How Cultural Appropriation Masks True Access
Modern yoga often strips away the cultural, philosophical, and community-centered roots of yoga while presenting a polished, commercialized version that excludes the very people it originated to serve.
And I hate to be the one to tell you, but this isn’t just a white people problem. The version of yoga we have in the US today was a propaganda campaign delivered to the West by Indian men of a high caste who had appropriated yoga from the Vedic peoples, all with the intent to rebrand Indian (men) as strong and wise in the eyes of the West.
When a practice is presented without its lineage, it becomes easier for people with privilege to access it—and harder for people who carry generational trauma, cultural connection, or systemic barriers to feel like they belong. This becomes more complicated when you realize that most lineages in the US were brought through people who had culturally appropriated the practice themselves and turned yoga from a community tool into a propaganda.
The truth is that we cannot really “do” yoga the “real” way because we are not of that community, but we can do yoga in the spirit in which it was intended to be done and in a way that is equitable and accessible.
This isn’t just an equity issue; it’s a nervous system issue. When people say that the “culture” is missing from yoga, what other people think is that they have to perform a version of Indian culture in order to be authentic. But Indian culture itself is an incredible complex tapestry of identity. There IS no one monolithic version of “Indian” culture, and, in fact, Indian culture has its own Pandora’s box of incredibly complicated history of class oppression.
Yoga doesn’t ask anything of the identity of the practitioner and if you read the yogic texts you see that they are applicable to any age, any cultural or historical context. The INTENT that you bring to your yoga is everything. Bring your authentic self so that you can be in alignment with your nervous system. Yes, recognize that this is an ancient practice that has - in our context - not made space for the identities, histories, and lived experiences, but also see the opportunity for the harmony of your authentic self and this living tradition. You do not have to cosplay the persona of a guru or a Vedic person. You are allowed to access the teachings of yoga and apply this philosophy to your life, as you are.