of being irrelevant. That doesn’t mean the entire thread was. It doesn’t mean other conversations with that person can’t be educational. We all need to be able to see things from multiple perspectives, and please realize that anti-oppression work can be exhausting, frustrating, depressing, angering, and overwhelming because we see this type of thing everywhere, all the time. It drains our energy. It leaves us depleted. And many of us engaged in this work are coming to the practice to heal, and we come to it only to find that we see the same things and end up engaging in the same work in spaces where we hope to feel supported and listened to. This can be double hurtful, as we are often made to feel unwelcome in the yoga world as well, called “unyogic” for being critical, and that this is a constant, constant battle we face in a practice where all we want is to find peace.

Sometimes when we say things nicely, no one listens. Sometimes the only way to be heard is to be loud, is to be rude. Niceness is not a requirement of yoga, although many people misinterpret ahimsa as being “nice.” Ahimsa is “do no harm,” not “be nice”. Sure we should strive to be respectful and kind in all our interactions to avoid doing harm, but we are human, and sometimes we mess up. In fact, the requirement of being “nice” that many people of privilege try to require when talking about these topics often serves to reinforce the status quo and silence marginalized voices. The requirement to “be nice” puts your own comfort before the lived experiences of others. It is denying the upsetting reality of oppression. And if you want to learn more, please see this article on “White Niceness as the Enemy of Black Liberation”. The claim to “be nice” is good, and we should all strive toward that, and I’m sorry that thread became a crap shoot (hello social media! No surprise there, in all honesty), but now we have potentially lost a critical voice who has a great deal of expertise in these areas and who could have served as an educational resource for many in the future (after tempers died down on both sides, cause we are human).

Finally, one of the things that disturbs me the most is the way in which these acts of power (deleting threads, blocking people, etc.) are likely to make others feel silenced and less likely to speak up on these topics. I know personally that I’m less inclined to talk about these things on this group now because I’m not sure what will happen if I do. I’m honestly a little leery of sharing resources now, because god knows what responses I’ll get when I bring these topics up. If I call someone out on privilege, even with the best of intentions and even making an effort to be “nice” (though as I mentioned that whole idea of niceness can also be deconstructed), what will happen to me? Will I be blocked too? Will I be called names? Will my threads and resources be deleted? Why should I bother spending time and energy to try and educate when I’m not sure anyone is even open to listening? And this is the real root of the issue I have with what happened, because it speaks to a larger issue of privilege and power going on in this group that frankly makes me think of just giving up and leaving the group entirely, because at a certain point it’s just angering, frustrating, and depressing for me to see these topics being met with defensiveness and white fragility (per DiAngelo’s work). Who knows! Maybe this post will be deleted later this day, and if you don’t hear from me again, maybe it’s because I was blocked from the group. (Joke, I think?)

I am curious why the thread was deleted so quickly (including comments that were not rude) and why the person was blocked. Did admins make an effort to reach out privately to discuss their concerns with that person? Did they let emotions cool down before trying to do so? Because from what I gather of the situation, that decision was done in the heat of the emotional reaction without trying to dialogue with anyone privately, and without a thought for how that decision itself is representative of privilege and power dynamics ongoing in the group, or how that decision might be seen by other members of the group who may already be marginalized in the yoga world at large. And that’s problematic. Because ultimately, who is deciding to do this? And based on what? It’s one thing to be rude and a completely other thing to threaten to kill someone, folks, and we shouldn’t be silencing people just for rudeness.

I’m not sure where to go from here. All I know is that voices are people, not just words on a screen, and our habits and defenses are deeply ingrained; from the time we are born we are taught to lean into privilege, and to ignore oppression. These habits become rooted in our bodies, our brains; literally our physiology contains our cultural bias and predispositions. As DiAngelo notes, “fragility and privilege result in responses that function to restore equilibrium and return the resources ‘lost’ via the challenge–resistance towards the trigger, shutting down and/or tuning out, indulgence in emotional incapacitation such as guilt or ‘hurt feelings,’ exiting, or a combination of these responses.” And I’m sad to say that this is what I saw in what happened, and rather than learn from the experience, there has been a continuation of the very privilege and practices that the “offender” was likely trying to draw attention to (even if it did devolve into a crap shoot).

Ultimately the art and act of yoga is to uproot these samskara, to see beyond bias, to uncover how this bias influences our actions, reactions, and defenses in ways we may not even be aware. Yoga challenges us to find truth, to use our pain to learn and grow and fuel our selfless devotion and service, to eliminate suffering. And we can’t do this if we avoid what makes us uncomfortable. I’m not saying don’t monitor. But please, please, please consider how the way in which this group is monitored reflects larger issues of privilege and power. Please don’t delete things that can be education and meaningful and learning opportunities unless they are actually dangerous and harassment. And please let’s continue talking about these things, because they are important and relevant to the mission of this group.

Love, light, and… yoga ❤

And to end on some humor, here’s a Letter to My Yoga Teacher.

 

Inequality, Manners, and the Gross Yoga Body

Today I want to explore some thoughts about elitism and class privilege in the yoga world, and how this connects to constructions of the yoga body in terms of manners, size, and race (because really, these three tend to be interconnected). There is a great deal of discussion about how yoga is primarily practiced by and accessible to a high-class, highly educated, thin, white, female demographic, and that it is this body that is overwhelmingly featured in (stereotypical) cultural representations of the yoga body. Often, discussions of inequality in yoga focus on race or size (or gender) rather than on social class per se. But in this post I want to center the discussion on class, and see how we can think about inequality/exclusion in yoga in a different way by using class as an underlying lens to focus in on issues of race, size, and even gender. Watch out folks, we’re about to discuss the gross yoga body!

Bodies as Social Signals

In addition to being a very intimate and personal part of our everyday experiences, bodies are also inherently social as they signal others around us, signifying and representing identities to others in ways that allow us to interact more effectively within the world. For example, Goffman’s theory of dramaturgy discusses how bodies can serve as props in the performance of social scripts; what we wear, how we carry ourselves (our body language), and (ultimately) how our bodies are interpreted by others (including race, class, gender, sexuality, and/or size, all of which are embodied to various degrees) provide a framework for us and others to interact in predicable (but unique) ways, what Bourdieu calls “regulated improvisation.” Bodies are a part of our social scripts, and help us interpret and interact with the world as they can help us anticipate what is appropriate behavior in different settings with different people.

We learn to interpret bodies through our personal interactions but also through media (which is a profoundly powerful agent of socialization in today’s world). Bodies, in this sense, are interpreted and framed by cultural processes that ascribe meaning and moral distinction to various individuals depending on what they look like. Because we often develop split second impressions of people based on appearance, bodies shape our experiences in life as they can affect how others treat us, and because of the looking glass self, bodies also come to shape how we think about ourselves as we imagine what others see when they look at our fleshy being and learn to internalize that (as if we see through a looking glass to develop our sense of self).

Class is ultimately an embodied experience and signal. Our social class is written in the body in ways that are often invisible, naturalized, and normalized even as we socially construct them. This happens in numerous ways. For example, poverty contributes to increased rates of diseases and illnesses that can define and shape our bodily experiences in the world. All those in poverty have bodies shaped by less access to quality health care, both medical and dental, across a lifetime. Those who are poor generally live in worse areas that have higher rates of pollution and exposure to dangerous substances (such as lead paint) all of which can impact health in profound and lasting ways. Those who are poor have shorter lifespans as well; the wealth-health connection is strong and lasting, and ultimately a connection that plays out in and on the bodies of real people, in real life. So class is written in the body and signaled through the body in terms of health, illness, disease. Class is also written into the body through the type of work done by different classes (e.g., blue collar vs. white collar) or in the type of fashion worn by different classes.

Manners, Size, and the Gross Body

More importantly to our discussion, class is also embodied in terms of manners. Norbert Elias researched how during the industrial revolution when people began moving to cities en masse, a civilizing process took place where the new experience of living in close quarters with so many people created a system of self-imposed restraint, especially regarding bodily management, or manners. It became necessary to construct a divide between “private life” and “public life” to preserve personal boundaries in new urban environments, and bodily processes that were once relatively open and shared (particularly sex and the processes of elimination) became unacceptable, taboo, inappropriate, controlled through laws (like “no defecating in public spaces” or even “no sleeping in public places”), and relegated to the privacy of the home, preferably kep private even from those you share your home with.

This civilizing process, this private/public divide, wasn’t an accident. Levine and DiMaggio have both researched how elite groups in cities actively worked to impose manners on the lower classes as a means of combating and controlling class tensions. Not to mention the fact that this process was directly related to elite desire to maintain racial differences between elite whites and newly freed black slaves after the end of the civil war in 1965. What did elites do when there was no more legal distinction based on race? Not a problem when they could utilize the adherence of manners to justify the exact same practices and beliefs. So the construction of manners was intimately connected to maintaining class and racial inequality by elite white men, but in a way that seemed “natural” as it took place through bodily controls learned from a very early age, becoming habitual over time.

Farrell discusses in her book Fat Shame (which I can’t recommend enough) how this civilizing process was also connected to body size. Prior to industrialization, fatness was considered a sign of wealth, status, and prestige. But as the civilizing process took place, beliefs about fatness changed. Fatness becomes associated with gluttony and non-white racial identities, particularly the “primitive” or “uncivilized” body. Thin bodies were considered “closer to God,” and thinness became physical evidence of the control/restraint one presumably had to demonstrate to maintain that body (and faith, presumably) (60). “Fat became clearly identified as a physical trait that marked its bearers as people lower on the evolutionary and racial scale— Africans, ‘native’ peoples, immigrants, criminals, and prostitutes. All women were also considered to be more at risk of fatness, another sign of their status lower on the evolutionary scale than men. Thin, in contrast, became identified as a physical trait marking those who were higher on the evolutionary and racial scale—aristocrats, white people, men. Fatness, then, served as yet another attribute demarcating the divide between civilization and primitive cultures, whiteness and blackness, good and bad” (64).

So during this time elite (white, male) groups constructed a cultural divide between the elite, “high” body and the “lower” body. (By the by, interesting side note: the terms “high” and “low” culture derive from racist terms “highbrow” and “lowbrow” which were based on the pseudo-scientific eugenic study of craniometry, which argued that white people were inherently more intelligent because they had “higher brows”, aka skulls, than other groups. This study has since been found to be complete codswallop, the very definition of (pseudo-)scientific racism).

The “high” culture body was well-mannered, a body in control at all times, associated with intellect rather than emotion, and as such associated with the upper half of the body, especially the brain (rather than the lower half that engages in activities like sex, processes of elimination, and for women also menstruation, child birth, and so on). The “high” culture body was as such a male body, a white body, and higher-class. The “low” culture body had no manners, was a body out of control, was presumably subject to the whims of emotion and instinct, and as such was associated with the lower half of the body (e.g., sexual urges). It was (and is) a body associated with women, people of color, and those who are poor (also people of “deviant” sexual identities). Kipnis (in her excellent study of Hustler magazine) discusses how this “body is often a gaseous, fluid-emitting, embarrassing body, one continually defying the strictures of social manners and mores and instead governed by its lower intestinal tract: a body threatening to erupt at any moment… [It] devotes itself to what we might call grossness: an obsessive focus on the lower half of the body, and on the processes (and products) of elimination.” (132)

This bodily distinction took on a moral quality, with “high” cultured bodies considered more moral, “better,” “good,” and “normal.” As Bordo argues, “The moral—and, as we shall see, economic—coding of the fat/slender body in terms of its capacity for self-containment and the control of impulse and desire represents the culmination of a developing historical change in the social symbolism of body weight and size… [Under capitalism,] social power has come to be less dependent on the sheer accumulation of material wealth and more connected to the ability to control and manage the labor and resources of others. At the same time, excess body weight came to be seen as reflecting moral or personal inadequacy, or lack of will “ (Unbearable Weight: 192).

But how laughable all this is when we dig deeper! Because manners, bodily difference, and moralizing this difference is based on a false construction of elite bodies as somehow inherently different than those who are “Othered,” than “lower” bodies. And it is a false distinction! It is an illusion! It is not truth! Because all bodies eat, spit, piss, fart, poop, have sex (here’s hoping, at least!), and are ultimately at a basic level out of our control. Most of our body processes, and even mental processes for that matter, happen outside our conscious awareness. And that’s a good thing, because if we had to remember to breathe all the time we’d be in trouble, folks, let alone if we had to remember to make our hearts beat. All bodies are gross bodies. All bodies are flesh, and blood, and fluids, all bodies are messy–and thank god for that too because otherwise we’d be robots, unable to feel or truly experience anything. Denying the human nature of our bodies, hiding processes that are “undesirable” according to cultural norms just to take on, maintain, or enforce elite status can actually be incredibly damaging, not just in terms of the inequality it helps support and reproduce but also physically and mentally for those who adhere to it.

Class Privilege, Elitism, and Yoga

So let’s bring this back to yoga and class privilege. Of course class privilege in yoga is partially tied to the way the industry developed, the creation of yoga studio systems and teacher training programs, their marketing that primarily targets and caters to middle-class, highly educated white women (and to a lesser degree, men), and their locations, which are often in high end, white neighborhoods. (That’s a whole other post, though.) It’s also in some sense tied to fashion and consumption patterns. But right now I want to draw your attention to the way class privilege in yoga also has to do with the social construction of the yoga body, which is ultimately a classed (and raced, and gendered) body.

The yoga body is constructed as a “high,” elite body. It is a body constructed as completely in control (look at the force of will required to achieve and maintain some of those intense arm balances and inversions!), a body that is thin, “absolutely tight, contained, ‘bolted down,’ firm: in other words, a body that is protected against eruption within, whose internal processes are under control” (Bordo: 192). It is a body that does not burp, fart, or defecate (that we hear about), that is associated with the mind and upper half of the body, a body that is white, a body that is not messy. It is a body that is elegantly photographed, in a way that is associated with high-end, high-class production (think: Playboy, not Hustler). It is the sexualized body, not the body having sex. It is a bodied that is well mannered at all times, not the embarrassing body. And in saying these things, I’m not trying to say these things are bad; they simply are, and I am simply trying to acknowledge the way the yoga body is constructed as a classed body. But this construction is also limiting; at its very essence it is classed in profound ways and tied to forms of oppression and privilege that are inscribed in and read off bodies and their representations. The representations we see of this yoga body are not truth; they are manufactured and present a particular classed reality that is not shared by most people, that hides the underlying, inevitable gross body.

Perhaps more interestingly, the yoga body has not always been constructed in this way. The classical hatha yogic body was originally a gross body, a messy body. As discussed by Singleton, traditional hatha practice bodily practices were often distinct from the use of asanas, and a great deal of traditional hatha yoga practice aimed at purifying the body would today seem incredibly unorthodox, downright alarming, and, well, gross. Singleton summarizes some these practices as follows: “A preliminary stage of the hahta discipline is the six purifications (satkarmas), which are (with some variation between texts) (1) dhauti, or the cleansing of the stomach by means of swallowing a long, narrow strip of cloth; (2) basti, or ‘yoga enema’ effected by sucking water into the colon by means of an abdominal vacuum technique (uddiana bandha); (3) neti, or the cleaning of the nasal passages with water and/or cloth; (4) trataka, or staring at a small mark or candle until the eyes water; (5) nauli or lauliki, in which the abdomen is massaged by forcibly moving the rectus abdominus muscles in a circular motion; and (6) kapalabhati, where air is repeatedly and forcefully expelled via the nose by contraction of the abdominal muscles” (28). One of the many aims of these practices was to stimulate proper digestion (remember, that whole burping, farting, pissing, pooing messy body?), which is essential to good health.

The hatha yoga body was sanitized when it became appropriated by highly educated, upper-class Indians and later by the West, and this sanitizing process has continued today through studio systems where the practice is removed from the fleshy, gross body (god forbid you fart or burp in your class!) even as we are encouraged to “drop in” to our body through asana–but that “dropping in” takes place in classed ways that tie to race, size, and also gender, and seek to construct our bodies, and shape them, according to class boundaries and privilege.

This is a huge problem, because if we are only encouraged to connect to the “high,” elite body we marginalize many groups from practicing yoga who may feel uncomfortable as their bodies may not fit as easily within this construction (recall: people of color and larger bodies as well as a number of other groups are often are associated with the body out of control, the “lower” body, experiencing greater body monitoring by others as a result). Focusing only on the elite, “high” yoga body also means we lose sight of our connection to our own bodies, which are ultimately not classed, and are all gross. All yoga bodies are gross bodies, just as all bodies are gross bodies. Denying this is denying truth. Embracing our gross yoga bodies is pivotal to deepening a better understanding of ourselves and others as well as improving our health and well-being, both physically and mentally. Only by embracing the entirety of ourselves, including our gross bodies, will we be able to learn to love ourselves, improve our health, and reduce inequality.

Embracing the Gross Yoga Body

I think it’s high time we reclaim the gross yoga body, not only as a means of combating class privilege and inequality in yoga, but also because it’s important for our own health and well-being. Reconstructing the yoga body as a real, gross, fleshy, messy body is necessary if we want to change the classed nature of the practice. And this entails changing the practice to encourage and embrace the gross body. By all means, burp and fart in class! Why not? In fact, why wouldn’t you? What does it say about yoga today when we discourage people from expressing natural bodily practices that are a by-product of a deep, real, felt practice? Because honestly, if your yoga practice isn’t encouraging proper digestion, including healthy burps and farts, why are you even practicing in the first place? If we aren’t practicing asana to become healthier, then what are we practicing for?

In fact, it can be bad for your health to suppress a burp or fart. As this excellent post discusses: “burp when your body wants to burp, and pass gas when your body wants to pass gas; both mechanisms are in place to keep you comfortable and healthy, and suppressing these mechanisms can lead to trouble… The bottom line: For less abdominal discomfort and better overall health, chew well, don’t suppress the release of gas from your body, and strive to avoid foods that don’t agree with your digestive tract.” Here’s another post that identifies how “holding in gas leads to bloating, stomach cramps, and even devastatingly serious pain.” So why is something that is actually good for our health actively discouraged? (Oh right; I guess class oppression, because always?)

And if this discussion about bodily processes is making you uncomfortable, maybe you need to be asking yourself: why? Why do bodily processes that are natural and vital for our health and well-being make us ashamed, embarrassed, or uneasy? Who has taught us this is the “proper” reaction? How do feelings of shame and embarrassment control us and help to maintain unequal power systems?

If we want to adequately develop self awareness, we need to become aware not just of our “high,” elite bodies but also the aspects of our bodies that are “low” class. We need to embrace our gross yoga bodies as a path to self-love and healing, both physical and emotional. And we need to encourage a culture where the gross yoga body is not shamed or “Othered” but is considered normal and welcomed, so that everyone can live in a body that burps and farts without fear! Ultimately, we need to become comfortable talking about these things; and hey, a little laughter doesn’t hurt either.

Love, light, and… yoga ❤

Healthism, Yoga and the Body as Machine

As some of you may know if you follow me on social media, I’ve been dealing with a minor shoulder injury. When I was around ten, I fell through a metal jungle gym, fractured my left wrist during the ten foot drop, and landed on my left side while at school. After going to the nurse and then having my parents take me to the ER, my wrist was treated and healed. But I didn’t realize until much later after I had became a more dedicated yoga practitioner that my shoulder had also experienced impact trauma and hadn’t healed properly, leading to over a decade of compensatory movement patterns. This is actually very common with impact trauma, as the instinctual reaction is to protect the area of the injury, often leading to postural habits that imbalance the body; for me, my instinct was to protect my left side even if I didn’t realize I was doing so.

Part of the lingering problem included an ability to slightly dislocate my shoulder, allowing my clasped arms to wrap around, up, and over my shoulders all the way to the back (yes, crazy I know). Yet for years, not understanding why I could do this and its connection to my lingering shoulder injury, I would dislocate my shoulders. It often felt like a great stretch through my upper back (even while I wasn’t learning to utilize my muscles to stretch the back). Admittedly, there was also some part of me that enjoyed the novel identity it brought, being able to do something so many people couldn’t do, especially considering I was never very athletic (book worm much?). Obviously, I have since stopped doing this.

As I have been going through my teacher training, I found that my practice was beginning to aggravate my shoulder. I’ve been practicing asana more than I ever have, and between the activity, weight bearing, long holds, and adjustments I’ve had to back off my asana practice for a bit and seek some medical and therapeutic help to let it heal properly, finally, after nearly twenty years. I am getting a variety of bodywork done to realign my left shoulder to proper placement, and am now trying to relearn proper postural habits to overcome over a decade of compensatory movement patterns. For me, this minor injury has actually been a profound learning experience in my own personal practice and has helped me think more deeply about my research, about what we are doing in asana, and about how we learn and think about yoga and the body in the Western yoga world.

Why do we think of yoga as only asana? In what ways have Western modalities of thinking influenced our understanding of the body as machine, and prevented us from a holistic connection and proprioceptive understanding of the body? What does it mean to have a deep yoga practice? How do certification programs reproduce and perpetuate limited views of yoga and the yoga body? And ultimately, how can we teach yoga as more than asana?

In sociology, we talk about how our ideas of health are socially constructed. What a healthy body looks like and the practices it engages in are socially determined through culture, socialization experiences, and medical practices. In the last century, western medicine has become a primary driver in our determination of “health,” often in ways that moralize the division between healthy/unhealthy, normal/pathological, pure/impure, such that marginalized populations are typically ascribed the status of “unhealthy.” In sociology, we call this approach healthism, and it is equally common in the yoga world where ideas of health, asana, and the body as machine mix in often dangerous and unanticipated ways.

Let’s look at an example of healthism in action. Women’s natural health systems, including pregnancy, menstruation, and menopause have been medicalized and pathologized for centuries. This is what I like to call (pseudo-)scientific sexism, and in the past included ideas that a woman’s uterus could travel through the body disrupting normal functioning (a “pathology” called female hysteria among Western psychology that wasn’t removed from their list of diseases until 1959), that a women who was menstruating was impure and dangerous, and (during the height of eugenics) that mental or physical exertion could actually damage future unborn children, an idea that was used to restrict access to higher education for women as it might “tax the brain” and damage our capacity for reproduction. And it’s important to note that these type of myths are not dead and gone! They survive in popular culture ideas that women are more emotional, that we experience PMS that interferes with our judgement (for which there is NO sound medical evidence), and misnomers like the popular “women shouldn’t lift weights” adage. In yoga, we often hear outdated ideas about not practicing certain poses while during our periods, despite the complete lack of scientific evidence as to why this might be necessary.

We could take this further to discuss (pseudo-)scientific racism, as well as popular ideas of size as a determinant of health that are similarly problematic and rooted in cultural and social myth rather than fact, but I think you get the idea. The point I’m trying to make here is that, especially in the Western world, we often like to think we understand what “health” means and how to practice it. But sociology teaches us that these ideas, like all knowledge, are socially constructed, historically situated, constantly changing, and can often lead to flawed understandings about the body, especially bodies of marginalized groups like women, people of color, larger bodies, queer bodies, and so on.

And if you are feeling reactive in light of this information, and want to proclaim, “Amara, how can you say that health is constructed? That PMS is a myth? WHAT?! *mind blown*,” know you are not alone. When I teach medicalization in my classes, my students often have similar reactions. This is because we are taught from infanthood to accept these ideas as absolute, indisputable “natural,” “truth.” It’s very uncomfortable to challenge something we have internalized and believed in for most of our lives. In fact, a great deal of social psychological research shows that people who are confronted with their own biases become defensive and reactive. But ultimately, confronting deeply ingrained misperceptions is the art and practice of yoga: to acknowledge the biases that we have internalized that drive our actions, and to overcome these illusions to get at a more accurate and pure understanding of our Selves and the world around us so that we can act from a place of knowledge and intention, with mindful awareness (which we can think of as a practice of vinyasa krama).

In yoga philosophy, we refer to the biases of the mind as maya, illusion, or avidya, incorrect comprehension or ignorance that clouds our perception, that is the “accumulated result of our many unconscious actions, the actions and ways of perceiving that we have been mechanically carrying out for years” (Desikachar’s Heart of Yoga). Such habitual bias colors the mind, obscuring our clarity of perception and preventing us from achieving true understanding of our Selves and world. The art of yoga is about overcoming this ignorance and illusion to foster a deeper understanding, so that we can avoid and alleviate suffering in our lives and others.

Healthism, Yoga, and the Body as Machine

During the past century our understandings and ideas about the body within yoga have been heavily influenced by Western medical practices and healthism. Historically, the incorporation of anatomy into yoga was driven by an interest in eugenics in the early 1900s (a topic thoroughly researched by Joseph Alter) and by the cross-cultural transmission by yoga gurus like B.K.S. Iyengar, who often utilized medical science to appeal to a Western audience and to legitimize yoga in the modern world. In this process of transformation yoga increasingly became defined as asana, which was more accessible and easier for Westerners to understand as it corresponded to already existing ideas of fitness practices and provided a tangible path of progress to follow. It was also easier to teach in group class settings than the more classical understanding of yoga as a philosophical practice.

What this meant is that yoga became synonymous with asana, disconnected from philosophical practices, and tied to medical science, particularly the use of anatomy, predicated on dividing the body into separate parts and systems rather than viewing the body as a holistic physical, emotive, and mental being. So we now take classes, solely teaching yoga as asana, that “focus” on specific parts of the body: a class to work your hamstrings, a class to open the hips, a class to work the core abdominal muscles, a class to work the butt muscles, and so on. We learn that this pose is good for this ailment, this muscle, this system. And in teacher training systems we teach the body as consisting of seemingly separate parts: poses that work the legs, poses that twist the spine, the separation of the muscular, skeletal, and nervous systems, a division between structural and functional movement patterns. We divide the body up into parts of a machine, that work together but are presented as separable. And “health” becomes constructed as purely physical and as something that we achieve by isolating and maximizing the utility of seemingly disparate parts of the physical body without a clear end point (something illustrated clearly by the creation of numerous sequences in the Ashtanga method beyond the primary series; there used to be just one until the practice was Westernized and the later series were added on to meet the demand and expectations of students).

This view of the body and of health in yoga is flawed; the body is not divisible, and all the parts of our body are interconnected. The organs are not separate from the muscular and skeletal systems, but are intimately tied together into a functioning whole. The muscular and skeletal systems are interconnected, and alive; habitual functional movement patterns can actually change our skeletal structures over time. We cannot isolate the core muscles from other parts of the body, or target particular body areas to work on in isolation and when we try to do so we disconnect from the sense of the body as whole, the body as holistic, the body as flesh and blood rather than the body as machine. We also potentially increase the risk of injury. Not to mention that the body is not simply physical but also a mental and emotive being. Emotional and mental states can change the physical body, which, for example, is at the heart of current research on the psychology of eating. In asana, ideally, every pose is a entire body practice, not just of the entire physical body, but also of the mental and emotive body.

And these aspects of the body are not separate from the world around us, either. We are not contained in an isolated bag of flesh; as Stacy Alaimo argues in Bodily Natures, the body is transcorporeal and interconnected to the world around us. What we put on the body, like body products, enters into us through the pores of our skin. The toxins we are exposed to become a part of us as we breathe, and the social, cultural, and institutional influences on our lives have a profound effect on the physical, emotive, and mental practices of the flesh. For example, research has shown that poverty affects our mental behaviors and attitudes, as well as the physical being as those who are poor are more likely to suffer from a variety of health concerns like obesity, mental illness, or toxic exposure. Gendered socialization can actually change the way the brain works. The body is ultimately permeable and porous, and as yoga philosophy teaches us all of these things are constantly in change, constantly in flux (even our bones).

This holistic, transcorporeal approach to health is gaining ground in Western science, and is being corroborated with recent biomechanical research on movement and stretching, on the new science of pain, on the psychology of eating and weight loss, on the existence of the microbiome, and in bodywork circles on the way emotional and physical trauma is held in the body across time. But most of the Western yoga world is woefully behind the times, as the regulations for teacher training systems have not been updated in decades and most certification programs primarily teach yoga as asana according to the body as machine approach to “health.”

In this “yoga as asana” approach, yoga becomes constructed as the achievement of various positions of the body, rather than a way or method of moving the body to prepare for the deeper, more meditative practice. Rather than think about how we practice asana, as a methodology of moving meditation and philosophical application practiced through the physical body, where the physical is joined with the emotive and mental and whose movement takes place in the world, we focus on disjointed poses or positions of the body and rarely pay attention to the transitions between postures. We focus on staying bounded on a mat, restricted in space, stuck in a box, rather than recognizing the movement in every moment, in every transition and position, as an extension and engagement with the world around us, wherever we are.

I like the term “chasing asana” to describe how we have become focused on chasing the sensation or achievement of individual postures, without a clear reflection or understanding (self-study, anyone?) of why and how we seek to attain these positions. What is the purpose of posture? In the Western yoga world, we teach students, and train teachers to teach, that the focus is on achieving the 2-d pose we see rather than feel, typically on social media and through popular culture (produced by the yoga industrial complex that profits often of this consumption-focus). And don’t be fooled! We are taught yoga is something to consume. To buy. To sell. To practice in small quantities in ritualistic and disparate spaces (studios), to keep on the mat, or to take asana off the mat, rather than as a way of living life throughout every moment, for a lifetime. And as a form of consumption, we can also think of this interpretation of yoga practice as a type of indulgence, because chasing asana is ultimately a practice of stroking the ego rather than non-attachment. Frustration that may come through injury demonstrates this, as we are attached to chasing asana, to yoga as asana, so that when we are unable to practice this interpretation of yoga we lose sight of the path, we lose sight of the practice entirely (although personally I haven’t been frustrated with my injury, I know many many yogis who have been with their own, and I have experienced this myself in the past when I was younger and did not understand yoga as deeply.)

We chase a construction of asana as individual positions, regardless of whether we have to force the body beyond its ability to get there, regardless of whether we are capable of muscular stability to prevent injury and ensure proper alignment. We don’t develop proprioception through deep self-reflection, mindfulness, and meditation on what we are doing, in every second, in every transition, as well as in every “end-point.” We are told to “listen to the body,” but never how to do so, or why. We are encouraged to “feel” but never taught how to interpret what we sense within the context of the lifetime, in the context of sustainability in our practice across time. We are encouraged to chase poses that biomechanically speaking often require us to go beyond a safe range of movement in the joints. We are encouraged to seek ego and pleasure through asana instead of practicing vairagya, non-attachment, in order to understand what is best for us and avoid being clouded by bias, illusion, avidya. We are encouraged to want to practice, rather than utilize practice to achieve what we need and encourage functionality.

We don’t teach asana within the context of yama and niyama, within the context of yoga philosophy. We don’t learn the classical purpose of asana as a means of learning to sense, understand, and master the body in conjunction with pranayama for the purpose of self-realization and elimination of suffering. Traditionally speaking, asana was one part of a larger practice of yama, niyama, pranayama and meditation, all of which allowed the yogi to, in a simplified sense, control the instinctual flight or fight response that leads to reactivity, instead developing a constant practice of acting with intentionality, knowledge, and purpose. The path of yoga is the path of learning how to act with intention through the development of self-realization, so that we may be a stable balance point in the sea of constant change, enabling us act from this anchor.

The construction of yoga as asana is exacerbated by the Westernized, militarized format of classes, which have changed from the individualized, one-on-one instruction between a student and teacher to drill-style group classes geared towards the average individual. This is based on the factory-style educational program that began after industrialization in the West which was also incorporated into the military, and subsequently spread to the rest of the world, including India.

In one-on-one instruction the teacher would create and gear lessons to the students’ individual needs and level of understanding. Lecture and discussion of philosophy and readings were common, and asana was taught according the individual student’s ability in conjunction with other yogic practices. But in the drill-style, group class setting there are time restrictions, we can’t assign homework or reading, there isn’t the degree of student-teacher contact, discussion of philosophy is limited to the brief moments of stillness in the midst of chasing asana. And even if teachers want to break free from this mold it can be extremely difficult, as many make a living teaching and in order to earn their income must meet the expectations of paying, student consumers who learn about yoga through popular culture and come to class with prior expectations of what they are paying for that put pressure on teachers to present yoga as only asana. While there are some ways around this, such as offering teacher trainings where trainers can teach yoga as more than asana (to a very limited degree), private classes, reading groups, and the like, these are more difficult to achieve and to find strong student support for.

So I’d like to leave this post with a few questions for myself and everyone out there to think deeply on. What is the purpose of asana, and why do we chase it? What are we really gaining by achieving more complex postures, or practicing 108 sun salutations (which, really, no one should do if they want to avoid repetitive stress injuries)? At what point do these practices become a practice of ego, and devoid of the deeper aspects of yoga? To what extent do we consume yoga, rather than practice or study it, because of industry expectations and encouragement? If the body is transcorporeal and holistic, rather than a machine, then how can we transform our asana practices to reflect this? How can we utilize asana as a tool to gain self-knowledge and self-realization, a tool to practice the deeper philosophy of yoga? (Because a tool is only as useful as how it is wielded; a hammer can just as easily injury you as build a roof to sleep under.) What are we teaching about the body and self if we are not reflecting on the bodily habits (physical, emotional, and mental) in our everyday lives, both on and off the mat? In what ways do we compensate physically, emotionally, and mentally in our practice, why do we do so, and how is this written in flesh?

Love, light, and… yoga ❤