8 Signs Your Yoga Practice Is Culturally Appropriated – And Why It Matters

Originally published on Everyday Feminism

Author’s Note: While this article emphasizes the South Asian roots of yoga, nisha celebrates and acknowledges the deep roots in Kemetic yoga from East Africa.

What draws you to yoga?

If you’re reading this article, I’m guessing there’s something about it that appeals to you. Is it how it makes your body feel? The chance to do something good for yourself? The way it helps you get centered?

Every year, more and more people are learning about the benefits of a yoga practice, and that can be wonderful.

And, as yoga gets more popular in mainstream culture, more and more people who aren’t connected to the practice’s roots are picking it up.

In the US, for example, the image of yoga is often associated with white, thin, able-bodied, middle class women. If you’re one of these women, yoga is being marketed to you all over the place, and might not have noticed anything wrong with the way it’s being advertised.

There’s not necessarily anything wrong with you doing yoga as a white person. You’re probably just doing it for your own wellness, so it might be strange to think you could be hurting anyone else.

The problem lies not with you doing the practice, but with how yoga is commonly practiced and commercialized in Western contexts like the US.

Cultural appropriation is a process that takes a traditional practice from a marginalized group and turns it into something that benefits the dominant group – ultimately erasing its origins and meaning.

And that’s exactly what’s happening with yoga in Western spaces. Though the practices are based primarily on traditions that go back thousands of years in South Asia and other places around the world, including East Africa’s Kemetic Yoga. But this context and much of the essence of yoga’s meaning has been stripped away.

This has a damaging impact – though I know you don’t mean to cause any harm. So let’s unpack the impact of culturally appropriative yoga, so that you can figure out how to make sure you’re not contributing to harm.

I’ve spoken with nisha ahuja, an accomplished justice educator and facilitator who is known for her work addressing cultural appropriation of traditional healing practices.

This information offers nisha’s wisdom and the knowledge of those who have informed her work, and it’s an invitation for you to deepen your understanding of yoga practices and how they relate to building a more equitable world.

nisha speaks from a South Asian context, with yoga practiced as medicine and a spiritual path in places like India for thousands of years. All over the world, similar healing practices have existed in places that were colonized.

You can find more acknowledgments at the end of the piece, but nisha would particularly like to give thanks to collaborator and contributor Melissa Moore, a Black and Cherokee justice, healing, and Dharma practitioner; friends, community, and colleagues who are Black, Indigenous, Non-Caste Privileged South Asians, cash-poor, disabled, and abundant bodied; and members of Bending Towards Justice and Brown Girls Yoga.

nisha wants to be clear that this isn’t about reclaiming yoga for Hindus as some right wing extremism calls for – that’s counteractive to the work. It’s about understanding the complexities of oppression within the Western context of your yoga practice.

Even within a South Asian context, yoga was used in harmful acts of exclusion through the caste system – so yoga that’s exclusionary has always had a negative impact on the oppressed.

And this is only the beginning of how cultural appropriation can cause harm. If you’re able to notice when this is happening, then you can continue to build your yoga practice in a way that benefits you and helps you avoiding harming other people.

Here are some signs of cultural appropriation to watch out for – and some ideas for how to build a more healing practice.

1. You’re Treating Yoga Like a Solely Physical Activity

Many people think of yoga as a type of exercise, and nothing more.

If physical health is all you get out of your yoga practice, that’s perfectly fine – you deserve to be able to take care of your body. But it is important to know that the physical aspect of yoga isn’t all there is to it.

Yoga is also a spiritual path – and the story of how it got turned into the form of exercise you know today isn’t a pretty one.

With some schools of yoga, the deeper aspects of yoga were removed to be sold to white Westerners as an athletic activity. Throughout the history of colonization, demonizing the spiritual practices of indigenous people and people of color is part of how colonizers justified violence against them.

Those practices have played an essential role in many people’s healing, health, and survival. So it’s important that we don’t redefine yoga as a solely physical practice.

Doing so relies on racist thinking – legitimatizing what white and Western people like about yoga, and invalidating its original meaning.