Liberating Yoga: From Appropriation to Healing

Yoga teacher Harpinder Kaur Mann shows American yoga practitioners a path to reclaim yoga from appropriation and recenter the practice where it belongs.

In the West, the practice of yoga comes to us stripped of cultural context. Colonized and appropriated by capitalism, whiteness, fitness culture, and body shaming, yoga in America today is associated with expensive classes, trendy athleisure products, Corepower, Lululemon, and thin, conventionally beautiful white women. But yoga is not merely a one-hour fitness class aimed at stretching and flexibility. Yoga is a spiritual practice from the Indian subcontinent with the ultimate goal of liberation and self-realization.

In Liberating Yoga, yoga teacher Harpinder Kaur Mann draws from her own perspective as a Sikh-Punjabi woman who was alienated by the way yoga is practiced in the United States, but found her way toward reclaiming the spiritual practice for herself. Mann demonstrates that moving away from appropriated forms of yoga and back to yoga’s roots is the only true path to healing--both for yoga practitioners who desire to engage responsibly in the practice with cultural appreciation and, especially, for marginalized yogis who wish to reconnect with ancestral spiritual practices and reclaim their full identity.