While cultural appropriation was a term originally used in response to the cultural theft of Native traditions that was happening in the (land called) US as part of settler colonialism, the term is increasingly being applied to any instance of a dominant group (usually white, western) practicing, wearing or profiting off of the traditions of a more marginalized or exploited cultural group. We’d like to ask ourselves: How is the practice of yoga and Buddhism by members of dominant white/western culture a form of cultural appropriation? What are the impacts of practicing these traditions? In what ways might the practice of these traditions by people from outside of the cultures in which the traditions originate obscure or decontextualize them? How have imperialism, capitalism, racism and sexism shaped these practices and our decisions to engage with them?

Please take a look at one or all of these readings (or choose another one from our resource section) to start circulating our minds around some of the possible things to discuss:

• Consuming Commodified Blackness by bell hooks (just page 21 – though this piece is not about yoga or Buddhism directly, it does a wonderful job of framing why members of white culture seek out “other” traditions)
• The Difference Between Cultural Exchange and Cultural Appropriation
• Whiteness, Buddhism and Safe Spaces: Hands off our sitio y lengua!
• Are White People Ruining Yoga?
• Ghosts of Yogas Past and Present (references some lesser known historical and political context of yoga)

Dialogue Notes:

These are rough, uncut, unfiltered, and anonymous notes taken at the dialogue. We get that these may not be very readable to those who were not in attendance at the dialogue, and, honestly, sometimes even to those of us who were. We still feel it is important to keep them available as part of our accountability process and for archiving and reference purposes.  Some of these notes have been digested/transformed into blogs.

• Yoga block, stopped going because it was bothering her that its mostly skinny, white, women.
• Every studio had Buddhas and paraphernalia, just too much.
• This issue hasn’t been super present, which probably speaks to the privilege I have to not think about those things.
• yoga is an important part of her life and healing, works at a studio for bodies and people that are marginalized.
• Studying Buddhism.  The dharma is an important part of their life, mindfulness based stressed reduction. Core source of healing, and teaching that has brought them back into radical spaces. Rage and frustration about how its being used. how to offer it with the total depth and respect that they can.
• Questions from past workshop on this issue, people from different communities and practice have asked white folks to look at these issues. Is the point to be more aware and then to keep doing these practices. Or what?
• Working as a teacher at schools that market spiritual practices, and the commodification of these practices to the tech world. “We have the spiritual wholeness that you need”
• Practing Buddhism in the Tich Nat Hahn tradition, really wrestled with the way the community looks racially. The interactions between the Vietnamese and White community. The way that relationship can be really beautiful and also really appropriative. As Buddhism becomes more marketable, need to reflect more
• Practice yoga and didn’t know about yoga until coming to an urban area, helpful for physical pain. IN a practicing space where there were diverse bodies and ethnicities. Did a teacher training at a social justice center led by POC. And since been teaching a
• Don’t want to be contributing to a yoga industrial complex for skinny white women. Continue to breath as that is not appropriation. Continue to do work on finding my own history. Want to know what is going on in India politically and historically about this type f thing.
• The narrative– people from the generating parts of the world of yoga and Buddhist practices wanted us to have it.
• Feeling more sense of calm lately around issues, have had periods of life that were more explicitly appropriative, what is like now to have simple private relationship with more respect.
• Commodification, where the money is, gaining cultural or economic capital
• Got politicized through meditation, then stopped doing it
• Feels more complicated due to health benefits and less relationship to indigenaity
• No Namaste
• Otherness feeling from not having the right body type or clothes.
• Who is more authentic than others
• Culture appropriation in general, appropriation of black culture – music
• Use yoga as healing and the huge amount of healing.
• Struggle with the expense of yoga
• What does it mean to visit an originating country to practice and learn.
• Teaching yoga- physical and emotional practice. Very white teacher training. using Sanskrit without knowing, making light of sacred concepts.
• Priveleged white women teaching to low income women of color. How to mitigate that role or even removing herself.
• Yoga- purely physical practice, staple of physical healing. Relationship with yoga that has a spiritual underpinning. Because of money couldn’t attend, practicing at home.
• Compelled by article around class divides in India, and how white people mis-understanding.

Themes

• Policing body size, ableism
• Privilege and class access
• Stepping away from studios- as not supporting institutions. But how to be proactive
• Spiritual vs. the secular

Discussion:

• South Asian people cannot stand to walk into studio and be the only brown body. Pakastani person- fetishized him until they realized he was Pakastani and then labled terrist.
• Yoga as a way to otherize different eastern and south eastern ethnicities
• Yoga is here so how do we make sure everyone has access.
• Why are we trying to heal our communities? To endure capitalism better?
• Some white woman wanted a workout class, not a spiritual class. White women in particular drawn to yoga for the spiritual healing it seems to offer and some people who want it to be a physical class.
• Level of ethics brought into the teaching- deep commitment to ethics. That basis is anti-capitalist.
• Pain point is that yoga becing offered as skills and commodity and not the anti-capitalist ethics.
• How is it taught is the real question.
• Spiritality is being commodified- speaking to deep thirst, but also the secular is responsible for the popularity.
• Military is being taught yoga as mental fitness.
• Western yoga or white yoga is a whole industrial complex
• Yoga studio in China- booming. Expats etc. The reason it is successful is beacues middle class Chinese people have a taste from western thngs. Export of yoga as a western commodity and not seen at all as
• Zen Buddhism was dying out in japan until it became popular in the west. Cycle.

• Economics of being a yoga teacher in the US. Article about the fact that yoga teachers are in a lower economic position.
• Millions of dollar spent on yoga clothes, objects, guides, classes. The corporations that make money, the teachers are just workers.
• And the teachers are mostly white.
• Male teachers that are sexualizing and harassing people through this spatial manipulations.

• How do we define yoga and meditation?
• Yoga is usually defined as cis, white, women, able-bodied. While mediation usually hippy, white women.
• Problemetize how we take the spirituality and the ways we divorce the practice from spirituality.
• Secular vs spiritual is similar to specific vs general. Hurtful to take the intimate detail and also violence in glossing over difference.
• Indian American man decided to grow his hair long and speak with accent and decided to pretend to be a guru to see if people would follow him. What is going on with white people in our society that make us latch on so quickly.
• What can we build from our own legacies, histories and practices that can lead us.
• Radicalization that can happen through these practices, meditation through radical activism that Tich Nat Hahn did with his community.
• Spiritual activism and forgiveness. Being peaceful and living peace. No discussions about the privilege that we occupy when we talk about peace.
• European history of healing practices especially from European traditions- midwifery and herbalism. How the levels and layers of violence wiped those out-
• Have not come across a lot of physical healing practices in the European lineage.
• And even in the Indian location- it could be a classed practice where people did not have time to do physical practice because their bodies were broken, working.
• What does it mean if there is nothing to reclaim
• White ancestors- white people with no traditions, and even when we look closely our history is involved with the KKK and the colonizers.
• What is their to look up to in our ancestors, so much pain and disgust. What do we get to choose as a way to live as a white person.
• Coming from a western patriarchal tradition, all stories of men, told by men
• Christian tradition- Eve went to be curios and ruined the world.
• What does it mean to be generating and creating my own power in myself, own movement healing out of myself.
• Investigating my ancestors tools around healing, not tools passed down through any kind of generations of lineage. I am so disconnected to Irish dancing even through I am Irish. Whereas  I have a lot more personal connection to Cuban salsa.
• Don’t want to perpetuate harm. [
• Homeland poem- “What does Africa mean to me”. Asks as a black American what is the relationship to Africa when people have never been there.
• Land based traditions of our ancestors when we are on different land and the way we relate and use the land is different from our legacies.
• Most of the practices that were brought over to the west were brought over by rich men.
  • Two scholars talk about Tibetan Buddhism. Talked about how Tibetan Buddhism came to the west during the invasion and they needed help from the west and the politicians said we will help you if you teach us how to meditate. It was used as barter.
  • Gurus from India, many were men and many were upper class.
• One of my intentions was to practice with women in sanghas (spiritual communities) which are illegal to have women fully ordained sanghas.
  • Two things happening with patriarcy in that lineage- men have brought over the teachings, and then there is patriarchy in the cultural structure as opposed to the actual
  • A lot of disillusionment in Thailand with the spiritual community because of the departure from the original teachings. But the women are really radical in their devotion to the original practice and doing anti-racism work without claiming that out of ego.
  • Theravada lineage and text- the Buddha allowed women to be fully ordained in that sangha and to be the most advanced in all forms of leadership, very controversial and he faced a lot of push back and discrimination.
  • A butcher came to be ordained and a king came. A butcher in that context was the most low work position, and the Buddha took the butcher first and told the king to wait.
  • In yoga studios, teachers conflating Buddhism and Hinduism, as this “cool other”
  • Is yoga a secular practice or is it interwoven with Hinduism? Or is it even meaningful to ask that question?
  • In terms of Buddhism there is a relationship between Hinduism and Buddhism as Buddha was a Hindu reformer.
  • Good book called the “Yoga Body”, about the construction of what US people consider Yoga and the evolution and very complicated. A lot related to militarization, and asserting masculinity and Indian Nationalism in the 40s.
• Patriarchy and feminism- “I am not religious, Im spiritual.” Basically saying,  I’m not going to take what I don’t want from this religious tradition, like patriarchy, and then take a selection of all these other traditions in order to have a spirituality that I want even if it is a mish mash of other people’s religions.
• Native folks have called out that white women’s escape from patriarchy is a taking and sampling from all these native traditions and calling that my femininst liberation journey.
• White woman who worked within a Native church and wanted to take a traditional male ceremony and open it to women, and whether that was her place.
• Untraining and looking deeply at white condition- a practice that they hold is mindfulness, cant we look at race and society through a mindfulness lens.
  • Basic goodness- comes from a Buddhist tradition
• East Bay Meditation Center is offering a 6 month course for white allies within a Buddhist tradition
• The only way to have a shift in someone’s behavior is to have a sustained relationship with someone. Will not get a good response if you say something one off. Really need to be embedded in a network of support
• What would the ideal look like?
  • Is there a way to bring a deep respect, is it possible to create a yoga class that isn’t fucked up, is that even possible?
• Part of what Im learning in being a white women, is that Im going to participate in racist and patriarchal systems, because of the limited choices that I have I am going to perpetuating that at some points in time. I need to hold the complexity of what it means to navigate this world, It is more complicated than being a good and bad white person if I do this or this. I really want to work in the world in a way so that racism doesn’t exist anymore, while recognizing that it will be here in my life.
• I want to be more aware of power.  Where am I pushing power in the choices I make. If I go to a white based yoga studio vs a studio led by people of color
• To be a true exchange- respect, mutual understanding, equality
  • If we are going to engage in a practice how can we engage with the most mutual understanding
  • Noticing where there are invitations and where there are not.
  • Not just couch surfing cause I can.
  • Im not going to look at the
  • We do need healing from trauma and I don’t know how much our traditions have that, embodied trauma, hard to find.
  • Curious of breathing and being aware of your body feels other.
  • So interesting that when someone says the words “breathe, stretch or notice how you are feeling” we think of other traditions and cultures because our cultures within capitalism never made room for that.
• The awareness of taking these parts of other cultures as assesories, gaining cultural, spiritual capital where someone from that traidiotn who was expressing their tradition might be seen as a liability (eg. a bindhi)
• What is individual healing, seeking it or a process, what is that in a larger process that is reproducing harm or theft of other cultures
• Huaywasca ceremony- sitting with all these white settler people, white south African, Jewish American Israeli, Australian, etc. And that was my journey to notice us all together on land in Northern California, a place of incredible colonial violence.
• What are we healing and what is the harm created within in the bigger system, why are we healing?
• Am I healing to be able to perpetuate harm and stealing?
• Americans cant deal with death, disembodied- we are trying to heal from serious societal ills, including capitalism.
• Buddhist Precept- Don’t cause harm, and you practice in community. They set it up so that you are interdependent and accountable to your community.
• Using consent cards around touch as a yoga teacher.
• Coming to yoga from a space of disability and feeling alienated from normative communities, and how great it is for people  who need non-ableist spaces. Don’t say your class is for all bodies if its not
• Third Root health yoga center in NY. POC led , disability justice space, thoughtfully reflecting on the intersections.
• In mainstream studios the teachers talk the whole time
• What if yoga studios had a 10 min sharing circle that gave people ability to speak to their relationship to this practice.
• White women boycott in front of lululemon with demands for accountability to appropriation, where the money goes, etc.
• Getting people to talk about these issues
• So hard to remember that people are inherently good, people at yoga journal are inherently good is really hard to remember, I just don’t want to be around them.
• Everyone is your potential anti-capitalist ally, and you didn’t start out there either. Not everyone will have the energy to work with someone to change their behavior. We should move away from the hierarchy of the best response and solutions. Every opportunity we have is a great one to be able to intervene towards the world we want to see- an anti-colonial, anti-capitalist world.
• I like small interventions- like telling a big macho teacher, no you cannot touch me and some small change did happen.
• Praciting yoga in a community- if I don’t know my instructors and all the people in my class, can I call that my community? No
• If I practice in a space that does not speak to any
• Some gender neutral bathrooms in the yoga studios
• History and origins and also the present day, Hindu nationalism as a way to make more complex the present reality of a place. And white people start to see that its not just some peaceful, mono
• Mindfulness practices can be revolutionary or feed capitalism. Bring mindfulness to the system or they can relax us so we can go back to work. Need to be careful that these practices don’t get overtaken and manipulated.
• Decolonizing yoga – good blog
• Untraining is a program for both white folks and POC, useful for me to take the teachings I have been given as a women, I’m not good enough, etc and give a slow reflection into that.
• Video- stages of colonization