Pretty Heart

A couple of reasons that free yoga classes are held and advertised in predominantly Indian spaces so often, when Indians make up a very small portion of the US:

Because Indians are awesome! :D

Because if you market to anyone else you have to pay thousands of dollars to get white people’s yoga certification, no matter if you have been doing yoga all your life, no matter that your gurus, with a teaching lineage that can be traced back centuries, have given you permission to teach (sometimes with a shiny modern certificate attached natch!). You require white people validation, which usually costs thousands of dollars, and you require membership to a white people’s yoga teaching association, something like that, am unclear about the details of all this except for the fact that it, once again, costs a lot of money. If you don’t jump through these white people’s hoops, even if you are doing this on your own free time and charging absolutely nothing, you will not be seen as qualified (to teach what is yours; to teach what you have been practicing all your life) and you might be held liable if something goes wrong.

So, be careful with giving free yoga classes to people (even if they are lower-income people who have so few other options for preventative health care) unless they are Indian. Because not only have clueless appropriative white people completely mangled yoga in pretty much every way possible by turning it into some hobby plaything (it is supposed to be a way of life and the asans are only a small small part of it) for the well off, they have made it horridly difficult for anyone else to teach it the way it should be.

This isn’t even getting into the mess where the US patent office is apparently ready to award patents for yoga asans to whichever complete and utter waste of space sell-out has gotten there first to exclusively claim a practice thousands of years old, created and refined for the good of all people, as his own personal property in order to profit off it. And Indian organizations and the Indian government are trying to prevent that, and are being attacked by people saying that yoga isn’t an Indian or a Hindu thing, and therefore we have no claim to do this. And does this mean one of these days we will have cops bursting through the doors of temples to charge volunteer yoga teachers with teaching the sun salutation without a license? The ridiculousness of having to live in this society, I can’t even begin to explain it.