Do’s & Don’ts of a Culturally Respectful Yoga Practice: Decolonize yoga

For the amount of content that’s out there, there is surprisingly little about the theory and history of yoga. This is the HUGE, glaringly obvious form of cultural appropriation that we see happening in yoga. When we say “decolonize yoga” what we are saying is- how do we HONOR yoga’s lineage, history, culture and the people who created it? How do we STOP just commercializing and selling yoga, without giving back to its roots? Decolonizing yoga is about acknowledging that yoga came from India, and that India was colonized for 89 years by the British.

1930, Mahatma Gandhi Salt March

This 24 day march was a non-violent protest against the British salt monopoly. It wasn’t until 1947 that India gained independence from British colonial rule.

The colonization of India was horrific. According to Al-Jazeera: “Between 1880 to 1920, British colonial policies in India claimed more lives than all famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China and North Korea combined.”

Beyond the estimated 40 million lives lost, the economic plunder was also devastating: “ According to the historian Madhusree Mukerjee, the colonial regime practically eliminated Indian tariffs, allowing British goods to flood the domestic market, but created a system of exorbitant taxes and internal duties that prevented Indians from selling cloth within their own country, let alone exporting it.

This unequal trade regime crushed Indian manufacturers and effectively de-industrialised the country. As the chairman of East India and China Association boasted to the English parliament in 1840: “This company has succeeded in converting India from a manufacturing country into a country exporting raw produce.” English manufacturers gained a tremendous advantage, while India was reduced to poverty and its people were made vulnerable to hunger and disease.

To make matters worse, British colonisers established a system of legal plunder, known to contemporaries as the “drain of wealth.” Britain taxed the Indian population and then used the revenues to buy Indian products – indigo, grain, cotton, and opium – thus obtaining these goods for free. These goods were then either consumed within Britain or re-exported abroad, with the revenues pocketed by the British state and used to finance the industrial development of Britain and its settler colonies – the United States, Canada and Australia.”

Read more from this article here. It is incredibly, sad, sobering, and something we need to acknowledge happened.

Ganhi organized Indian resistance to colonization and joined the independence movement in 1914 using the method of nonviolent protest known as satyagraha. He encouraged Indians to stop buying British goods, avoid paying taxes to the British government, and take part in peaceful protests and marches.

I don’t blame yoga practitioners for the dearth of information- a lot of the way we consume information is visual. And our culture particularly glorifies the body. It makes sense that the visual, body aspect of yoga is emphasized in Western culture.

However, we can all do better about acknowledging yoga’s roots. Anytime you see any kind of subtle violence towards Asian yogis or yoga teachers, please speak up and help support South Asian yogis and yoga teachers.

I worked for several years at a yoga studio called Y7 in NYC and they DEFINITELY could do better. There was not one nod, from a corporate level, that had any kind discussion on the roots of yoga. In fact, it felt like they tried hard to particularly wipe out ANY kind of ‘woo woo’ or traditional yoga symbols, to make yoga more consumable to New Yorkers.

To their credit, they had a hugely popular yoga studio, opening 12 locations in a matter of a few years, and paid their yoga instructors some of the best rates in the city. Most yoga teachers I knew there had real practices and taught yoga not to make money, but to share their love of the practice. We were all, from the teacher level, encouraged to share dharma in our classes.

From a corporate level however, studios like Y7 were making money off of yoga without acknowledging yoga’s roots. That is colonized yoga.

Y7 also received backlash for appropriating black culture.

This was part of their statement, and it still does not acknowledge yoga’s roots and instead, tries to distance itself from ‘traditional’ yoga.

This is the state of the world, yet THERE IS HOPE. The fact that this term: decolonized yoga exists is a testimony to all of us waking up. I find that many yoga students WANT to know the real yoga, not just yoga-stretching, yoga-workout, or yoga-for-weightloss.

So here’s what we do: show up as someone who understands the roots of yoga and speak up if you see any kind of South Asian discrimination.

Easy Do’s and Don’ts of a Decolonized Yoga Practice

DO ✅ Practice many forms of yoga, not just yoga asana postures.

DON’T ❌ Please do not only practice or teach yoga asana, and call it yoga. Instead consider yoga-asana classes “yoga inspired workouts”

DO ✅ Acknowledge the cultural context of yoga, that yoga comes from INDIA and that India was colonized for ~90 years. Read a biography on Gandhi, such as this one to help further this understanding.

DON’T ❌ Please do not try to completely erase yoga’s history or cultural context in your effort to further your business or branding.

DO ✅ Respect yoga’s tradition and iconography.

DON’T ❌ Please do not say Om, Namaste, or use statues of sacred symbols in a way that devalue their meaning. No more “namaslay” it is disrespectful. Do not say Om in a joke. Just like you would not use a statue of Jesus on the Cross to hang your keys, do not use statues of the Buddha unless you respect it.

DO ✅ Support South Asian yoga businesses, yoga teachers, and yoga books.

DON’T ❌ Please do not support, directly or indirectly, any kind of discrimination or racism towards South Asians.

DO ✅ Love, support, and practice yoga and it’s meaning beyond yoga asana

DO ✅ Foster a deep personal yoga practice and give thanks to its culture and lineage

DO ✅ Help others understand, in a compassionate way, that yoga is not just yoga poses, but part of a long lineage and couched within the cultural context of India

DO ✅ BE A YOGI. One of the best things you can do is keep the lineage alive by remembering it 🤍

READ NEXT: (Coming Soon) A Brief History of Yoga 🤍 Small excerpt below:

A Brief History of a 4000+ Year Old Lineage

Understanding the true aim of yoga fundamentally alters the physical practice from a workout to a work(in).

What is yoga?

I will compile a few definitions of yoga together so that you can get a sense of the broadness, and also the through line of yoga:

Yoga is the union of the individual self (jivatma) with the supreme self (Brahman).

- Yoga Yajnavalkya 1.43. 8th century BC

This definition emphasizes the union of the individual spirit of the self and the universal reality. Atman is the indwelling eternal spirit in each living being, the temple of ‘Brahman’ within your heart. Brahman is the cosmic, eternal, universal spirit, beyond and within the form of manifest reality, the divine ground of Being; impersonal, transcendent Reality. This is a philosophical stance on the meaning of yoga.

Read more: The Upanishads translation by Eknath Easwaran. This is a beautiful translation and was the one recommended by professors on yoga history.

Yoga is the cessation of thought modifications.

-Yoga Sutras of Patanjali 1.2, 4th century CE

Patanjali’s defiition emphasizes the practice, the active form of yoga. That is, the practice of controlling the mind and the sense to reduce and eventually stop ‘thought modifications’. Thought modifications are judgements, projections, false perception, likes and dislikes. These are thought patterns related to the “I'“ ego principle, asmita, which leads to seeing Maya, illusion; ignorance; the veil of the changing world, identification with the ever-changing body and mind.

Read more: The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali by Sri Swami Satchinanda is the most famous translation. Sage Patanjali codified the texts on yoga and his book is considered the ‘textbook’ on classical yoga.

The man who sees me in everything and everything with me will not be lost to me, nor will I be lost to him.

He who is rooted in oneness realizes that I am in every being; wherever he goes, he remains in me.

When he sees all being as equal in suffering or in joy because they are like himself, that man has grown perfect in yoga.

—

Steadfast in Yoga perform actions, abandoning attachment and remaining the same in success and failure. Yoga is called evenness.

--The Bhagavad Gita, 2nd century BC

The Bhagavad Gita is a more lyrical interpretation of yoga and Brahman. Those who see the equanimity and unity in the world see Brahman and those that perform action while seeing this underlying nature perform yoga.

Read more: The Bhagavad Gita translation by Eknath Easwaran (again.) Easwaran also has volumes about how to apply the teachings of the Gita to daily life. The Gita more broadly is the dramatization into epic form, the teachings of the Vedas and Upanishads.

All life is a secret Yoga, an obscure growth of Nature towards the discovery and fulfillment of the divine principle hidden in her which becomes progressively less obscure, more self-conscient and luminous, more self-possessed in the human being by the opening of all his instruments of knowledge, will, action, and life to the Spirit within him and in the world.

-Sri Aurobindo, (1872-1950)

Sri Aurobindo is a modern sage. He describes the yogi and the changes finding Brahman have upon him or her.

Read more: Sri Aurobindo authored several books such as “The Secrets of the Vedas”. You may also actually visit his utopian society called Auorville in Tamil Nadu, India.

Images from the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, 14th Century

For the vast majority of the yoga cannon, yoga was primarily meditation practice. It isn’t until this book that we see the first introduction to 15 physical postures, and that the body is a method of transformation of the self, not just a distraction to the practice.