Yet another one-sided whitewashed yoga article.
Here's a long one. I worked on this critique just for you! This community is often asking for more education to help decolonize yoga and wellness so here's my take on a popular NPR article published on Jan 2. Keep reading and be sure to share your thoughts with me!
The NPR article She was a popular yoga guru. Then she embraced QAnon conspiracy theories talks about Katie Griggs, a white woman yoga instructor and her belief in QAnon. Katie often wore turbans and was given the name Guru Jagat by her mentor Yogi Bhajan.
Before I dive in, two things to get clear:
1. Kundalini Yoga is a practice that many South Asians, especially the Punjabi Sikh community, raise their eyebrows over. Since the 60s, we've experienced willing westerners buy into the charlatan Yogi Bhajan’s bag of yoga tricks. Practitioners find themselves emerging wiser and more spiritually enlightened when really they were just fed a bucket of lies and sketchy practices. See abcdyogi’s latest conversation “I Can’t With Kundalini (as taught by Yogi Bhajan)” to dive into this conversation.
2. Misinformation, Fake News, and QAnon-supporting yoga teachers are things that I’m not disputing. Just look at these examples in our latest history: The J6 “QAnon Shaman” and the article Wellness Practitioners Take Stand Against Anti-Vax Conspiracy Theories Brewing in Industry, including my colleague Anusha’s take. I even negotiated a a right of refusal clause into a contract with a breath work company if ever the company was bought by any QAnon conspiritualists, but that’s a story for another time.
We’ve seen many people fall into conspiracy theory rabbit holes before and during Trump’s presidency, this is nothing new.
My issues aren’t with the first part of the article or even the headline.
Yes, this Katie character (aka Guru Jagat) is popular especially here in Santa Monica, and sadly, the comments from white women students espousing her brilliance even as she descended into conspiracy, showcase a blind devotion that isn’t going away anytime soon.
My concern comes from the journalistic choices made to publish the article.
Yet again, we’re reading about yoga in a negative light, without any reference to its roots and connection to culture. Yet again, we’re reading this critique from people who aren’t South Asian and claim to be experts on the matter. One source actively culturally appropriates the practice, another has no stated background or experience with yoga, and most everyone else included are cis-hetero white men.
“Yet again, we’re reading this critique from people who aren’t South Asian and claim to be experts on the matter.”
Not a single South Asian person was interviewed in an article about yoga and current social dynamics. Ain’t that about white?
How much longer will Brown people who offer authentic, spiritual yoga be left out of the conversation?
It’s bad enough that we have the racist and exclusionary Yoga Journal supporting the idea that Eugenie Peterson, a white Russian dancer, was the Mother of Modern Yoga while Gwenyth of Goop claims to be the one that brought yoga to its current popularity. Outside of yoga yet within South Asian culture, we’re still contending with celebrities co-opting our culture for capitalistic exploitation (ahem, ahem Gwen, Katy, Russell, etc). To combat these harmful whitewashed narratives I co-wrote the e-book The Original Godmothers of Yoga, available here.
How much longer will performative activism be the knee-jerk reaction to injustice?
We really need people to remember the teachings that opened their eyes to the racial and ethnic harm caused by whitewashed wellness. When I dropped “Yoga is Dead” and the first episode “White Women Killed Yoga” turned our follower count from 300 to 3,000 nearly overnight I thought something would change.
I thought people were listening and ready to take real, progressive action. But what now? It’s been two and a half years and after reading this article I’m left wondering did everyone really slide back into their usual ways of elevating themselves and ignoring all South Asian experts in yoga, politics, neuroscience? Are we content as a society to simply continue the centuries-old history of colonialism and neocolonialism our desi community has worked so hard to stop?
It gets to the point, where sometimes I want to close the news app. Ignore what's happening right in front of me and stay in my comfortable circle of community to feel fake-safe. But that's not why you're here. You're here because you want to learn and grow and so do I. So instead of looking away, I sat with this article, felt it out for a while, gathered up some resources and wrote this as a way to move through.
Here are tips to stop journalistic harm:
Interview a variety of South Asian people that do the work. There are plenty of South Asian experts in authentic and spiritual yoga, conspiracy theories, Kundalini Yoga, etc.
Bring a critical lens to what you write or publish about yoga. That means, if it’s one-sided, don’t let it be.
Avoid rushing through the writing to be the first. Avoid producing content just to produce. Give yourself a break from the dominant culture norms of hyperproductivity and quantity over quality.
Stick to the topic at hand. In this article, talking about QAnon conspiracy pushing yoga teachers was enough. Why extrapolate that out and make thin conclusions about yoga at all?
It all boils down to understanding and respect. Understand and Respect Yoga.
Additional thoughts:
1. What’s all this nonsense written here: ““yoga philosophy and conspiratorial thinking have a lot in common, making it easy to slide from the former into the latter. In both circles, there is an emphasis on "doing your own research" and "finding your own truth." And many people who practice and teach yoga distrust Western medicine, preferring to find alternative solutions or try to let their body heal itself.”
The article then goes on to support this loose correlation, sharing supporting thoughts from conspirituality podcast hosts instead of explaining the claim through a critical lens by bringing in experts of Ayurveda, the sibling science of yoga, to negate the idea that practicing yoga leads to conspiracy and distrust of Western medicine.
Ayurveda is an ancient discipline and practice that includes herbal medicine, holistic healing, and physical therapies. It is practiced by 80% of the population in Nepal and India. Not even mentioning Ayurveda and its roots as a common practice - not great.
Insinuating that people distrust Western medicine and then look to alternatives creates a false hierarchy where Western medicine is the go to and Ayurveda is subordinate to it. Ayurveda addresses lifestyle and conditions in a way that Western medicine does not, is an older and widely accepted discipline, and in fact, the two can completely coexist in a person’s life.
2. To learn more about the correlation and causation in this article, read what EMS Fitness Trainer Conrad Sanchez has to say about it:
The main problem I have with this article is that it puts correlation and causation next to each other, draws a thin line between them, and walks on it.
A quick reminder: correlation is a measure of a relationship between two variables. Causation is the direct result of one variable to another.
For example cities with a lot of churches also have a lot of crime. This is a correlation. A city that has a lot of people causes a need for a lot of churches, and also has the potential for more crime in a city. The fact of a large population is the cause.
If an article was written about churches and crime, most readers would think that the presence of churches causes an increase in crime. It’s not really the readers' fault. Our minds are built to create relationships with everything around us, however, one of the common teachings in yoga is to have a discerning eye. In western culture, we often call it “critical thinking”.
Now back to NPR. Podcaster Matthew Remski is cited in the article saying he’s seen many yoga instructors fall into conspiracies and makes the association to yoga teachings. Remski quotes “This idea that 'truth is just in the eye of the beholder”, “doing your own research”, and “finding your own truth”. Yoga also has many other teachings such as Ahimsa / Non-violence, Vairagya / Freedom from attachment and rejection, and Viveka / Discernment, Right Action to name a few.
Trump became president and had a lot of followers. QAnon appeared shortly after and also gained many followers. The pandemic hit two years into his presidency, QAnon, and other outlets started spewing a lot of conspiracies that many people believed, including some of your relatives, some of your coworkers, and maybe even your yoga teacher.
It is true that yoga has seen some controversial and despicable people. Listen to “Gurus Killed Yoga”. However, it is the proliferation of articles like this with a lack of a wider context that turns away many people from yoga, a practice that has too many benefits to list in one place.
The correlation drawn between believing in yoga philosophies and conspiracies is as thin as saying that people that believe in one thing also believe in another.
The article cites Ben Lorber who monitors right-wing movements and believes that both communities share the idea of a higher truth only accessible to a select few.
Yoga is one of the most accessible practices in the world. You don’t have to wander down any rabbit hole or register in any obscure forums to retrieve its teachings.
Well, that's alot from me! I hope you enjoyed reading my perspective. Click this link to share your thoughts.
Warmly,
Tejal
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