6      Resistance and Remedy Through Embodied Learning

Yoga Cultural Appropriation and Culturally Appropriate Services

Sheila Batacharya

In Canada, health research addressing Indigenous and other racially subordinated women identifies violence, social inequity, and lack of access to social and health services as primary concerns (Amnesty International 2004, 2009; Federal/Provincial/Territorial Working Group on Women’s Health 1990; FORWARD 2006; Harding 2005; Khanlou and Hadjukowski-Ahmed 1999; Khosla 2003; McKenna and Larkin 2002; Native Women’s Association of Canada 2004). Young women face increased exposure to violence and their experiences of systemic oppression, especially racism and colonialism, not only compromise their options for support but may profoundly damage their sense of identity and hamper their strategies to resist, cope with, and recover from abuse (Ali et al. 2003; Czapska et al. 2006; Handa 2003; Jiwani 1999, 2002, 2005; Rice and Russell 1995a, 1995b; Shakti Kee Chatree Collective 1997). With regard to health policy and programming, this body of research further suggests the need for greater attention to the strategies that young women use to resist and cope in contexts of violence and oppression.

In 2004, I facilitated twelve yoga workshops addressing health, healing, violence, and oppression for young South Asian women living in Toronto. I then conducted individual interviews with fifteen workshop participants and three yoga teachers that same year. Participants theorized yoga as a resource for addressing mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual consequences of violence and oppression. In this project, spirit and spirituality were described as experiences of deep respect, a sense of humility, and awareness of one’s connection with other beings and with nature in general. Although yoga is the framework used in this study, it is not privileged by the researcher or the participants as a superior form of spiritual knowing or practice.

Identity and critiques of social relations of power are salient themes that emerged in the interviews. In particular, participants objected to New Age reinterpretations of yoga and cultural appropriation. However, their critiques of New Age yoga are not easily remedied by recourse to definitions of authentic South Asian culture. The young women indicate that it is not sufficient to frame yoga as authentic and therefor a culturally appropriate resource if it is presented using orthodox religious, nationalistic, patriarchal, colonial, or other hegemonic tropes. Similarly, the yoga teachers discussed how they meet the challenge of supporting students who have experienced violence and oppression. They also highlighted the importance of addressing identity and social relations of power.

The workshop participants and the yoga teachers offered insightful considerations and recommendations for using yoga as a counterhegemonic healing strategy grounded in “ethical cultural connections” (Kadi 1996, 125). I argue that the counterhegemonic healing strategies used by participants disrupt dominant healing and embodiment discourses such as New Age romanticism and “somatophobia” (Davis 2007, 53) in critical theory. Said differently, participants illustrate how sentient-social embodied learning is an important form of resistance to violence and oppression.

Doing Embodiment Research

Theorizing sentient-social embodied experience within critical Western scholarship carries certain challenges. As a researcher, I have undergone extensive training about how social relations of power operate and I have practiced methodologies that identify lived experience as an important source of knowledge. However, to write about lived experiences of mind, body, breath, emotions, and spirit in academia is venturesome, despite the existence of research that addresses these topics in interesting and provocative ways. Scholars, notably Roxana Ng (2000b, 2011) and the contributors to this collection, ask why embodiment feels out of place in academic forums, and in doing so they produce varied responses (Alexander 2005; Frankenberg 2004; Graveline 1998).

When the body is understood as inextricable from perception, rather than as an obstacle to it, embodiment can be understood as the “worldsense” (Oyĕwùmí 1997) of an individual and a collective—an understanding that Temitope Adefarakan explains in her chapter in this collection as “how life is understood from this multisensory position.” However, in critical antiracist and feminist studies, sentient embodiment remains a tricky topic despite widespread acknowledgement of lived experience as a valued source of knowledge. “One of the most unfortunate legacies of poststructuralist and postmodern feminism,” notes Stacy Alaimo (2008, 237), “has been the accelerated ‘flight from nature’ fuelled by rigid commitments to social constructionism and the determination to rout out all vestiges of essentialism. Nature, charged as accessory to essentialism, has served as feminism’s abject.” Indeed, discursive inquiries about the body have at times obscured the material concerns that were central to these insights in the first place (Bordo, 2004, 282). However, this was not always the case. Susan Bordo (2004, 16) argues, the body was at the centre of women’s liberation and black power movements long before it was addressed in poststructuralism.

Critical feminist scholarship that privileges mind over body in the repudiation of the physical body, along with nature, dovetails with hegemonic denials of lived experiences of subordination. The retreat from the material body, or “somatophobia” (Davis 2007, 53), is rooted in the objection to a biological determinism that assigns intrinsic characteristics to dominant and subordinate people, the latter of whom are positioned on the body side of the mind-body dichotomy. Like Bordo (2004), Kathy Davis (2007, 53) argues that many critical feminist investigations of social embodiment do address both the material and discursive aspects of lived sentient experience. As she points out, numerous theorists—among them Evelyn Fox Keller, Sandra Harding, Patricia Hill Collins, and Dorothy Smith—situate “sentient, embodied experiential knowing as a resource for unmasking the universalist pretensions of science and for providing the basis for an alternative, critical epistemology, which would be grounded in the material realities of women’s lives.”

Situating “sentient, embodied experiential knowing” as a source of knowledge features prominently in antiracist and feminist scholarship, and, despite the discursive turn in Western knowledge-production, scholars continue to assert that lived experience is an important source of knowledge about social systems and inequities. I, too, am interested in research that goes beyond cognitive ways of knowing—in other words, research that addresses how embodiment is a social experience but one that is not fully explained by social theory and is not reducible to thinking. Embodiment is surely experienced through discourse, but the story does not end there.

In response to the problem of dichotomous thinking in terms of a sentient body versus a socially constructed body, science studies scholar Elizabeth Grosz (2008, 24) asks, “How does biology, the bodily existence of individuals (whether human or nonhuman), provide the conditions for culture and for history, those terms to which it is traditionally opposed? How does biology—the structure and organization of living systems—facilitate and make possible cultural existence and social change?” Attending to the body as “organized by processes that are living systems” (24) and examining how these systems interlock with social systems have been central concerns in both my work as a yoga teacher and my research about embodiment and embodied learning. When I teach about the relationships among body, mind, breath, emotions, and spirit, I do so by drawing attention to the body and sentient experiences; however, sentient experiences occur symbiotically with social experience. As Zainab, a twenty-seven-year-old youth counsellor and graduate student, said during an interview,

I think remembering moments of, like, positive experiences away from those destructive situations, when you had moments of insight, when you felt peace flooding your body, when you’ve been sensitive and flexible and open, help keep you human when you are faced with that violence and oppression. ’Cause I’m not reducible to this, I’m not reducible to this situation or my response to it.1

Many of the participants in my study described sentient experiences of body, breath, and spirit as providing an important opportunity to theorize and respond to social experiences. As the comment above suggests, sentient-social embodied awareness provides an important perspective from which to respond to social inequity and its consequences. Zainab acknowledges social experience but refuses to be reduced to it. In identifying moments of embodied insight as a resource for contending with violence and oppression, she expresses embodied awareness as sentient and social.

The ways in which sentience and perception have been avoided as a result of the mind-body dualism are being rethought in embodiment studies. “To explain or analyse perception,” notes Elizabeth Grosz (1994, 94), “requires an understanding not only of physiological and psychological processes but above all the ways in which each is mutually implicated with the other.” Wrestling against dismissals of lived experience and sentient knowledge that include but are not limited to cognitive knowing is a very difficult project within academia. Lived experience is, and should be, subject to critique; however, experience (often that of marginalized persons) can also be dismissed as suspicious because of the belief that it is discursive and subject to infinite interpretations. In other words, perceptual knowing may be defined as nothing more than the result of discourse on an inert body-object. The contradiction here is stunning in that there can be no material body in a discursive universe, yet an inert body as object must exist for discourse be applied to. Ultimately, both sentient and social experience have at times been disdained and dismissed as unknowable—as fragmented or essentialist. Needless to say, these dismissals have also been resisted.

Antiracist feminism provides an important lens through which to understand how the participants in my research are positioned in society and how they negotiate their experiences of social hierarchies as interconnected and mutually constituting (Bannerji 1993; Calliste and Dei 2000; Hill Collins 1998; Lorde 1984; Mohanty, Russo, and Torres 1991; Ng 1986, 1993; Razack 1998; Stasiulis 1990). It also supports my investigation of sentient-social embodiment and “transformative possibilities beyond the frame” (Calliste and Dei 2000, 12) of dominant ways of knowing. As noted in the introduction to this collection, anticolonialism and decolonization are social movements and constitute a historicized approach to theory and practice with the aim of ending colonial power relations; it “can only be engaged through active withdrawal of consent and resistance to structures of psychic and social domination” (Mohanty 2003, 7). Importantly, anticolonialism and decolonization provide frameworks that expose and challenge the histories and legacies of colonialism from the perspectives and knowledges of Indigenous peoples (Dei and Asgharzadeh 2001, 298).

Framing yoga teachings as an Indigenous knowledge in my research is a decolonizing move, but it is only so when specific and situated forms of colonization, such as the distinction between settler colonialism on Turtle Island and exploitation colonization in South Asia, are confronted (Tuck and Yang 2012, 4). Yoga teachings offer important strategies for engaging in decolonization by preparing one to unlearn ways of being and thinking that one has been inculcated into and takes for granted. Yoga provides training for witnessing oneself and others with discernment; this skill is important for avoiding guilt and the manifold ways in which those in positions of settler, racial, gender, class, and ability privilege seek innocence by way of resisting or embracing positions of superiority and/or victimhood (Lawrence and Dua 2005; Razack 1998). Roxana Ng (2011, 352) insists on both the discursive/symbolic understanding and the material/praxis of embodied learning, “not only to reason critically but to see dispassionately and to alter actions that contribute to the reproduction of dominant-subordinate relations.” Yoga teachings may be used to challenge hegemonic thinking, but they only become anticolonial when reconciled with actions that contribute to both discursive and material decolonization.

Antiracist feminism frameworks illustrate how race and gender interlock with other social categories of difference, such as ability, sexuality, class, religion, ethnicity, and age. However, these insights must be considered in terms of anticolonial and decolonization critiques that identify how colonialism grants privilege to differently situated settlers (Lawrence and Dua 2005; Tuck and Yang 2012). Drawing on antiracist feminism, anticolonial and decolonization frameworks provide perspectives through which to address historical processes that have led to and shaped the establishment of a South Asian diaspora in Toronto (Brah 1996; Handa 2003; Grewal 2005; Rajiva 2004, 2006; Razack 2002; Thobani 2007). Furthermore, using these frameworks help to contextualize yoga—a knowledge that is historically and culturally associated with South Asia, although it is practiced and produced in settler societies such as Canada.

Kathy Absolon and Cam Willett (2005, 98) discuss what it means to “put ourselves forward” by addressing colonial history as an important aspect of self-location in the research process—by thinking of location as “more than simply saying you are of Cree or Anishinaabe or British ancestry; from Toronto or Alberta or Canada.” Rather, one’s location is defined by relationships, not only to land and language but also to “spiritual, cosmological, political, economical, environmental, and social elements in one’s life.” Described as part of the challenge to “unlearn colonial research agendas and processes” and the need to “be creative in revising research methodologies to make our research more Indigenous and counter-colonial” (106), locating oneself is identified as central to resisting Eurocentrism and ethnocentrism by countering the idea of objectivity and the process of objectification (107). Absolon and Willet explain that self-location also helps readers identify the vested interests of the researcher and calls her to be accountable in her relationships. Keeping this in mind, I try to write as an embodied subject “and to show how such an account can be written not merely as a self-absorbed autobiography” (Ng 2000a, 185).

I have lived and travelled through the territories of Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabeg, and Wendat nations since my birth. My mother’s paternal forbears arrived as colonial settlers in the mid-1800s from Britain to the Anishinaabeg territories of the Mississauga peoples.2 They purchased land through the process of colonial land theft and the illegal appropriation of Mississauga territory through the Toronto Purchase—a deed that was blank between 1787, the year of its inception, and 1805, when the Mississauga peoples were coerced into signing a new deed.3 My mother’s maternal lineage includes French settlers in the territory of the Mohawk people of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in the early 1700s.4

Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) explains that colonial settlers engaged in the process of claiming Indigenous status after several generations of land occupation. This, she argues, was made possible by the erasure of colonial violence underpinning such claims (7). I, along with my maternal family, never questioned our sense of entitlement and belonging in the Canadian nation, and despite my experiences of racism, I too grew up claiming Canada as my “home and native land,” as declared in the Canadian national anthem. Also factoring into our settler entitlement were the unremitting crises that my mother’s family members faced, all of which, I believe, contributed to our unquestioned sense of belonging to the nation, as compensation for our hardships, and thus to the complicity with the inequities that underpin it. I would even argue that these crises fuelled our identification with whiteness and all other markers of elite citizenship, despite experiences of subordination violence in a white settler capitalist society. Sunera Thobani (2007, 21) explains nonelite claims to Canadian citizenship as a process of exaltation: “Exaltation enables nationals with even the lowliest ‘internal’ status to claim civilizational and existentialist parity with privileged insiders and civilizational superiority in their daily encounters with outsiders. . . . It enhances the social and moral being of all those included within the national enterprise and promotes aspirations of acquiring greater nationality among even the most despised of insiders.” In other words, I and my maternal family demonstrated a settler mentality based on a strong sense of entitlement to the privileges we possessed by virtue of having worked hard and having suffered for them.

My paternal ancestry is South Asian. My father was born near Kolkata in West Bengal, India, in 1930. My father’s elders were persecuted during the Indian independence movement. However, my father came from a family of propertied Brahmins, and his class location and access to education allowed him to study and work in Europe and then eventually to immigrate to Canada, in the mid-1960s. This coincided with what antiracist historians have referred to as a period of “paki-bashing”—a time in which increased South Asian immigration was met with pervasive racist violence perpetrated by Canadian citizens who may or may not have had a significantly longer settler presence but were economically and culturally threatened by these newcomers (Bolaria and Li 1988; Thobani 2007). My father was an immigrant from postcolonial India and a settler. His immigration to Canada was shaped by colonization in both countries, and although not an elite beneficiary, he, like my mother’s family, enjoyed the rewards of living in a settler society. As Sunera Thobani (2007, 16–17) argues,

Propelled into the circuit of migration by structural conditions within the global economy, as well as by their desires for economic advancement, migrants have been party to the ongoing colonization of Aboriginal peoples.

. . . Although the suffering of immigrants cannot be minimized neither can their participating (and benefiting from) the ongoing cultural and material domination of Aboriginal peoples.

With this in mind, I consider my situated and specific racialized and gendered experience as the result of my marginalization and privilege within a white settler nation.

Paying attention to my location requires more than cognitive theorization. Emotional, physical, and spiritual aspects of my lived experience and family relationships are critically important in my endeavour “to understand how oppressions, as well as privilege, intersect and how these affect interactions between people” (Batacharya 1994, 183). This is where my yoga practice has been helpful. Having a way to engage emotional, psychic, and “spirit wounding” (Wing 1997, 28)—a way that attends to breath, body, and spirit—has been an important part of my practice of self-location. While the teachings of yoga in and of themselves offer remedies to damages caused by violence and oppression, in my case, yoga is also a way to think about culture, history, and community and how these shape identity; in many respects, it has been a way to locate oneself using spirituality (Absolon and Willett 2005, 112).

However, social location also changes in response to context. “We each locate ourselves differently at various points in our lives. As our recovery from colonialism progresses, we speak about our past and present experiences with more awareness, understanding, and knowledge, and we revise the stories of our lives” (Absolon and Willett 2005, 112). When I reflect on my experiences and observe how I write about them now compared to twenty years ago, I see new offshoots rather than hard breaks. These shifts debunk the idea that research is objective or that research can be anything but a process characterized by change and context. I agree with Sandra Harding (1993, 65), who argues that communities, not individuals, produce knowledge because it is only through community that the knowledge I claim can be challenged or legitimated.

Healing Discourses and Yoga: Cultural Appropriation and Culturally Appropriate Services

It is important to address the ways in which embodiment and healing are discoursed in order to distinguish between hegemonic and counterhegemonic meanings and practices. Just as the material dimension of social inequity has embodied consequences, so too does discourse. Susan Hekman (2008, 100) writes that “the goal of Foucault’s analyses of discourses in all of his works is to reveal how discourses shape the material reality in which we live.” She argues that “bodies are crafted by discourse and that this crafting has very real consequences for how those bodies inhabit cultural space” (101). If healing is an important response to the embodied consequences of violence and oppression, as the South Asian women and yoga teachers whom I interviewed claimed, what kinds of discursive approaches to embodiment and healing help or hinder that healing? What is meant by “healing” in different historical contexts and frameworks? What are the different understandings of embodiment that underpin healing discourses?

New Age discourses inform popular understandings of embodiment and healing. Yet although New Age attends to mind, body, emotions, and spirit, social relations of power are often effaced. Furthermore, New Age knowledge production provides many examples of how Western cultural dominance, appropriations, and reinterpretations of Indigenous knowledges are not acknowledged or critically engaged, despite the widespread recourse to Indigenous knowledges for teachings about embodied learning and holistic healing. By examining New Age discourses, it is possible to trace both social relations of power and their effacement in hegemonic discourses pertaining to embodiment and healing.

Despite claims to novelty, New Age discourse is consistent with other developments in Western thought, particularly those that occurred during the Enlightenment and its offshoot, Romanticism (Hammer 2001; Tumber 2002). The Enlightenment is generally understood as a late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century movement characterized by specific trends in knowledge production in England and France that privileged rationalism, absolute and universal truth, positivism, and materialism with the aim of dispelling religious superstition and ushering in an era of liberty, freedom, democracy, and reason (Hammer 2001, 4; Zeitlin 1990, 1–6). The ability to reason, however, was considered to be the exclusive domain of men of European ancestry, who were also the subjects to which notions of liberty and freedom applied; race and gender, important categories in the Enlightenment world view, were presented as purely factual when used to justify and organize colonial projects (Loomba 1998, 64). Reacting to Enlightenment priorities, Romanticism did not challenge a hierarchical world view or the rationalist aims of the Enlightenment. It did, however, emphasize passion, creativity, and the “inner quest” as a means of privileging the individual and utopian notions of fulfilling man’s destiny of mastering the physical world (Hammer 2001; Tumber 2002). As Raymond Williams (1996, 53) notes in The Politics of Modernism, the Romantic movement was characterized by a fascination with folk art, which was “seen as primitive and exotic” and was made widely available through European imperialism. Williams argues that “these appeals to the ‘Other’—in fact highly developed arts of their own places—are combined with an underlying association of the ‘primitive’ and the ‘unconscious’” (53). In other words, the Romantic spiritual inner quest into the unconscious is inextricable from the fetishized and racialized “other.”

Cultural appropriation has been theorized as a form of violence. For example, Kadi (1996, 116) defines cultural appropriation as “taking possession of specific aspects of someone else’s culture in unethical, oppressive ways.” Furthermore, Kadi argues that “what passes for multiculturalism is actually covert and overt cultural appropriation, actually a form of cultural genocide. As dominant white society casually buys and sells our symbols/realities, their cultural meaning is watered down and their integrity diminished” (120). While opposing the “imperialist attitude in which privileged people want to own segments of other people’s cultures” (117), Kadi is not simply opposed to people participating in traditions other than their own. Rather, “ethical cultural connections” have the potential for building solidarity and fighting oppression:

Ethical cultural connections are comprised of respect for the community involved, a desire to learn and take action, an openness to being challenged and criticized, a willingness to think critically about personal behavior, and a commitment to actively fighting racism. These cornerstones remain the same whether I’m getting to know one Native person or buying a carving from a Native museum. They apply to people of color and white people. (125)

Kadi theorizes a protocol that challenges New Age cultural appropriation and objects to the ways in which tradition is sometimes evoked within communities in the name of cultural nationalism in order to entrench social hierarchies. Traditions, Kadi argues, are negotiated, not static, and oppressive traditions “need to be kissed goodbye” (124).

New Age discourses and practices are constructed as an opposition to dominant Western religious, medical, and political institutions. However, despite this claim to marginality and counterculture status, New Age discourses are inseparable from European colonialism and Western knowledge production. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999, 1), a scholar of Maori descent, writes as one of the colonized whose Indigenous knowledge has been appropriated: “It appalls us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we created and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations.” Cultural appropriation is not merely an exchange of cultural knowledge. It occurs within asymmetrical social relations of power and involves attempts to erase the historical, political, and cultural experience of the subordinated group. This is not only discursive but is inextricable from material realities.

Yoga provides a framework for participants’ embodied learning in this study. When referring to Indigenous knowledges, I am aware of the problems associated with collapsing differences and distinctions between peoples and their knowledges and practices by way of generalizations, homogenization, and the failure to acknowledge power differentials and relationships among peoples. However, it is possible and useful to note commonalities among Indigenous knowledges and practices. I agree with George Dei, Budd Hall, and Dorothy Rosenberg (2000, 6), who write:

This body of knowledge is diverse and complex given the histories, cultures, and lived realities of people. . . . Indigenous knowledges are emerging again in the present day as a response to the growing awareness that the world’s subordinated peoples and their values have been marginalized—that their past and present experiences have been flooded out by the rise in influence of Western industrial capital.

Importantly, “counter colonial” (Absolon and Willet 2005, 106) aspects of Indigenous knowledges include a high regard for process, for relationships among all things, and for lived embodied sentient-social experience as inextricable components of knowing and being.

Diverse yoga teachings have evolved over millennia. The term yoga is derived from the Sanskrit root yuj, which signifies union, and is broadly used to define concepts in religious, scientific, astronomical, philosophical, spiritual, and physical knowledges (Banerji 1995, 1). The various exegetic texts associated with yoga may be addressed as reflective of the epistemological, cosmological beliefs and practices of some South Asian peoples. However, these knowledges are neither static nor homogeneous. Rather, they have been transformed by many transitions and upheavals within the extremely diverse part of the world defined as South Asia. These knowledges reflect power dynamics within communities and other social formations. Furthermore, Hinduism, with which yoga is associated, is not an easily reconciled religious category (Chakraborty 2011, Doniger 2009; King 1999). Richard King (1999, 98) notes that “the notion of ‘Hinduism’ is itself a Western-inspired abstraction, which until the nineteenth century bore little or no resemblance to the diversity of Indian religious belief and practice.”

Yogic knowledge, like other forms of knowledge production, is heterogeneous. It is diverse, sometimes contradictory, and is found in different schools of thought and religious frameworks developed over the span of more than three thousand years. Texts that focus on yoga are legion and will not be reviewed in this chapter. However, by acknowledging the specificity and complexity of yogic knowledges, I maintain that yoga is socially constructed through power relations at the same time as it references a distinct “worldsense” (Oyĕwùmí 1997) that contrasts with and challenges hegemonic Western ways of knowing, particularly in terms of embodiment. Roxana Ng makes a similar observation and argument about traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) as a style of medical knowledge and practice synthesized from diverse local practices and knowledges. Although TCM is subject to power relations and historical formations, it nonetheless reflects a distinct and cohesive way of knowing that contrasts with allopathic medicine and dominant Western knowledge production (see Ng’s chapter in this collection).

Discussions about yoga as it relates to consumerism, appropriation, intellectual property patents, authenticity, reinterpretation, and charlatanism are increasingly common. A plethora of journalistic forums—such as the website Decolonizing Yoga, Assent Magazine, and documentaries including Yoga, Inc. (Philp 2007) and Who Owns Yoga? (Bhanu 2014)—testify to a concern about social relations of power with respect to yogic knowledge and its applications. Many have attempted to engage with yogic knowledge in terms of political and material realities, some examples being yoga instructors such as Krishna Kaur, of the American Black Yoga Teachers Association (Chavis 1998); Tawanna Kane, executive director of the Lineage Project in New York (Neilson 2004); and Jade Harper, owner of Spirit Fusion, a mobile yoga studio in Winnipeg that combines Cree and Ojibwe teachings with yoga (Harper 2016); writers and scholars such as Marina Budhos (2007a, 2007b), Retiki Vazirani (2001), Barbara Stoler Miller (1995), and Shola Arewa (1998) can be added to the list.

Farah Shroff (2000) contends that yoga and Ayurveda were suppressed during the colonial occupation of South Asia by the British because of the anticolonial implications of this medical knowledge and practice. She argues that “the struggle to reclaim holistic health care involves decolonizing the mind, which is a political benefit; at the same time, it has the potential to offer valuable therapeutic contributions to health care” (217). However, as demonstrated by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (MacAskill 2015) and the popular yogi Swami “Baba” Ramdev (Nelson 2009), yoga may also be discoursed in the service of promoting religious communalism and homophobia. Understanding yoga requires addressing its Indigenous context as well as how it is influenced by, and reinterpreted through, colonialism and Western imperialism, including current neoliberal formations. That said, a nuanced approach values yogic knowledge as not reducible to hegemonic interpretations. Attention to the therapeutic benefits of yoga, including its countercolonial applications, reveals the complex material and discursive aspects of this knowledge (Budhos 2007a, 2007b; Chavis 1998; Grewal 1996; Shroff 2000). Reetika Vazirani (2001, 133) observes that

by turning at critical junctures to the East—to the stereotype that in Indian philosophy, truth has no context, that oblivion is the geography of wisdom, that nirvana is emptiness, that nonattachment means we can forget about other people, and about race, class, and gender—America supplies itself with the anesthesia it craves to numb itself from the pain of its history: the pain of stolen land and labor, the outrageous waste.

Vazirani suggests that this “forgetting” has consequences: “In our insatiable drive for ownership and the future, we lose the advantage of the present tense. Thus, we wreck our breathing. Our bodies click out of joint” (133). She articulates an understanding of yoga through her experiences of racism, the confusion and grief she felt after her father committed suicide when she was ten years old, and her difficulties developing her yoga practice within a context of American appropriations and reinterpretations (121). She elaborates on her sentient-social embodiment from her location as a South Asian woman; her yoga practice includes being aware of self-location, nation making, and the colonial history of the United States.

Embodied learning has and continues to be an important resource in healing from violence and oppression. Somatic therapies are gaining greater recognition in clinical health fields at a time when researchers and therapists are acknowledging that solely cognitive-based counselling may not always be effective when addressing trauma (Baranowsky and Lauer 2012; Battell et al. 2008; Haskell 2001; Nadeau and Young 2006; Rai 2009). However, a crucial contribution of feminist therapy is the assertion that therapeutic approaches that neglect the social context of trauma perpetuate oppression for women in recovery (Burstow 1992; Lamb 1999). While addressing sentient-social embodiment as an important strategy for recovering from violence and oppression, “it is only by changing the social relations between colonizer and colonized that psychosocial trauma can be alleviated” (Nadeau and Young 2006, 91).

The individual subjective aspect of embodied learning accommodates an examination of oneself but need not devolve into a New Age individualistic pursuit. In fact, approaches to embodied learning that keep hold of both individual experience and social context posit an interdependence of self, other, and environment: “Self-sufficiency is important to health, but its necessary condition is relationality, a concept that illuminates meanings of health as regards person, species, environment, and community” (Fields 2001, 69). Relationality and self-determination are important teachings in many Indigenous knowledges. As Patricia Monture-Angus (1999, 8) explains, “Self-determination begins with looking at yourself and your family and deciding if and when you are living responsibly. Self-determination is principally, that is first and foremost, about our relationships.” She also points out that “living in peace is about living a good life where respect for our relationships with people and all creation is primary” (41).

Yoga—when framed by antiracist feminist, anticolonial, and decolonization scholarship and practice—encourages healing in terms of sentient-social embodiment. Understanding yoga in this way has three significant advantages. First, it challenges New Age individualism and dominant discourses of healing by insisting on the acknowledgement of historical specificity and social relations of power. This is important to circumvent victim blaming toward those who suffer poor health and are unable to thrive because of social determinants of health. Second, it challenges the Cartesian mind/body dichotomy, making room for a sentient-social embodied approach to healing and learning. Third, in practice, Indigenous knowledges such as yoga are important resources, often supplementing limited state medical care and services or, in some cases, replacing it when it is inaccessible or ineffective (Rai 2009; Shroff 2000; Waldron 2005).

Resistance and Remedies: Situated, Strategic, and Transcendent Identity

This study illustrates the social differences of birthplace, language, class, education, and sexual identity within a grouping such as “young South Asian women” in a diasporic setting such as Toronto. For example, ten of the fifteen participants were born in Canada: five in Toronto and five in Edmonton, Moncton, Calgary, Vancouver, and Victoria, respectively. Five women were born abroad: two in Sri Lanka, one in Saudi Arabia, and two in the United Arab Emirates. Languages other than English spoken by individual women are Arabic, Baluchi, Bengali, French, Gujarati, Hindi, Karachi, Persian, Punjabi, Sinhalese, Spanish, Tamil, Telegu, and Urdu. All participants spoke English, two spoke only English, and seven spoke three or more languages besides English. English was not the first language of six women in the group.

The young women, aged from nineteen to twenty-six, use nuanced strategies to access spaces and resources that acknowledge their lived experiences and identities. Amrit, Sarah, Zainab, Mina, and Maya wanted to participate because the class was free of charge, specifically designed for young South Asian women, and combined yoga instruction with discussion about social issues. For example, when asked what stood out for her in the workshops, Sarah replied that discussions about the murder of Reena Virk, the suicide of Hamed Nastoh, and how South Asian youth are gendered and racialized were memorable.5 Furthermore, many of the women commented on self-location in relation not only to communities to which they belong but also to those with which they express solidarity (e.g., Indigenous, black diasporic, and LGBTQ communities). Although being with other young South Asian women in this project was important, none of the women expressed an exclusive affiliation with this social group. Participating in the yoga classes was expressed as an interest in discussing social relations of power and how this shapes community, culture, and identity rather than because of any presumed sense of sameness within the group. Rania, a twenty-three-year-old community worker and consultant, described the experience of being with other young South Asian women as a means of support that did not presume friendship:

I think on a very small scale like just the act of us coming together every Wednesday as South Asian women and sharing, like we’re not friends but that’s the space that we need and then doing yoga and the session afterwards just kinda allows us to open up and talk about experiences that we have on a daily basis and how being South Asian women, how that affects us.

Shared identity was significant for the participants not because of assumed homogeneity but because of the potential to have a conversation about commonalities and differences. As Maya, a twenty-four-year-old nursing student said, “You don’t know their stories, you don’t know even if they have a story, but you know that we are all living in this world together and we’ve probably all encountered some sort of situations being South Asian.” A space for young South Asians does not ensure affinity; however, it can be a useful space to investigate identity, as articulated by Rekha, a third-year university student:

I’ve never felt like, oh, okay, I’m South Asian so I need to practice yoga, although I feel that sometimes that’s the way other people may look at me. I don’t think you have to be from South Asian descent to practice, but I do sometimes feel closer to the spirituality of it because I’m Hindu. I wanted to experience being with all brown women and doing yoga. Second, all these topics have such an importance to me and now just learning more has drawn me in even further. I knew that I wanted to be educated more about certain things, and I still do want to explore more.

Participants articulated a nuanced understanding of culture as fluid and as an important resource in knowledge production and identity making. Amrit, a mental health coordinator, addressed cultural stereotypes:

I think that probably in the Western world there is absolutely that “oh cool, she’s like that new wave artsy fartsy type and she’s in the helping profession and she does yoga”—there is that whole image and stereotype. I’m probably viewed that way, so that probably does impact or change my relationships with people. But I also think that there is that substantive quality of, like, I’m nicer, I’m much more mellow, I have a spiritual understanding of things and so I’m a lot less cruel to people. . . . I’m less openly argumentative about things because I understand that there is this mysticism in this world that I wasn’t open to before.

Amrit, while suggesting that her yoga practice may position her as a respectable New Age consumer, asserts that her interest in the practice is due to the substantive benefit to her lived experience and engagements with others.

The participants objected to the manner in which yoga is fetishized and commodified. They criticized the use of images of Hindu deities as decorations, the whiteness of yoga magazine imagery, and the economic and class aspects of yoga fashions exemplified by boutique yoga mats and pants. Some claimed that they avoid yoga studios because of the race and class dynamics they observe. However, none made the claim that only South Asians have a right to practice yoga. Furthermore, they claimed that it is inaccurate to assume that yoga is a culturally appropriate teaching and practice that resonates for all South Asians. Given the diversity of their social locations and identities, it is perhaps not surprising that participants challenged the idea that young South Asian women necessarily have familiarity with or an interest in yoga. When asked if yoga is part of her identity, Rania replied:

No, and I say no because there is this whole thing of, oh, you’re Indian, you must know how to do yoga. When I think of yoga, like I said before, I think of something Hindu, and I’m not Hindu. So that’s like a false assumption that all Indians practice yoga. And I think yoga practiced here is very different from the way it is practiced in India. So, I mean, I don’t see it as something specific to my identity at all.

Yoga is not part of her identity, but interestingly, the yoga workshops were an opportunity to explore it.

While some of the women in the project critically engaged yoga as culturally and historically situated, others saw it very much in the context of a health practice and as one of many options available to them. Shallini, a human resources professional, saw it from both perspectives:

I have West Indian background; there are few people [with that background] that are Hindu, and there is a majority that are Christian and their ancestors were Hindu. I know my great grandparents were. I think also that makes me want to learn about my culture, my background. . . . In all the magazines, you see that so and so is practicing yoga, Madonna, Sting, and they have excellent form, excellent shape. If you practice yoga, you can be like them.

Similarly, Zahra commented, “I didn’t have so much exposure to yoga, but I had an idea that it was becoming more popular. . . . I got really interested and I wanted to try it. It was exotic in its own way, and I decided I would give it a try. And I started.” Later, when asked if she reflected on her experience as a South Asian woman while learning yoga, Zahra said she did not. She was referred to the yoga workshops by her counsellor, and her understanding of yoga is in relation to health and healing rather than culture. She laughed when she described yoga as exotic, thereby implying its otherness; however, she also chose to participate in the workshop because it was for young South Asian women. Both Shallini and Zahra described yoga as a practice akin to other lifestyle and fitness commodities in the dominant culture, but issues of identity and culture figured in the subtext of their discussion.

The finding that young South Asian women are interested in yoga coincides with other research indicating that South Asians in Toronto turn to traditional healing practices when they have mental health needs that are not met by Western counselling practices (Rai 2009). My research indicates, though, that this is not without complex considerations. In addition to expressing an aversion to New Age yoga studios, some participants also said they avoid traditional healing resources offered in their communities. Amrit commented, “I’m not really down with organized religion. I don’t feel that our temples are places that are really inclusive and equitable.” Rekha similarly recounted, “I went through a period of time where I said, no, I don’t want to go to this religious place.” Zainab told of having abandoned her spiritual practice long ago: “Aspects of the ritual corrupted it for me so that I could no longer engage in it. And I’ve missed that for the years and years and years since I’ve stopped praying.” Amrit, Rekha, and Zainab indicate a wariness of religious institutions and teachings that efface social relations of power. Aanchal Rai (2009, 27) explains that within South Asian healing traditions, ideas such as karma (the result of past actions), God’s curse resulting from wrong deeds or lack of devotion, and destiny are prevalent. These teachings may efface social determinants of health such as social inequities (Wilkinson 2005). While Amrit, Zainab, and Rekha were referring to religious organizations, I argue that their comments are also applicable to yoga studios and ashrams, which are often institutional and hierarchical in structure and are didactic in a way that precludes critical engagement with yoga teachings and society at large.

I asked the women about their participation in healing traditions and knowledges other than yoga. The critique of how yoga has been culturally appropriated was reflected in comments about Indigenous teachings that are not part of their own cultural heritage. Mina, a graduate student, remarked:

I guess I find safety in practicing yoga because it does come from a place where I identify with and a culture that I can connect with. And I think I’m very wary of and I’m very conscious of cultural appropriation, particularly with Indigenous knowledge within North America and how that’s been taken and ripped apart and mainstreamed in the same sort of way that parts of yoga have.

Zainab expressed similar concerns:

I have been thinking of doing drumming as something similar but I have a lot of reservations and worries about cultural appropriation and appropriateness and how things can get captured. . . . I was wary about coming into some other culture’s practice and saying, like, okay, this seems to be more flexible and open so I can get in on it.

Rekha, on the other hand, explained how her yoga practice provides a foundation for understanding and participating in other healing traditions:

I think through practicing yoga, which has come from India, I’ve felt a desire to learn about other Indigenous cultures in Canada and in South Asia. . . . I feel very interested and drawn towards natural healing throughout all cultures. I think it also has to do with yoga and the way I’ve been brought up, being able to respect other people’s cultures and wanting to learn about them as well.

Rekha then described her experience attending a sweat lodge and how her yoga practice prepared her to “stay in the moment and challenge myself . . . to breathe and focus on not just the physical body and what you’re experiencing, because it’s so much more than that.” I asked Rekha about how the sweat lodge was conducted and by whom. She replied that it was conducted in a traditional way; however, the woman who conducted the ceremony was Croatian. Rekha explained that this woman has a deep respect for the ceremony and the culture from which she learned it and that an elder gave her permission to conduct the sweat lodge. Rekha also commented on the presence of an Indigenous man at the sweat lodge:

He was teaching us a lot, and he kept telling us that this woman knows so much about this culture. That was really important and really refreshing to see as well. I also appreciated the fact that the Native man was there to bring us through his own perspective and to sing prayers in his own language and allow us to experience the actual roots of what we were doing.

Rekha made several notable comments about her engagement with yoga and sweat lodge teachings. She explains how her yoga practice provided a framework for learning about and respecting the sweat lodge ceremony. She also explains that the ceremony was conducted by a Croatian woman who, Rekha said, was given permission by an elder to conduct the sweat lodge ceremony. This is, of course, controversial because many Indigenous people assert that given the past and current levels of colonialism and genocide, ceremonies should not be performed by non-Indigenous peoples (Smith 2005). However, Rekha reconciles her concerns about cultural appropriation by attributing authenticity to the Indigenous man who shared teachings at the sweat lodge ceremony. Rekha signals her concern with cultural appropriation and her account conveys the difficulty of negotiating participation as a cultural visitor in contexts where authenticity, ethics, and community consent and permission are complex and likely contested.

Candace, one of the yoga teachers I interviewed, self-identifies as a Cree woman with French ancestry. Like Rekha, she seeks permission and validation in her bid to avoid cultural appropriation. Speaking of an exchange between herself and an activist scholar and yoga practitioner visiting Toronto from India, Candace remarked:

She was really encouraging ’cause I felt somewhat, like, I know how it is being an Aboriginal woman and dealing with appropriation, and I felt very—I’m aware of that and I try not to pretend like I’m original to these instructions. I think that’s a really important thing, that us in the West, we tend to forget and not acknowledge, and it’s really important to acknowledge. So [she] really kind of made me feel at peace with just being here. She said something—really, I can’t remember exactly the words, but just she reminded me, you’re teaching here on Turtle Island and you are teaching to your people and you know it is okay.

Rekha and Candace both expressed concern about permission and guidance with regard to participating in a tradition to which they are visitors. On the surface, this raises the issue of tokenism and looking to “native informants” (Trinh 1989) for validation and proof of authenticity. Arguably, it also speaks to a politics of “ethical cultural connections” (Kadi 1996, 125) by acknowledging the importance of where traditions come from and whose ancestors carried them. However, other issues must be considered as well, such as how the difference between exploitation and colonization in South Asia affects yoga knowledges and practices, on the one hand, and the genocidal settler colonization in the Americas and how this has impacted the knowledges of Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, on the other. For example, the protocols for participating in yoga studios are framed through neoliberal markets; participation is based on tuition fees. While the practice of initiation and mentorship may have been protocol for transmitting yoga teachings in the past, and may still figure in different (sometimes abusive) ways now, for the most part, the ability to pay for instruction is the determining qualification for learning yoga in the West—and increasingly in South Asia as well, since yoga teachings have become centralized through the ashram model and commercialization. Protocols for participating in Indigenous ceremonies such as the sweat lodge are not the same as those for studying yoga. While one can always find opportunities to attend a sweat lodge, marketing this experience to settlers should be approached with as much skepticism and critical thinking as one would approach naked or surfboard yoga instruction. Interestingly, Rekha and Candace expressed similar concerns about cultural appropriation; however, their comments also raise questions about differences in knowledges and practices. Similarities in yogic and sweat lodge teachings pertain to the material body in terms of breath and emotions, but discursive practices and knowledge production within different traditions will vary widely, especially with respect to New Age reinterpretation, neoliberal commercial practices, and colonial contexts.

While examples of people (including people of colour) appropriating and commercializing Indigenous and traditional health knowledges abound, many others are held accountable and act responsibly regarding membership and participation in cultural and community spaces where these knowledges are taught and practiced. The spread of yoga is a good example of this: yoga has been reinterpreted for commercial gain and in support of New Age ideologies, but it has also been used in activist communities as a response to the consequences of social inequities, with only some of these initiatives led by South Asians. For example, people of African descent, many of whom see the roots of yoga as African as well as South Asian (Shola Arewa 1998), and other racially marginalized communities have integrated yoga into their protocols and goals (Chavis 1998).

Reinterpreting yogic knowledge as a resource for challenging social inequities is a very different project than adapting yogic teachings to support New Age consumption and neoliberal individualism. The latter effaces social relations of power while the former aims to correct power imbalances. “The difference between appropriation and proliferation,” notes Gloria Anzaldúa (1990, xxi), “is that the first steals and harms; the second helps heal breaches of knowledge.” The pertinent question regarding the Croatian woman who conducts the sweat lodge that Rekha attended is whether it is an appropriation, and if not, what criteria are met to ensure that the ceremony she conducts helps rather than harms. This is an important consideration given her social location. However, it is a criterion that is also required of Indigenous people conducting ceremonies. Jade Harper (2016), an Indigenous woman who teaches yoga in Winnipeg, carefully considers how to integrate yogic, Cree, and Ojibwe teachings. She comments on the importance of building relationships with elders and yoga instructors with whom she works:

I build relationships with people, and to me, that is really important because when I started learning my traditional ways when I was seven years old, that was the first time I went to a lodge. I learned that learning our teachings is a part of who we are and using them is a part of our inherent right. And so, I think that through building relationships, people get to know me and understand that my intentions with sharing this information or sharing our traditional ways is coming from a good place. It is not about being a commodity as much as, I think, that it is a part of also bridging.

When asked about how she would respond to challenges about presenting Indigenous teachings in yoga classes, Jade responded:

It is more about a conversation. To be honest, I don’t really look forward to it, but I do look forward to that conversation happening at some point [laughs]. I know that I’m treading on—I’m embarking on something a bit new. It’s not out of ill intent or that I am trying to sell ceremony or trying to exploit an entire ancient tradition of yoga, which is not a part of my culture, and that is something I am actually learning about. I am very committed to learning about Indian culture and yoga because I know that there are so many other connections beyond yoga, like colonization.

While some yoga schools tend to claim an original authentic yoga, the diversity of teachings complicates this assertion. This is not to say that yoga teachings are, in the postmodern sense, open to any and all interpretations, devoid of history and context. Rather, it is a matter of yogic knowledge being created in the context of community instead of in the domain of any one individual or group. Yogic knowledge is subject to exegetical debate and contestation, ideological tensions, and a wide range of practical applications. I argue that talking about what yoga is may be less productive than theorizing “how we live our yoga” (Jeremijenko 2001) and how we engage in critical dialogue about it, including discussions about how to practice yoga in counterhegemonic ways that defy cultural appropriation. The interviews with Candace and Rekha may be read as both a critical and an unresolved attempt to think about what it means to teach yoga as a First Nation woman and to participate in a sweat lodge ceremony as a young South Asian woman on Turtle Island. In their work with Indigenous women, Denise Nadeau and Alannah Young (2006, 97) address the issue of cultural appropriation and make the point that negotiation and attention to power relations are crucial considerations: “Negotiating ceremonies and protocols is a co-creative process that reflects and maintains equitable power dynamics. The appropriate protocol is to acknowledge historical relationships and identify how to demonstrate power-sharing and enhance community vitality in accordance with the traditional teachings.” Participants in my study struggle with cultural appropriation and power relationships when learning Indigenous knowledges as insiders and outsiders.

Anne-Marie, a yoga teacher of African, South Asian, European, and Caribbean Indigenous ancestry, commented on a different aspect of the ethics of cultural appropriation. She is frustrated when subordinated peoples are denied, or deny themselves, teachings that could benefit them.

You know if there is anything that gets my back up against a wall, it’s when people can’t even choose something. They must be able to make that choice. I feel really badly in the sense that there’s all these people, these Caribbean people, suffering, and when other groups of people who have more privilege suffer, they feel fine about going here, getting this kind of healing, going over there and getting that kind of healing, and [if] all that didn’t work, I’ll go do acupuncture. . . . They think about all of the things, as long as they can get to know about them, they just include all of these modalities as, like, a big buffet and that it is their right to go and try them and see how it works. Then you have this group who are suffering, and they are allowed by their religious leaders only one thing. That, to me, is the saddest thing. It is just so sad because what it actually does, and it’s really opposite to what they want it to do, what it actually does is reinforces the slave mentality of being regulated and confined and not allowed to try these things. It’s actually so reinforcing of the mindset, the cultural mindset of slavery that I actually find it scary that it’s not understood that way. But they can’t see what it’s actually doing to that group of people what has always been done to them.

Anne-Marie asserted that it is important to acknowledge where yoga comes from, especially when teaching South Asian women. However, as the quotation above indicates, she also feels that everyone should be able to access remedies that will help them, especially those who have suffered oppression. She commented that in the Caribbean community in which she works, Christian prayer is prescribed as the only option for healing. In attempting to work around this, she finds ways to adapt teachings—for example making connections between yogic teachings and the experiences of her students.

I’ll talk about the idea of kundalini and that the literal translation as I received it is the lock of the hair of the beloved. And that is, for the Caribbean person coming from Christianity who can’t hear about snakes and women without having alarm bells going off—to have a coil of love at the base of the spine seems to be okay. I also sometimes will talk a little bit about how in Egyptian pyramids—in papyruses, those kind of things—there were also images of shoulder stands and energy wheels for the body, and all of those things, to try to bring yoga through India back to Africa if I feel that it’s going to help.

Similarly, Candace makes links between yoga and Indigenous knowledges in North America:

I find that there is a strong connection to the land with yoga, and even if you go to Ayurveda, which is an extension of yoga—I mean, you know, the elements, and I mean there are many connections. Well, obviously, with the fasting—fasting is a ritual or a practice among Indigenous people. . . . I could definitely see the links there. And meditation, I mean, vision quests are meditative, whether they have a certain technique, it is a little bit different but it’s experiential basically. When it gets right down to it, that’s the fundamental similarity I think between Indigenous ways, First Nations or North America, and Eastern philosophy and yoga is experiential learning.

Similar to Anne-Marie’s adaptation of yoga teachings to suit the context she works in, Candace recalled that during a yoga class, one of her students became triggered by the sound of a chime, commonly used in yoga classes to signal the end of the class, because it reminded him of bells used in residential school.

I’ve had questions about are you going to be indoctrinating, because it is a Hindu belief system and people are aware of that, and I think there are a lot of sensitivities, particularly with the Aboriginal community because of residential schools and, you know, assimilation policies and that sort of thing. There are those, you know, people are, have their guards up in some cases, so I think that’s probably the biggest concern that I face presenting and offering this to Aboriginal communities.

Anne-Marie and Candace remarked that teaching yoga in their communities is not without challenges related to culture and history, particularly the history of slavery, colonialism, and cultural assimilation. Despite these complexities, they remain committed to the pursuit of practices such as yoga because of its health benefits.

The young women and yoga teachers interviewed claim yoga as an important resource; however, they also problematize hegemonic approaches to yogic knowledge production and practice. They address the paradoxes arising from cultural appropriations and the notion that yoga is culturally appropriate for anyone who is of South Asian ancestry; they object to the idea that cultural spaces where yoga may be offered are necessarily accessible and/or helpful. Pursuing these themes further, Mina’s thoughts on identity and embodied experience are worth quoting at length.

If you ask me who I am, I’ll say I’m a South Asian woman, I’m Punjabi Sikh, and I’m a student, and this is who I am. And I guess yoga would be more sort of removing yourself from that and looking at yourself as I am, a whole person . . . like, I don’t know how you would describe that. But it is another way of approaching how we look at who we are ourselves and how we build that notion of that. . . . And it [yoga] humbles you and it sort of removes yourself from that and [you] are maybe able to look at yourself just for your own spiritual, emotional, and physical self as opposed to all these other trappings. And physical in a very, sort of, these-are-my-legs sort of way, not just in an appearance sort of way. . . . I’ve sort of been struggling with the identity game in a lot of ways. I do take a lot of power and I do think there are a lot of positive things that can come out of your identity, but I also think that even intellectually, I’ve reached a point where I’m finding that a bit limiting. And it seems the politics in this sort of area, like the lefty politics and in academia, is based solely around the identity games and using those to sort of state your case. . . . And then there’s the horrible tokenism that comes out of that. So I guess I’m just personally trying to struggle with that.

Here, Mina addresses the importance of a strong social identity as well as its limits. Violence and oppression impact individuals in every way—mind, body, emotions, and spirit, as well as self-perception and identity. While acknowledging the need to address this in, for example, identity-based group work with young South Asian women, Mina suggests that it is important to understand ourselves as more than socially constructed beings. Without privileging one over the other or seeing these concerns in conflict with one another, Mina struggles to acknowledge both. Given that binaries and dichotomies underpin many forms of oppression, this acknowledgement is useful in asserting that one need not be forced to choose between healing and social engagement or between social identities and practices that allow for strategically transcending the artifice of social divisions, despite their very real consequences.

Sonia, a yoga teacher who identified as a Punjabi Sikh woman and whose ancestry is from the Pakistan region of pre-partition Punjab, stated,

I believe fundamentally in personal responsibility and I am in no way suggesting that people ask for violent situations or anything like that. I mean, no way am I even going there . . . I mean, there is no denying that the options are ultimately limited, but I do feel, I guess this is my spiritual belief, that each person has a tiny window of opportunity to find a sense of peace and a sense of happiness in whatever situation that they are in. . . . I just feel, ultimately, I don’t want people to feel disempowered. That’s where I’m coming from in my heart, is that I don’t want anyone to feel like they have no options.

Sonia will not let go of the importance of personal responsibility, not because she underestimates the consequences of violence and oppression but because she sees individual agency as a crucial resource for overcoming victimization. Although her belief in personal responsibility could be taken to resonate with health-promotion discourses of New Age, neoliberalism, and behaviour modification, I would argue that her acknowledgement of the potential misunderstanding of how she takes up individual agency constitutes a counterhegemonic approach to healing. Patricia Hill Collins (1990, 237) has similarly theorized that

the existence of Afrocentric feminist thought suggests that there is always choice, and power to act, no matter how bleak the situation may be. Viewing the world as one in the making raises the issue of individual responsibility for bringing about change. It also shows that while individual empowerment is key, only collective action can effectively generate lasting social transformation of political and economic institutions.

The struggle to reconcile individual agency with the need for structural social transformation is complicated by the ways in which agency and systemic determinants of health are dichotomized. For example, to regard individual agency as important coincides with New Age and health-promotion discourses that efface social inequities. However, to deny the importance of individual agency is also to deny the importance of that window of opportunity so crucial to healing as a form of resistance. Participants suggest that acknowledging and challenging the structures of social inequity need not dismiss the importance of individual agency, resistance, and creative actions. Finding a window of opportunity does not dismiss the reality that some windows are very small and difficult, if not impossible, to access. However, survival often depends on individual agency. As Sara Ahmed (2004, 201) argues,

For those whose lives have been torn apart by violence, or those for whom the tiredness of repetition in everyday life becomes too much to bear, feeling better does and should matter. Feeling better is not a sign that justice has been done, and nor should it be reified as the goal of political struggle. But feeling better does still matter, as it is about learning to live with the injuries that threaten to make life impossible.

Attunement to sentient-social embodiment becomes a counterhegemonic healing strategy when women participate in identity formation and use their agency to feel better by “making sense” of their experience, “not covering over” the wounds they have incurred living through violence and oppression (197).

Roxana Ng (2011, 351) explains that observing ourselves, what we do and who we present ourselves as, involves recognizing deeply ingrained patterns that may go unnoticed. “Once hegemonic ideas become common sense,” she contends, “they are condensed in our emotional and physical beings—in how we relate to women and minority groups, for example, and in how we see and relate to ourselves. In short, they become patterns of behaviour.” Countering hegemonic ideas involves attending to perceptions about who we are in relation to others and what we do in our interpersonal interactions. Furthermore, as Ng explains, change is not only a matter of thinking differently but also involves emotional and physical transformation: “It draws our attention to how the body, emotion and spirit are involved in the learning process: what we embrace and resist, and why” (353).

In Denise Noble’s (2005) discussion of the Sacred Woman program, a self-help Afrocentric healing program for women of African ancestry, she argues that “critiques of essentialism must be historicised and contextualised, for there are no identities devoid of essentialist elements and moments” (151). As with Noble’s research participants, the young women in my study convey an “engaged cultural criticism,” which Noble describes as consideration of “whether there may paradoxically be emancipatory elements in moments of essentialism, which can be brought to give voice to criticism from within” (151). The young South Asian women in my study exhibited a complex and strategic understanding and use of identity. They claimed a racialized and gendered location in opposition to racism and sexism; however, they also resisted essentializing definitions of South Asian experiences. As Mina suggested, the limiting aspects of identity categories must be addressed, including the ways that “people reify binaristically constructed concepts of self, gender, race, and a host of other categories with which they identify and to which they become deeply attached at the same time that they assign the oppositional terms to others” (Orr 2002, 491). The young women and yoga teachers attest that this can only be accomplished through a sophisticated approach to embodiment rather than through renouncing or dismissing it as essentialist. Additionally, transcendence is not understood as an escape or a place in which to permanently reside. Rather, it fosters nonjudgment and the opportunity to observe more deeply the contours of our sentient-social embodiment. Putting this awareness to use in everyday life is an important aspect of resisting and finding respite from violence and oppression.

Conclusion

The women I interviewed affirmed that sentient-social embodied attunement is an important strategy for contending with social inequity and its impacts on health and healing. They considered how yoga can be used as a counterhegemonic healing strategy through a careful critique of cultural appropriation. I address New Age, neoliberal, and colonial reinterpretations of yoga in the context of settler colonialism in Canada in order to consider the experiences of participants in this study. Identity is discussed at length as an important resource and many of the women explained how they rely on it when coping with and resisting social inequities. However, they also expressed interest in knowledges and practices that examine the socially constructed aspects of identities. They explore yogic teachings not as an escape or denial of identity and social context but rather as a resource for understanding and contending with material realities. Furthermore, their interviews offer a critique of essentialist notions of identity—and indeed, of yoga itself. In other words, the young South Asian women and yoga teachers explored social identities to counter racism and colonialism and as a challenge to cultural essentialism. In doing so, they contributed to the ongoing discussion about cultural appropriation and culturally appropriate services through a nuanced and critical examination of social relations of power and strategies for resisting violence and oppression.

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1  All the participants in my research study have been given pseudonyms. I extend my thanks to them all for their insights and for allowing me to quote their comments.

2  I am grateful to relatives Jane (née Rundle) Barnacki and Theresa Faubert who shared research about our family history with me.

3  The Toronto Purchase is currently being challenged by the Mississaugas of the New Credit in land claims negotiations with the Canadian government. See Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation, Toronto Purchase Specific Claim: Arriving at an Agreement, n.d., http://www.newcreditfirstnation.com/uploads/1/8/1/4/18145011/torontopurchasebkltsm.pdf.

4  Haudenosaunee are the people of the longhouse. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy includes the Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondoga, Seneca, and Tuscarora peoples (Sunseri 2011, 9). See Kanesatake: 270 Years of Resistance, directed by renowned filmmaker Alanis Obamsawin (1993), for a detailed history of the Mohawk peoples and documentation of the 1992 Oka “crisis” as a continuation of anticolonial struggle for self-determination.

5  Reena Virk was a fourteen-year-old South Asian girl who was murdered on 14 November 1997 by two white youth, a young man and woman, who had never met her before the night she was killed (Rajiva and Batacharya 2010). Hamed Nastoh, a young South Asian man, committed suicide on 11 March 2000. He experienced homophobic torments from his school peers (Walton, 2005).