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Liz Bucar was concerned about her students. The Northeastern University religious-ethics professor says they were using the term “cultural appropriation” without fully understanding the concept or its implications. Consequently, they were shutting down complicated ethical conversations they needed to be having. When it got here to the notion of non secular appropriation, well, that was a wholly foreign concept for them.

In her latest book, Stealing My Religion, Bucar writes that “they never consider that forms of non secular borrowing is likely to be harmful in the identical way” as cultural appropriation. She wrote the book because she wanted them to think more deeply. Where higher to explore that than within the murky realm of yoga. Or should we are saying yogas. 

Devotional yoga offers chanting, sutras, and traditions

Bucar, who can be an authorized Kripalu Yoga teacher, suggests that there are two sorts of yoga—devotional and respite.  Distinguishing between them helps us understand the complex way we approach the practice within the West.

Devotional yoga is rooted in Vedic study and evolved out of Hinduism. Here lives the chanting, the mudras, the sutras, the Bhagavad Gita. We might imagine of it as traditional or authentic since it seems more like what we imagine sages to have done in Hindu ashrams.

“When yoga first got here [to the U.S.] it was very devotional,” she says. While it did draw some adherents who were serious about the philosophy, it wasn’t palatable for a lot of Westerners. “It was too Eastern, too foreign, too brown, too difficult.”

To make it more accessible to a broader swath of individuals, “yoga advocates principally told people: you’ll be able to pull out asanas and don’t worry in regards to the metaphysics and the cosmologies and the ethics,” she says. They were promised a primarily physical practice that was secure and unchallenging to their worldview. That’s the framework from which “respite yoga” evolved.

Respite yoga guarantees higher wellbeing

The practice Bucar calls respite yoga is all about physical health, stress reduction, and overall well-being. She describes it as “feel-good yoga, good-vibes-only yoga.” It’s the sort of secular practice we expect from a studio or a fitness center.

The advantage of a secular yoga practice is that it might probably be accessible to more people, no matter their religious or spiritual leanings. But eliminating the esoteric parts of yoga distills it all the way down to little greater than calisthenics and deep respiration. And while medical research confirms the physical and mental health advantages of such exercises, for some people, that just doesn’t appear to have the identical appeal because the practice we call yoga.

“The thing that makes yoga helpful is that it’s type of vaguely spiritual,” she says. “There’s something attractive to us about accessing Eastern types of spirituality and wisdom and practice techniques which are ancient and meaningful.” But we may feel more comfortable doing it if we will overlook yoga’s religious origins, she says. And that’s once we begin wading into religious appropriation.

What’s incorrect with borrowing from religions?

Like cultural appropriation, which “borrows” from culture at large, religious appropriation involves cherry-picking points of varied religious traditions and claiming them—or dismissing them—to suit one’s own practice. Bucar says this tendency has evolved as increasing numbers of individuals describe themselves as “spiritual, not religious”—who are inclined to imagine in a better power, but eschew the precise commitments required by religions.

People on this category are inclined to approach spirituality as something that could be “individually curated,” she says. “Yoga is an example of that—where you decide and select the various practices you need to do. And then you definitely get to assign whatever meanings you need to it. So you wish your Sun Salutation to be a prostration to a god? Great. You would like it to only be the thing you do in a hot room within the morning, and forget that cultural context from which that practice got here? That’s effective, too.”

That’s why we will go to a yoga studio and check in under the watchful eye of a Buddha statue, sit on a Mexican blanket wrapped in a shawl embroidered with Ganesha images, and meditate in a haze of sage smoke. We’re taking appealing elements from various religious contexts and tucking them under the umbrella of what we call yoga.

Yoga’s evolution

This shouldn’t be to suggest that there’s any such thing as “pure” yoga. “Yoga itself comes from all varieties of traditions,” Bucar says. Along with Hinduism, she cites the influences of Jainism and Sikhism, points of Buddhism, in addition to older Indian philosophies. It was influenced by colonization before it got here West. Once it arrived within the US, it influenced and was influenced by Transcendentalism, the Harlem Renaissance, bliss-seeking hippies within the 60s, and eventually monied White elites.

Today, yoga is being claimed by marginalized groups representing various races, gender identities, body shapes, abilities, and circumstances. It’s being reclaimed by South Asian practitioners calling for the acknowledgement of yoga’s Indian roots.

The purpose is that yoga doesn’t occur in a bubble, Bucar says. “It happens inside a world that has inequities and injustices. It happens inside whiteness and white supremacy within the US. It happens inside a context of Orientalism. It happens inside a context of capitalism. It interacts with those types of structural injustice and, sometimes, makes them worse.” As yoga practitioners, we now have to grapple with where we stand on that.

The approach to non secular appropriation

Her answer to countering religious appropriation isn’t to tug away, but to dive in additional deeply.

“This type of [religious] borrowing by itself shouldn’t be necessarily an issue. That is the best way that cultures interact; the best way religions interact,” she says. “There’s no technique to avoid it, quite frankly.” Bucar suggests that cultures–including religious cultures–evolve and alter in consequence of coming into contact with each other. Exploring various spiritual paths could be a chance for mutual understanding—if there’s respect, reciprocity, and a sensitivity to cultural context.

“Careful engagement with the faith of others has the potential to assist us understand communities different from our own,” she writes. “But it might probably also fundamentally change the best way we see the world and supply ways for dismantling structures of privilege, inequity, and alienation.”

That engagement necessitates some self examination—svadyaya, in case you will. For her, that has meant wrestling with whether or not there are methods to “borrow” religions respectfully and responsibly. Or whether being respectful means giving up certain practices altogether.

Can I still do yoga?

Bucar says that at any time when she talks publicly about this subject, “the primary or second query is at all times from someone who raises their hand and says, ‘Can I still do yoga?’”

“In the event you [are] asking that, then there’s something about stuff you’re doing that you just’re uncomfortable with,” she says.  That discomfort is a signal that you might want to take a seat and grapple with the query, looking for the reply that’s best for you.

It’s a matter she’s had to take a seat with herself—examining the problem through the lens of her positions in society. She says how she approaches her practice relies on whether she is practicing privately at home or in a yoga class, where certain gestures might sound performative. “Things turn out to be tougher after I step into the role of yoga teacher. I actually have come to see that this role requires leading others through religious appropriation, and my opinion about easy methods to do this continues to be evolving,” she writes. “Once I teach, I still deal with a respite experience, but try to offer a chance to find out about devotional yoga as well.”

But that’s her personal decision. “I don’t want [people] to agree with me on where I come out on yoga and what I’ve decided for myself,” she says. [My decision came from] sitting with the discomfort, and interested by my very own privilege on this planet. And that’s not the identical for everyone. But the purpose is to take that point and do it. It’s not to come back to the identical answer.”

No right answers

“We are able to’t have it each ways,” she says. “We are able to’t say that yoga is special and different from other exercises since it’s an ancient spiritual practice, but then ignore the undeniable fact that it comes from a devotional context.” While she stops in need of saying that yoga itself is a strictly Hindu practice, or necessarily a faith itself, she does acknowledge that yogic techniques are powerful and that they will change us—even when we’re not expecting that change.

“This is tough stuff to work out.” she says. “There are not any right answers. There’s no-one-size-fits- all, but that struggle is what I need to encourage people to do and never be afraid of.”

And if the method leaves you with more questions than answers, that’s okay with Bucar. “In religious studies and non secular ethics, we’re okay with sitting with discomfort,” she says. “I believe that a part of my job is to get students to take a seat slightly bit with discomfort and let that anxiety be productive.”

That sounds similar to yoga.