Breathing, concentration and physical positions are all pieces of a yoga practice. But if you’re scrolling through Instagram or YouTube, it may seem like a cute outfit or being able to hold your feet behind your ears is paramount.
Yoga is a cultural and spiritual practice with roots in the Indian subcontinent that is thousands of years old. In the Western world, much of that history has been swallowed up by fitness trends and consumer culture.
Host Anita Rao talks with three people about how yoga came to be the way it is in the U.S. and solutions for putting culture and context back into yoga spaces. and are the co-hosts of the podcast , where they examine power, fair pay, harassment, race, cultural appropriation and capitalism in yoga spaces. And , assistant professor of law and civic engagement with a doctorate in justice studies, also joins the conversation. Singh is a licensed attorney and host of the podcast .
Interview Highlights
Jesal Parikh on how yoga is much more than a physical practice:
In the yoga philosophy, there's this idea that you can only control your own actions and your own reactions — you can't control anybody else or the world around you. So the whole practice is aimed at what can I do to make myself feel empowered, feel better, operate in a way that works for me? … And I think that gets lost when we focus just on the physical, and I think that there's so many great practices within yoga that help us to address parts of our body, parts of our soul, parts of our mind that other fitness exercises don't do. And not saying that those fitness exercises are any less important or great, but it's not a spiritual philosophy, right? There's a distinction. When you go to your kickboxing class, or your cardio boxing class, or the gym and you're on the treadmill, or you're doing spin, or whatever it is, there's not this idea that you're there to address your own behaviors and actions and the way that you operate in the world. With yoga there is.
Roopa Bala Singh on why divestment isn’t a solution to the cultural appropriation of yoga:
I want folks to understand that when you say that, well, then I'll just not do yoga — you're affirming a mistranslation, you're doubling down on a narrowing of yoga that serves a commodification purpose, like a displacement type of purpose. So I feel like, what can you do? … Continue to understand: it's your breath, it's your practice. It’s something that I say in yoga classes all the time. This is not about a synchronized or uniform experience. If I say inhale and exhale, just take it as a cue for wherever you're at with your breath. Your own commitment to liberation, essentially, and your breath is not affected by the commodity.
Tejal Patel on advice for people seeking yoga teacher training in the U.S.:
You don't always have to get certified, you don't always need to learn just to get a certificate. You can have continuing education because this is your jam, because being a student that's going deeper into yoga is really how you understand yoga and your positionality, your intersectionality in the world a lot better. And those are the ways that I want to see people really take up a yoga practice, one that fits their whole life and becomes part of their whole way of being, rather than a 60-minute class that they're turning on and turning off.
Music on this episode was featured from the playlist below, created by Jesal!
