Miscellaneous
In today's podcast, we talk to Yoga Expert Lakshmi Nair about Yoga, People of Colour and Cultural Appropriation. In celebration of Black History Month, we talk about how yoga impacts our current culture. How we share yoga responsibility, and it is necessary to have brave spaces for POC to practice. Lakshmi Nair lived in the stories and philosophy of yoga and Ayurveda from a young age, Lakshmi formally studied yoga at Vivekananda Yoga Kendra and Kaivalyadhama Ashram in India in 2002. She also attended 4 years of graduate study in South Asian Studies at UC Berkeley, where she studied Sanskrit, Tamil, and contemporary South Asian literature. In 2014, Lakshmi started Satya Yoga Immersion for People of Color, one of the country’s first and perhaps only yoga immersion and teacher training programs exclusively for people of colour. Since 2014, Satya Yoga Immersion has grown into Satya Yoga Collective (www.satyayogacollective.com), a yoga collective offering yoga for people of colour by people of colour. In 2016, Lakshmi was a panellist at the 3rd annual Race and Yoga Conference at Mills College in Oakland, California and also at the Center for Trauma and Resilience's Diversifying Your Practice Symposium in Denver. She writes about her experiences as a South Asian American yoga teacher and about her journey to POC yoga in the Yoga and Body Image Coalition’s new book Yoga Rising: 30 Empowering Stories from Yoga Renegades for Every Body, edited by Melanie Klein, available via Llewelyn Worldwide. Lakshmi Nair's Additional reflections on Cultural Appropriation "I appreciate when people are serious about their study of yoga, and they go to Indian sources...especially for things like Sanskrit pronunciation, etc. You know? Treat it like a language. You wouldn't try to learn French from exclusively Chinese sources, right? Also, I appreciate when people approach yoga as a spiritual tradition first and not as a business or as just a fitness modality or as a hot trend. It's hard to say how, but you can only tell when someone approaches it with the humility and respect that we humans naturally feel for the sacred. And finally, the one thing I see zero of is actual care and concern about South Asian people. If you are so into a spiritual tradition of a people, you should give a damn about the people, right? A powerful example of this is when that mass shooting happened at a gurudwara in Oak Creek, WI several years ago. I see all these white kundalini practitioners in their turbans, some of whom are making lots of money from it, and identifying with the Sikh spiritual tradition, but not identifying with the people enough to even feel anything when such a thing happens in a gurudwara, let alone show support. When you only care about the things you can consume, our food, our clothes, our cool spirituality. It just feels a lot like taking. And that is just reminiscent of colonialism. What makes something appropriation is when it mimics the colonial relationship to race and culture. Cultural appropriation is when there is just a one way to the flow of resources. Who is benefitting from the relationship? When yoga classes are all or mostly white, we can see clearly who is profiting from yoga and who is not. If we truly believed that we are all one, that would be reflected in our yoga temples, but what is indicated is that we care more about the money to be made that we do about the essence of yoga. And the people who are the haves in this society are primarily the people who historically (and currently) benefitted from colonialism. " Find Lakshmi Here https://www.satyayogacollective.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en3JXyOf4x8&app=desktop Show Notes: https://yogainternational.com/article/view/yoga-race-and-culture https://yogainternational.com/article/view/yoga-equity-and-social-justice