Cultural Appropriation

Today, making the mistake of scrolling Facebook with better things to do, I happened across a post on BLM and anti-racist issues above an article critiquing love and light washing in the ‘spiritual’ community. This post was all about how white yoga teachers should stand with indigenous Australians and stop being racists. Published in a [...]

The US patent office has over one thousand forms of designer yoga waiting for approval. Is it any wonder, the Western media treats all things yoga, as some sort of flakey, New Age hippy-shit when it is actually a symbiote of Hinduism? [...]

Time and again we have seen Hindu gods appearing in the most unimaginable of places. In the West, there have been incidents of Ganesha appearing on toilet seats and the face of Ram on shoes. But what Indian-American Ohio girl Ankita Mishra witnessed a few weeks ago at a pub in New York probably beats [...]

If things could not get worse but now we have a growing cult of followers claiming Yoga was invented in the USA. Yogi Baba Prem exposes this new hijack narrative . [...]

“I like to think that someone will trace how the deepest thinking of India made its way to Greece and from there to the philosophy of our times.” – John Wheeler (American Quantum Physicist) The western world has long been known to appropriate ancient eastern cultures, worldviews, knowledge systems and ideas, through a process in [...]

Many are already aware of how Yoga is slowly being stolen away from its Hindu roots and then repackaged as disco yoga or beer drinking yoga or some other concoction mixed up by the snake oil salesman masquerading as a Yoga teacher just to lure more victims to hand over their cash. But meanwhile we [...]

The once expansive Bharata (India) is shrinking.  What was once a great cultural land mass extending possibly from near ancient Persia eastward to Southeast Asia and possibly as far south as various South Pacific islands is literally becoming smaller as a geographic land with the emergence of or partitioning of India exemplified through the creation [...]

There has been commentary by some scholars that the concept of chakras is a relatively new phenomenon within Hinduism; and there appears to be an implication that chakras were not known to the Vedic tradition. Regrettably, this appears to be part of a continuing effort to redefine Hinduism, and to imply that Dharmist do not [...]

To my chagrin and dismay, self-appointed defenders of oppressed cultures who cast contemporary western yoga as the second coming of the East India Company have attached themselves to the fabric of yoga discourse with the stubborn persistence of a burr on a sock. Consequently, perfectly serviceable yoga programs are now at risk of being run [...]

“A safer space is a supportive, non-threatening environment that encourages open-mindedness, respect, a willingness to learn from others, as well as physical and mental safety. It is a space that is critical of the power structures that affect our everyday lives, and where power dynamics, backgrounds, and the effects of our behavior on others are [...]