Leave yoga alone...!!!
Posted on 02/04/2014 11:08:23 AM PST by nickcarraway
IT HAPPENED TO ME: THERE ARE NO BLACK PEOPLE IN MY YOGA CLASSES AND I'M SUDDENLY FEELING UNCOMFORTABLE WITH IT
I was completely unable to focus on my practice, instead feeling hyper-aware of my skinny white girl body.
January is always a funny month in yoga studios: they are inevitably flooded with last year’s repentant exercise sinners who have sworn to turn over a new leaf, a new year, and a new workout regime. A lot of January patrons are atypical to the studio’s regular crowd and, for the most part, stop attending classes before February rolls around.
A few weeks ago, as I settled into an exceptionally crowded midday class, a young, fairly heavy black woman put her mat down directly behind mine. It appeared she had never set foot in a yoga studio—she was glancing around anxiously, adjusting her clothes, looking wide-eyed and nervous. Within the first few minutes of gentle warm-up stretches, I saw the fear in her eyes snowball, turning into panic and then despair. Before we made it into our first downward dog, she had crouched down on her elbows and knees, head lowered close to the ground, trapped and vulnerable. She stayed there, staring, for the rest of the class.
Because I was directly in front of her, I had no choice but to look straight at her every time my head was upside down (roughly once a minute). I’ve seen people freeze or give up in yoga classes many times, and it’s a sad thing, but as a student there’s nothing you can do about it. At that moment, though, I found it impossible to stop thinking about this woman. Even when I wasn’t positioned to stare directly at her, I knew she was still staring directly at me. Over the course of the next hour, I watched as her despair turned into resentment and then contempt. I felt it all directed toward me and my body.
I was completely unable to focus on my practice, instead feeling hyper-aware of my high-waisted bike shorts, my tastefully tacky sports bra, my well-versedness in these poses that I have been in hundreds of times. My skinny white girl body. Surely this woman was noticing all of these things and judging me for them, stereotyping me, resenting me—or so I imagined.
I thought about how even though yoga comes from thousands of years of south Asian tradition, it’s been shamelessly co-opted by Western culture as a sport for skinny, rich white women. I thought about my beloved donation-based studio that I’ve visited for years, in which classes are very big and often very crowded and no one will try to put a scented eye pillow on your face during savasana. They preach the gospel of yogic egalitarianism, that their style of vinyasa is approachable for people of all ages, experience levels, socioeconomic statuses, genders, and races; that it is non-judgmental and receptive. As such, the studio is populated largely by students, artists, and broke hipsters; there is a much higher ratio of men to women than at many other studios, and you never see the freshly-highlighted, Evian-toting, Upper-West-Side yoga stereotype.
I realized with horror that despite the all-inclusivity preached by the studio, despite the purported blindness to socioeconomic status, despite the sizeable population of regular Asian students, black students were few and far between. And in the large and constantly rotating roster of instructors, I could only ever remember two being black.
I thought about how that must feel: to be a heavyset black woman entering for the first time a system that by all accounts seems unable to accommodate her body. What could I do to help her? If I were her, I thought, I would want as little attention to be drawn to my despair as possible—I would not want anyone to look at me or notice me. And so I tried to very deliberately avoid looking in her direction each time I was in downward dog, but I could feel her hostility just the same. Trying to ignore it only made it worse. I thought about what the instructor could or should have done to help her. Would a simple “Are you okay?” whisper have helped, or would it embarrass her? Should I tell her after class how awful I was at yoga for the first few months of my practicing and encourage her to stick with it, or would that come off as massively condescending? If I asked her to articulate her experience to me so I could just listen, would she be at all interested in telling me about it? Perhaps more importantly, what could the system do to make itself more accessible to a broader range of bodies? Is having more racially diverse instructors enough, or would it require a serious restructuring of studio’s ethos?
I got home from that class and promptly broke down crying. Yoga, a beloved safe space that has helped me through many dark moments in over six years of practice, suddenly felt deeply suspect. Knowing fully well that one hour of perhaps self-importantly believing myself to be the deserving target of a racially charged anger is nothing, is largely my own psychological projection, is a drop in the bucket, is the tip of the iceberg in American race relations, I was shaken by it all the same.
The question is, of course, so much bigger than yoga—it’s a question of enormous systemic failure. But just the same, I want to know—how can we practice yoga in good conscience, when mere mindfulness is not enough? How do we create a space that is accessible not just to everybody, but to every body? And while I recognize that there is an element of spectatorship to my experience in this instance, it is precisely this feeling of not being able to engage, not knowing how to engage, that mitigates the hope for change.
These are the writings of a seriously neurotic person. So she thought she was liberal, discovered her feelings towards blacks were unclear, and we’re supposed to read through her voyage of self-discovery? Not likely.
Cancel her LibCard immediately!
I’m guessing her number of blog hits increased exponentially when it was mentioned on FR.
Sort of like Sandy Fluke with Rush Limbaugh.
Leave yoga alone...!!!
This is a spoof, right?
Yoga makes me fart. Of course, that’s better than sweating...
Who forgot the barf alert?
Lamenting bigotry or lack of environmental sensitivity is the new proselytism at best or church lady at worst
Believe it or not...in my youth....we were a 3-400% more church doctrinaire nation
Sunday mornings were ghost towns and TV was clean
Divorce rare and moms raised kids at home
Cities were safe except rare ghetto
Illegitimacy was 1% for whites and 20% for blacks
Yet that time is now considered a crime of inhumanity period by folks like yoga girl
Only thing constant is the same types of weak people have found something to be self righteous and morally superior to others
I think you are Jewish no....I bet Jews were more earful and or fearful of Gods word to them too
Its a malaise...its about killed us
Can’t folks see where the new worship has taken us?
Its like regression in a way...worship of the earth is pagan.
Both of us have pagan roots.....I think the word God passed down to Moses beats that
No, Jen, they were not real experiences they were fabricated entirely by your own mind. You have learned nothing.
I walked into a barber shop once. It wasn’t necessarily a black neighborhood, but not a upper class neighborhood either. It took me a few seconds to realize I was the only white person in there, and the pictures on the walls were all black people. How the hell was I supposed to know?
I then started contemplating, so how long do I sit here before I walk out without seeming racists. It took me about 3 minutes. I’m sure they giggled at me when I left.
Is it still open?
Thought it closed...
She can do the downward facing dog....
That will work out WELL for her I bet....
It may have gone bankrupt ((or private). I'm not completely up to speed.
I have to go ski my butt off at Big Sky before the Yellowstone Caldera blows again.
What’s wrong with a skinny white chick?
Isn’t Yoga supposed to be for Asian people only? Just as it is offensive for white people to dress up as a Geisha Girl or Native American Indians for Halloween, isn’t doing an “Asian activity” just as “hurtful”?
I mean just like hip-hop is only for black folks, boiled tasteless food for the English people, Vodka is only for Russians and Curry is only for Indian people?
That is how liberals think, they claim to be multicultural but then they love to show horn people into little boxes their tiny little minds can comprehend....
I was sitting in traffic today...in my humble little, quasi-suburban RustBelt small town...And there it was...tucked next to a State Farm Insurance Office and doors down from a Tatt parlor (”we do peircings too!”) a YOGA STUDIO. I was stunned. I didn’t know we had gone so upscale.
We’llsee how long they hold onto the lease or if a success, will our WalMart starts selling yoga mats?
I MAY need to purchase a Starbucks to sip as I meditate upon the cosmic urban transformation befallen my community. N’@.
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