and how we can do better as well-meaning white folks.
Staff Class – recorded September 24, 2024 – Mulberry, Omega Institute, Rhinebeck, New York, USA
While my yoga journey has been decades, in 2018 I began witnessing on social media what I called “The Desi Diaspora Angry Yoga Teacher Uprising”. South Asian yoga teachers throughout North America, Europe, etc. were organizing and sharing all the cringy moments they had experienced in white bodied led and filled commercial yoga spaces.
Allow me to explain… and get ready to get uncomfortable…
We explore:
Positionality, Intersectionality, White Fragility, Colonialism, Extraction, Capitalism; the cultural feedback loop between East and West; Yoga’s journey from 12 years of seva cycles >> Academia >> Yoga Alliance scam; Brahmin Supremacy / White Supremacy and Caste / Class Gate-keeping; most importantly: how to navigate the complicated line between Cultural Appreciation while traveling vs. Cultural Appropriation upon returning home from your yoga training.
As a white bodied person, who tf am I to teach this?
With 1000+ certificate training hours, 95% of which I gained in India, I still refuse to register for myself Yoga Alliance. Yet I have worked over a decade behind the scenes within a commercial ashram (yoga and ayurveda retreat center), yoga teacher trainings and spiritual tourism, catering to foreign tourists in India. Meanwhile, I have also lent my ear and shoulder to many friends among the South Asian Diaspora, venting about their very white yoga communities in the West. Before which I spent 12 years documenting women’s initiation rites into the largest and oldest order of sanyasis (renunciate ascetics) and over two decades living and learning from traditional yogis, where teacher-student dynamics have nothing to do with earning certificates. Then often living just 40 minutes downstream from gentrified Rishikesh (what the Spiritual Industrial Complex has named “The Yoga Capital of the World”), I have been observing the East-West feedback loop in action.
I have gained some unique insights into the predicament of Cultural Appropriation, I’d like to share with you.
I may also share books, podcasts, South Asian yoga teachers and social media accounts worth keeping on your radar.
CLASS RECORDING AND RESOURCES COMING SOON
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