Yoga is not your toy

Aug 4

The person selling these t-shirts (not the person pictured) is some fake yoga teacher trying to capitalize on this new gimmick. But actually, no, this is NOT what Yoga is.

If this person cared at all about the ancestors and the lineages of yoga, they wouldn't be appropriating yoga for their own ends.

Yoga is not your plaything. Yoga is not your object to mould and break and throw away how you want. Yoga belongs to LIVING PEOPLE WHO ARE RIGHT HERE ON THIS EARTH. Yoga belongs to my people - Hindus and other Dharmics each according to their authentic lineages. NO ONE ELSE. Therefore, no one else gets to define what yoga is. And no, you don’t get to re-write history to pretend like yoga somehow came from your country instead of the ancient Hindu civilization of INDIA. No amount of fantasizing and co-optation of my ancestors wisdom is going to make yoga yours so just stop. Aren’t you ashamed to do such an dishonest thing?

But the fake yoga teachers who make t-shirts like this don’t see my people as people. We don't count as humans with the right to our own traditions and philosophies and practices to the thieves who call themselves “yoga teachers”. They have decided that they have a right to take what is ours and present it as "theirs".

This is really what their "social justice" t-shirt should actually say:

Human Rights (but not counting Hindus who are obviously not human)

Recovery (but not Hindu recovery because no one cares about their addictions and mental health that all stems from their colonial trauma because they're not even humans so they can all die as far as we're concerned)

Economic Justice (but not economic justice for Hindus because we're going to loot their practices and make billions for ourselves while they live in poverty, tee hee)

Racial Justice (but not racial justice for Hindus because only we westerners get to decide who is oppressed by racism)

Politics (especially politics that excludes and silences Hindus and attacks their sacred motherland India over and over again)

Environmental Justice (while we pollute the planet with our "yoga" mats and "yoga" pants and all other manner of environmental abominations AND while we ignore the Indigenous Hindus who are on the frontlines of climate change and have been literally dying to protect the environment and the planet for centuries)

Disability Justice (but not counting Hindus because Hindu bodies disgust us in every way - except when we rape and pillage and traffic their bodies, of course, for our own profit)

Animal Rights (but only if we get to demonize the Hindus who are dying for Animal Rights and who we don't count as humans but also who are not deserving of the compassion we show non-human animals)

Food Justice (as long as we can take the food out of the mouths of Hindus by looting their wealth and destroying their land with climate change and appropriating all their food and spices and ideas and cooking and recipes - yum!)

Gender Justice (while we demonize and slander Hindu trans communities who are loud and proud Hindus, and while we enact every kind of violence upon Hindu women and girls while ignoring and gaslighting them as survivors)

Solidarity (with everyone but Hindus)

Western social justice. Don't you just love it?

Imagine if a non-Indigenous based "anti-oppression" group decided to lead sweat lodges and offered that "as a service" to the social justice crowd. Imagine if the people they chose to conduct those sweat lodges were white or non-Indigenous. Imagine if they called that "anti-oppression" and “social justice”.

What would happen? They'd be destroyed by the social justice crowd, rightly, for cultural appropriation, colonization, settler entitlement, racism, patriarchy, and white entitlement. Right?? That's what should happen.

Except that this is what happens to yoga every single day and no one in the social justice crowd gives a damn or defends my people against the systematic theft of our spiritual and cultural wisdom, or our authority to lead our own practices through our own lineages.

Social justice orgs with "anti-oppression frameworks" select non-Hindu teachers or non-Hindu lineage based orgs to "teach" them yoga for their members. THAT IS COLONIZATION OF HINDU PRACTICES. But do you think anyone in this movement says anything about it? Or even cares? And if I or any of my people bring it up, people look at us as if we're bewildering them. What do we mean they can't just take whatever they want from our people???

Stop being a hypocrite by stopping your theft of my people's cultural practices. Yoga isn’t your toy. Yoga doesn't belong to you and never will, no matter how much you try to claim it as yours.

If you want to understand how much of a violation this t-shirt - a gross violation of my people and our struggle - watch my presentation on Hindu Colonial Trauma.