Whose Yoga Is It Anyway?:
An Indian American’s
Adventures in YogaLand
Lakshmi Nair
Yoga was exploding in Denver in 2005. I had just returned to the United States from a three-year sojourn in India, where I studied yoga at Vivekananda Yoga Kendra and Kaivalyadhama Ashram. I thought those conditions seemed ripe for me to start teaching yoga. Yet, for some reason, it just wasn’t clicking for me. I wasn’t attracting a following and at a pay rate of $3/student, I wasn’t even making enough to cover gas. My mind slipped into a constant loop of negative self-talk.
“You are no good at this … People just don’t like you … You aren’t glamorous enough … You don’t have a yoga body … You can’t do advanced poses … Face it, you stink … Just give up and get a real job.”
Just as I was about to throw in the yoga towel, I was given an opportunity to teach a yoga class for women of color. Being in that room with them for the first time, I exhaled. A softness spread through my center and then this truth bubbled to the surface: Of course! How could I teach yoga when I couldn’t even breathe?
My “Yoga Story”
Often in American yoga settings, we are asked to tell our “yoga story” —how we came to yoga. Invariably most of the stories start with asana … perhaps a humorous anecdote about trying to get a leg behind the head followed by a sense that there’s “something deeper” which then ignites into a full-blown yoga passion. My yoga story doesn’t begin with asana. Asana came much later. Being from a fairly religious South Indian Hindu family growing up in suburban Colorado, my introduction to yoga was through cassette tapes and comic books. Devotional songs (and film songs) were the soundtrack of my childhood. My introduction to the wisdom and philosophy of yoga came through my treasured collection of Amar Chitra Katha comic books gifted to me by my grandfather. These comics are beautifully illustrated stories from the Puranas, the epics, the Upanishads, Indian history, and folklore. As my first taste of representation in reading material, I devoured them hungrily. Until then, I didn’t know how badly I was starving to see people who looked like me and reflected the culture of my family. I couldn’t get enough. I would read and re-read the ones I had until their pages grew tattered. Every time I went to India (to this day), I would betray my American privilege by buying a stack of thirty or forty at once.
What I absorbed and assimilated from these stories is that my culture (at least our pre-colonial culture) prized spirituality over materialism. They told tale after tale of people rejecting the material world to seek God, demonstrating compassion by seeing God in all beings, and devoting the simplest acts of everyday life to the Divine. There was a heck of a lot of yoga in those stories, including asana (which is why I really bristle when I hear people claim that asana is actually European in origin). These stories instilled in me a tremendous love and pride in my cultural heritage.
During my teenage years, my father exposed me to meditation and asana. He decided I needed to learn traditional discipline and he would wake me up at 4:30 a.m. (yes, 4:30 a.m.!!) to do one hour of asana and half an hour of meditation. My teenage meditations were half hour snoozes. Thus I looked forward to meditation and dreaded asana with every ounce of my being.
In college, believing I should be the “tolerant Hindu,” I gave up my practice for the comfort of my Born Again Christian roommate. I only rediscovered yoga again in my late twenties when my life was in total shambles. And that time, it began with an asana class at Integral Yoga Ashram in San Francisco. It reconnected me to my roots and to my body, with which I had completely lost touch. I grew to love asana and to respect its power. Being in the (pre-gentrified) Mission district, the class was very diverse, and though I was often confused and amused by the teacher’s pronunciation of Sanskrit names, I never felt awkward or out of place in the class. In fact, I felt really connected because this stuff was in my bones and my blood. Re-centered, I found the strength to leave the abusive marriage in which I found myself bound.
I decided to go to India to pursue formal study of yoga and to further connect to my roots and my spirituality. After three years, I came back to Colorado with a baby and an Indian husband in tow … my Eat, Pray, Love story before Eat, Pray, Love was a thing!
Upon my return from India, I tried to jump into American private yoga studio culture and I found myself constantly in a state of existential crisis. It was odd and depressing to try to fit myself into this hole that was shaped so very differently from everything I thought was yoga. Attempting to stuff myself into clinging synthetic spandex that would take me a year of teaching yoga to pay for with my top heavy, post-natal midsection suffocating my face in sarvangasana as all those smiling skinny white women on the covers of yoga magazines ocked me from the grocery store checkout stands was a little bit of a self-esteem killer. I thought the point of yoga was to be conscious of the Self, not self-conscious!
What did it mean that I was teaching classes that I couldn’t afford to take? The commercialism and high pricing, which in turn leads to an elitist and homogenous yoga culture disturbed me. In the precious stories of my childhood, yoga was a spiritual tradition and it wasn’t free, but it was based on respectful exchange and faith in the spiritual principle of karma. I thought of my paternal grandfather, who was an Ayurvedic physician. He would accept payment in fish from fisherman even though he and his entire family were strict vegetarians. And yet he was one of the first in the town of Trivandrum to own a car. He was well off because those who could paid him with respect according to their means. Yoga is oft touted as a 6 billion dollar business in the West. Meanwhile, some studios were paying me $3/student to teach. How is it yogic if all this money is being made from yoga but teachers are being exploited rather than respected and cared for and expected to compete in a popularity contest for students?
And there was the surreal stuff: like when my Indian body entered a yoga space, I was either greeted with googly eyes as if I were the Goddess Lakshmi Herself descended from the heavens and any words I uttered were instantly magical and profound OR I was greeted with defensiveness as if my presence made people feel they had to prove their knowledge of Sanskrit, yoga, and all things Indian. Both of these attitudes made it very hard for me to just show up as a person. I felt like I was expected to be an enlightened yogini just because I’m Indian. I’m not enlightened. I’m not a yogi. To me, the word “yogi” refers to people who renounce material life to live in an ashram or a cave and devote their entire lives to the practice of yoga. I live in the world. I like donuts and Netflix and I have student loans. (And somehow I suspect that even if I changed my name to Satyanandamayi Ma and moved to a Himalayan mountaintop, Sallie Mae would still find me). I, like most everyone else I know, am just a yogabhyasi, “one who practices yoga,” not a yogi, “one who has realized the state of yoga.”
Everywhere I looked, I was nowhere to be found. All the South Asian flavor in yoga had been reduced to bindis and henna and Ganesha on spandex (on skinny white ladies). I hear people of color say they don’t do yoga because yoga is a white lady thing. Heck, even I think it’s a white lady thing, and, as an Indian, that is a real downer! Yoga is one of the most beautiful aspects of my heritage, yet we have been thrust into yoga’s ancient past and totally left out of yoga’s present. Yoga philosophy itself states that yoga is a universal truth that belongs to none and is accessible to all AND cultural appropriation is a thing. It exists much the same way that Disney can make a movie about the Little Mermaid, and it can be really, really popular, but it’s still a bastardization of the beautiful, complex and deep Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of good folk out there who know and prefer the original. But that doesn’t change the fact that most people you meet only know the Disney YogaLand version.
The Last Straw: Yoga Racism
While romanticization of our culture might seem preferable to outright bigotry and ignorance, I feel a lump in my throat chakra when I hear white folks singing the praises of Rama, a Hindu God who is said to be an avatar of Vishnu, one of the trinity of Hindu patriarchal deities and is the hero of the epic Ramayana. Do I bring up that Desi (South Asian) feminists revile Rama for his treatment of his wife Sita (though She Herself is an avatar of the Goddess Lakshmi) and risk getting flooded with those pitying looks that I get when I wear a bindi (the mark worn traditionally by Hindu women on the third eye chakra point) … hip on white women, but a marker of patriarchal oppression on me? Do I bring up the Dravidian nationalist theory that the Ramayana is a narrative of Aryan colonization of the Dravidian South in which the Dravidians are rendered as monkeys and demons?
I can hear the whoosh of air going over people’s heads. Do I mention that of all the millions of Hindu gods, Rama is the most beloved icon of Hindu nationalists, who are a dangerously Islamophobic, patriarchal, fascist group who wield considerable political power in India today. Rama is to today’s India as Trump’s/Pence’s Jesus is to today’s America, an unforgiving icon of intolerance and misogyny. When in modern India, Hindu fundamentalists are actively appropriating yoga, yoking it to the most oppressive and intolerant aspects of Indian culture, it does South Asians no favors when Western yogis unwittingly glorify their narrative. Do I mention that Bhakti yoga was actually a medieval spiritual rebellion against the oppressive hierarchies of casteism and patriarchal power and not a rave party? For me, as a South Asian feminist yogabhyasi, to be able to come to a place of true authenticity in my relationship to yoga, it’s essential for me to examine all the historical complexities and to attempt to untangle the deeply interwoven threads of patriarchy and casteism. But when everything about yoga is mystified, potentially negative aspects are rendered invisible or, worse, made sacrosanct.
What finally made me want to give up on yoga teaching for good was when being the only person of color at a fund raiser ironically for yoga in “urban” schools, I became an “invisible” witness to culturally insensitive stereotyping of black people, couched in feel-good “yoga-speak.” That was the last straw. I decided I just couldn’t be a part of YogaLand anymore. I felt battered by this egoistic yoga that was like beauty standards … externally defined by a capitalist, patriarchal, racist framework that leaves everyone—even the skinny white women it puts up on a pedestal—out in the spiritual cold.
But as dharma would have it, that is when I was offered an opportunity to teach a yoga class for Women of Color.
We Need a Safe Space
The Center for Trauma and Resilience (formerly Denver Center for Crime Victims), founded by a woman of color, offers a trauma sensitive yoga program to various affinity groups, including Women of Color. Their program recognized that just being a person of color in American society is traumatic! Cue ray of light streaming through cloud break and chorus of angels! I was the teacher, but I needed that safe space just as much as the participants in that room did. No wonder I had failed so miserably at connecting with people! I had never allowed myself to drop into a true place of authenticity. I was always worried about how my brown body was being perceived … as too unfit, too basic, too Indian, not Indian enough, etc. I could relate to the discomfiting space my students land in when they attempt to connect with their bodies in a homogenous yoga culture that renders their bodies invisible and yet hyper visible at the same time. I understood the futility of trying to unravel chronic embedded trauma in a space that is triggering. But here in this safe space, we could reclaim our bodies. We could let down our defenses and give the parasympathetic nervous system its turn to do the restorative and healing work that is so needed and too often eclipsed in a society in which our bodies and being aren’t valued.
Isn’t Yoga for People of Color segregation? Isn’t it unyogic if we are supposed to be “all one” and beyond race and gender? Inclusivity and safe space are not at odds with each other. They are just two different fronts of the same struggle to make the world a better place. Alice Walker describes this concept best when she defines the term Womanist as one who is “committed to the survival and wholeness of the entire people, male and female. Not a separatist, except periodically, for health.” Safe space allows us to acknowledge and heal the trauma of living in a racist society by arming us with effective, health-promoting tools to maneuver through a world that is stacked against us. But it doesn’t mean we are any less committed to the wholeness and healing of the entire world. In fact, our lives, more than those with privilege, depend on it.
Yoga Teacher Training for People of Color
I watched these women in my Women of Color class sink into deep savasana and I wanted to cry. The participants were so warm and appreciative and they restored my faith in yoga and in myself. I realized that the demand for POC yoga was so much greater than the supply of teachers. I took a leap and decided to start my own yoga immersion/teacher training for people of color, with the intention of increasing the diversity of the yoga teacher pool in Denver, but equally importantly to give people of color a safe space to really dive in deep … to explore and heal the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wounds of oppression using the powerful tools of yoga. It also allows me to reclaim yoga as an indigenous healing wisdom tradition with authenticity, where I can feel free to be real about the good, the bad, and the ugly of yoga … where I can bring my whole self and my students can bring their whole selves too.
“Talking About the Negative
Is What Has Been Positive”
In my teacher training, when we talk about the root chakra, we dig deep into the historical traumas of slavery, genocide, colonization, war, and the impacts those things have on our bodies and our being. We talk about daily assaults and threats to our physical safety and security due to police brutality, economic structural racism, hate crimes, and war. When we speak about the solar plexus chakra and body issues and self-esteem, we speak about the lack of representation of our bodies in the media and all the macro- and microaggressions that assault every aspect of our bodies and self-esteem—our skin, our hair, our noses. How even our names and the markers of our identities (clothing, hair, language, etc.) are often violently or subtly stripped from us. When we talk about the heart chakra, we are allowed to express our profound grief for Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, the children of Flint, the thousands of unaccompanied minors crossing the border, Syrian refugees, and the ever increasing tally of lives that don’t matter in our current system. We explore what forgiveness looks like when it isn’t thrust upon us or expected from us.
In homogenous yoga settings, these kind of conversations are often seen as political (hence, not spiritual) or negative. But people of color simply don’t have the luxury of viewing the world through rose-colored YogaLand glasses. For us, enlightenment means seeing what is, even if it isn’t pretty. As one of my students said, “The discussion on darkness as a place of beauty and healing, I think, is core to why our group works. Talking about the negative is what has been positive.”
Backlash
This movement to create safe, healing space comes at a perfect time too, given our current political climate. The tide of the Civil Rights movement is again rising with #BlackLivesMatter. And along with that, the backlash against all people of color is growing stronger too, sadly even in spaces where we naively presumed we would be met with compassion, as we saw this year with people of color yoga in Seattle and elsewhere. Hate and yoga should be like oil and water, but somewhere, to make it more marketable, we have thrown in an emulsifier. It is curious to me that no other affinity group raises as much ire and violent opposition as people of color. Instead of asking us why we need separate space, perhaps the questions should be more introspective. Svadhyaya (self-study) is, after all, one of the essential eight limbs of yoga. Like the parable of the blind friends and the elephant, how much depth and richness of understanding is an insular and homogenous yoga community missing out on? How can this be shifted toward genuine inclusivity that feels safe for all? How can the larger yoga community extend its tremendous resources to support and protect yoga for people of color in this heated climate?
Human Beings Must Create Peace
As the Dalai Lama famously said,11 “Peace does not come through prayer, we human beings must create peace.” When people of color take the lead in our own healing, we dig deep into the heart of the problems of our world. The Ego’s separation from Self, which causes all of our individual suffering, is the very same separation mentality that creates all the suffering in the world and POC bodies are a kshetra (field) upon which this mentality is enacted. This is why the first Indian gurus to come West like Swami Vivekananda and Paramahamsa Yogananda were spiritually called here to share yoga. By no coincidence, they came at the height of the Indian anti-colonial movement. Yoga was meant to be an antidote to the mentality that created colonialism. POC, or any other kinds of affinity group yoga, should not be seen as an affront to yogic values. We cannot strive to liberate ourselves alone. To truly free ourselves from suffering, we must work tirelessly to end the suffering of every being on the planet, because we are all One. That is our dharma. Yoga IS social justice.
Lakshmi Nair is a yoga teacher based in Denver, Colorado. She teaches trauma sensitive yoga for the Center for Trauma and Resilience and is the founder of Satya Yoga Immersion and Yoga Teacher Training for People of Color. The three sacred intentions of her work are to make the teachings of yoga truly universal and accessible to all peoples, to offer a safe space for people of color to address the effects of racism and oppression on our bodies, minds, and spirits using the healing tools provided by yoga, and to put a little bit of India back into yoga. Author photo by Arun Lakshman.
11. “Quotes from HH The Dalai Lama,” Zen Moments. February 20, 2017. Accessed June 11, 2017. https://zenmoments.org/dalai-lama-quotes/.