Searching for a brown yoga teacher

Yogic Thot
Sep 7, 2018 · 4 min read

This is Yogic Thot — a blog about searching for a brown yoga teacher across the many yoga classes of London. The concept is simple: I’ll go to a bunch of yoga studios and write about them, chronicling my experience and tallying how many, if any, brown yoga instructors and other teachers of colour I find along the way.

First, some context. I am by no means an accomplished yogi. I’m decent at pranayama, can hold a relatively strong warrior (one and two… never three) and just about manage a few binds. But my legs are nowhere near straight and heels are nowhere near the floor in downward dog and inversions are a complete no-go. After a youth spent being truly awful at all sorts of physical activity, I started yoga on a getting-in-touch-with-my-roots trip to India when I was 17, and since it has been the only form of exercise that I’ve managed to stick at and genuinely enjoy. The reason I’m looking for a brown yoga teacher is, partly, because I want to learn more about the history and full philosophy of yoga, outside of asana practice, and imagine that a teacher of South Asian origin is my best bet of doing so in a way that won’t make my eyes roll/ blood boil. Equally, though, I’m just looking for a teacher that I really like, and having grown increasingly frustrated at the completely whitewashed London yoga scene, I want to find out what else is out there.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Now admittedly, are probably a lot easier and quicker ways to do this than taking lots of different yoga classes and writing blogs about them. I might try something wild like, I don’t know… the internet. But there’s a couple of reasons I’ve decided to do it this way. Firstly, summer is over, it’s getting cold and I really need some motivation to get out of bed and to class. Secondly, and more importantly, just as I would like to learn more about the historical, cultural and spiritual roots and significance of yoga, I am interested in exploring the colonisation and cultural appropriation of it too, how it got to this stage and what — if anything — we can do about it.

Whilst all cultural appropriation is complex (in terms of where the line between appreciation and appropriation is and what does and does not constitute cultural appropriation), the case of yoga is particularly so because unlike, say, basics wearing bindis and other forms of appropriation called out on the you are not a desi tumblr very few, if any, South Asians would argue white people shouldn’t practice or teach yoga. Most agree that yoga and its benefits should be available for everyone. Rather, it’s the way yoga has been commercialised, commodified and packaged into a £74 billion industry, with little reverence for the ancient tradition — and people — that it came from, which is the issue. I don’t have the stats (if you do please hmu in the comments), but I’ll bet that only a teeny-tiny proportion of those billions are ending up in brown hands. Moreover, it’s that the yoga scene is so incredibly elitist and non-inclusive that anyone who isn’t thin, white and dressed in expensive neon Lycra feels uncomfortable and even excluded in class. The situation is complicated further by the current repressive government in India, and their use and hijack of the tradition for their own Hindu nationalist agenda. This article on Everyday Feminism gives a powerful and thorough overview of the common appropriation pitfalls of Western yoga, and why it is an issue we should care about. But accepting, as we arguably must, that commercial-scale Western yoga is here to stay, the jury is still out on what a decolonised yoga industry could and should look like. Likewise, as far as I know, there hasn’t been much investigation into how whitewashed, exclusive and even offensive the London yoga scene actually is.

So, how bad is it? Are there any brown yoga teachers out there offering inclusive, authentic, culturally respectful classes? Are they any white yoga teachers out there offering inclusive, authentic, culturally respectful classes? What even is an inclusive, authentic, culturally respectful yoga class? Does it exist? Does it matter?

I am hoping that trying out yoga studios across London, with an eye out not only for a brown yoga teacher but also for how the different establishments handle (or don’t) issues of cultural appropriation, will generate some insights in this area, as well as giving a sense of what the current yoga offerings are in London to anyone who is interested. So, whilst this blog is predominantly aimed at brown girls and boys and other PoC who are looking for places to practice yoga where they don’t feel like an outsider, I hope it is equally useful and interesting for others, including white people, who are open to reflecting on and learning about doing yoga in a culturally sensitive way — or just want a laugh.

So until next time, Namas… (lol, no. I’m obviously joking)

Got suggestions of things I should read, points to consider, people to speak to or yoga classes I should try? Let me know in the comments.

Yogic Thot
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