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Continuing with our overview of Yoga history focusing on the postural and exercise aspects, we look at the influence of the colonial British and European empires on physical practice in South Asia. Yoga as we know it in its current globalized, commercialized form is a product of late 20th century capitalism, which we can trace back to the orientalist subculture of the 1960s (which actually began 100 years earlier in the Victorian era) and maybe peaked with the Instagram influencer Yoga of the 2010s. But its roots are in the British empire, under which an Indian resistance drew on its ancient heritage of inner cultivation practices to craft new forms of both religious practice and physical training. These new Yogas both appropriated from colonial forms—like the YMCA calisthenics and European circus contortion tricks that famously made their way into the modern āsana collection—and innovated on their ancestral models, developing the āsana-based Yoga that is most known now, even in India itself.

The heat from an initial flareup of concern around cultural appropriation in American Yoga seems to have died down from its peak about a decade ago, perhaps because the culture war moved on to new, more inflammatory subjects. What I see now is a Yoga culture where some schools and teachers are obviously fluent in the issues around cultural appropriation and colonialism more broadly, and these schools tend to be aligned in the US with the social justice left. And other schools and teachers, particularly in the more New Age side of progressive culture, appear to have never gotten the memo, and continue with orientalist approaches to South Asian content as if there was never a critical conversation at all. I suspect most of these folks simply don’t know that there was a critical conversation, or if they do, they have not been connected to communities that have taught them to take these critiques seriously.

We can call the recent history of Yoga (and many other colonial phenomena) a phase of postmodernization characterized by the fracturing of large-scale influential lineages into innumerable schools and approaches, a relativistic approach to culture and multiculturalism, and an embrace of the infinite differentiation created by awareness of social location and personality. All of this has changed Yoga as a physical discipline, certainly in the hyper-postmodern progressive subculture places like northern California, where I live. Folks who really wanted Yoga to be strength training peeled off into Pilates and Cross Fit, while folks who wanted it to be a vehicle for ecstatic devotional states found their home in bhakti lineages or in psychedelic work. Almost nobody I know still believes that stretching-based postural work is either good exercise or spiritually potent by itself.

We can see this realization emerging in both post-colonial posture-based Yoga and post-colonial meditation-based Buddhisms like Insight Meditation/vipassanā. A technique was abstracted from its South Asian religious home—sometimes by Europeans and Americans, sometimes by Asian teachers themselves, but both under colonial influence—found to be useful by itself, turned into a branch of the religion (and called “spiritual”: instead of “religious”), and then discovered by sincere devotees to be lacking essential elements of a spiritual path. Those devotees then either go back to the source tradition and attempt to bring more of it into the new branch, or go looking from outside the tradition for what is missing. So we have a profusion of mixed lineages, non-lineages, and infinitely fractured micro-communities. That’s the postmodern condition.

In both Yoga and Insight Meditation, I’m among the “go back to the source and try to bring a more complete religious framework into the globalized postmodern form” contingent. This doesn’t mean I’m going to encourage you to sever your lingual frenulum so that you can liberate your tongue to turn back into the nasal cavity in the practice of khecarī mudrā, but I do know contemporary yogis who have done that and experienced significant benefit! I do encourage us to investigate the practices we are drawn to, both in internal somatic and meditative inquiry and in external historical and cultural exploration. This precious human birth, as they call it, is short, and to waste any of it thinking we’re developig ourselves either physically or spiritually but actually doing something that is of dubious benefit is really a shame.

SEAN OAKES
Sean Feit Oakes, PhD (he/they, queer, Puerto Rican & English, living on Pomo ancestral land in Northern California), teaches Buddhism and somatic practice focusing on the integration of meditation, trauma resolution, and social justice. He received Insight Meditation teaching authorization from Jack Kornfield, and wrote his dissertation on extraordinary states in Buddhist meditation and experimental dance. Sean holds certifications in Somatic Experiencing (SEP, assistant), and Yoga (E-RYT 500, YACEP), and teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, East Bay Meditation Center, Insight Timer, and elsewhere.

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Spirit Rock: spiritrock.org/teachers/sean-oakes
Insight Timer: insighttimer.com/seanoakes

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Blessings on your path.