Misappropriating Yoga

I guess I was a couple of years shy of 50 when I had a chance to take a yoga class at church.  I had a vague thought that yoga would be the kind of exercise that could help me into older age without hurting me, and indeed that has turned out to be the case.  I lived in the Northeast at the time, so the Mother Ship of yoga for me was the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health.  I attended a number of workshops there and went faithfully to local classes, gradually settling in to a daily practice that has been a key part of my physical health and spiritual grounding for longer than I care to admit  (Oh, all right, it really has been over 20 years). I have a subscription to the Yoga Journal, which goes through seasons of alternately being helpful and being a vapid women's magazine.  I read books about yoga.  At this point I have that early background in Kirpalu style yoga plus several years of practice guided by teachers in the Iyengar tradition.

None of this has made me svelte as the woman whose photo I grabbed off the web,

but it has made me comfortable in my own body; more aware of the connection of body, mind, and spirit; and happier.

By some lights, I have been misappropriating this tradition. My practice is based on the very Americanized yoga that begins with asanas -- postures -- including meditation and breath control as "extras."  This is backwards from the way Patanjali would have practiced, using asanas as a warmup for pranayama -- breath work -- and meditation.   Never mind that I have learned the Sanskrit names for some postures, have come to love Kirtan chanting, actually do meditate (though I learned it in a different tradition), and have benefited from breathing practices.  It is not the Real Yoga of India.

There are people who do things they call yoga that are even less like the Real Yoga of India than mine.  In Christian church basements, they have to pretend it has nothing to do with some other religion.  In Public schools, they have to pretend that it has nothing to do with spirituality at all.  To me, that's okay.  The vocabulary of the asanas is a spiritual language that uses the body to shape the energies, the mind, and the spirit without words.  It has power that transcends culture, in my opinion.

Furthermore, today's yoga of asanas is an intercultural tradition.  It can be traced to the nineteenth century, as Mark Singleton has shown in his exploration of the origin of postures, Yoga Body, Oxford, 2010. Singleton found that the revival of asana practice was intimately connected with the international physical culture movement of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.  The YMCA, with its emphasis on "muscular Christianity," was a key agent in promoting a Scandinavian system of gymnastics throughout the British Empire, including India.  When the YMCA physical culture men met the indigenous system of asana practice in the Indian subcontinent, they melded the two so as to make their program more attractive to the locals. It worked beyond their wildest expectations.  Body builders and freedom fighters adopted the new asana regimes --including some clearly Scandinavian postures-- as their own.

In the 1930's, European and United States women began to take an interest in yoga for grace, suppleness,and poise.  It was only later that Indian women began to take advantage of their indigenous exercise tradition for the same goals. The traditions of yoga asanas have remained somewhat gendered, with emphasis on strength for men and poise for women, "muscular" Christianity for men and pseudo-Christian mysticism for women.  Gradually, the Hindu roots of the spirituality associated with yoga asana practice have been reasserted.  In U.S. yoga classes, teachers feel called on to begin and end class with Sanskrit chants, if not uniformly to guide the practitioner toward Hindu sources for more learning. Some "real" yogis, both from India and indigenously grown, are even now deepening the spirituality of yoga practice on our continent.

Misappropriation?  I'm thinking it's a little more complicated than that.