Demystifying Yoga for the Western Seeker
One of the great virtues of Harpinder Kaur Mann’s new book Liberating Yoga: From Appropriation to Healing (Broadleaf Books) is that it is intelligible to readers such as me who do not know much about yoga. Harpinder does not assume her audience is familiar with various yoga traditions and the cultures of South Asia that gave birth to them, even if they have practiced yoga poses for years. She makes clear that many who teach yoga in the West know little about its roots and heritage—something that others have reported to me.
Even those who are well-versed in the philosophy and spirituality of yoga may find in this book some fine examples of how to convey their experience to people of other faiths and cultures. One way she does this is with autobiographical tales that help WASPs put themselves in someone else’s shoes, stories that pack an emotional punch. Not until she reached the fifth grade, for example, Harpinder notes, did any teacher bother to ask how to say her name, gently leading us to imagine sitting through morning attendance for four or five years, hearing your name mangled every day.
A Personal Journey to Spiritual Reclamation
She recounts how yoga has nurtured her spiritual renewal and how she became a yoga teacher herself, now teaching in Los Angeles. Along the way, she reminds us that people often do not fit in neat religious categories. She was raised in “a traditional Punjabi Sikhi household that also believed in Hinduism.” Her family was particularly devoted to Goddess Durga. In her youth, she drifted away from all this, but yoga helped her to reexamine her faith as an adult.
Challenging Commercial Yoga: Beyond “No Omming Here!”
Harpinder also shines a light on how far removed commercial studios can be from yoga’s roots—or even hostile to them. She shows us how little those who teach in American studios often know — or care — about yoga spirituality, its history, and India in general. “No Omming here!” some of them insist.
Colonialism, Caste, and the Whitewashing of Yoga
Harpinder succinctly covers some things that are important for readers to understand but are unfamiliar to most Americans, such as the trauma inflicted by British colonialism, British suppression of hatha yoga, and the chaos of Partition. Non-indigenous residents of ‘Turtle Island’ (name used by some Indigenous peoples, primarily in North America, to refer to the continent) are heirs to similar colonialism, she notes. Nor was India free from its own home-grown caste injustice, including the appropriation of yoga by the Brahmin caste. America’s racial categories, of course, are also a caste system.
Harpinder Kaur Mann recounts how yoga has nurtured her spiritual renewal and led her to become a yoga teacher. She shines a light on how far removed commercial studios can be from yoga’s roots—or even hostile to them.
Asana: More Than Just a Pose – A Path to the Divine
Some Americans believe asanas should be taught in public schools as a form of exercise. Harpinder can help them understand why they often meet opposition from both those suspicious of religious instruction and others who do not want their treasured spiritual practice reduced to stretches and poses. Asana, after all, originally meant a meditation posture. The goal of yoga, Mann insists, is more than physical fitness: it is union with the divine.
The Commodification of a Sacred Tradition
Harpinder is offended when yoga is reduced to a form of exercise—and a commodity—without acknowledging its Indian spiritual roots. Commercial studios and marketers peddle an image of the ideal practitioner: a thin, young white woman. She is dismayed when her tradition is reduced to a form of entertainment, such as “beer yoga” in bars and breweries. And she is appalled to see “yoga for weight loss” offered in studios by thin, fat-shaming WASPs in Lululemon:
“How is it that yoga, a practice meant to create freedom and liberation, ends up being co-opted by the dominant culture to ostracize people who are seeking that very same freedom and liberation?”
Harpinder demonstrates pretty convincingly how those who practice—or profit from—a commercialized, secularized, whitewashed sort of yoga often prevent teachers from conveying anything else. One program director, for example, demanded that she provide something “more fitness-y.” She probes how this is based on assumptions about what sort of education appeals to potential customers, the self-censorship the writer Ursula K. Le Guin called “the Stalin of the Soul.”
Reclaiming Authenticity: The Market for Deeper Practice
But are these assumptions about the market correct? In working with teens, for example, she discovers that some students who are uninterested in doing asanas for an hour are engaged by deeper, more authentic yoga—much as I have found church youth groups to often be interested in a retreat that includes silence, journaling, and learning contemplative prayer far more than they are in an all-entertainment weekend.
This book offers challenges and lessons for everyone, whether you are a devoted yoga student or not. It can help us look upon each other with compassion rather than judgment, creating a more soulful and kind society.
‘ Liberating Yoga: From Appropriation to Healing’ by Harpinder Kaur Mann is published by Broadleaf Books, 232 pages; $25.99 (hardcover).
To read an excerpt from the book, go to
