soil, and she creates a spiritual practice of yoga that is uniquely her own. In Yoke, she grapples with the contradictions of practicing a South Asian tradition on U.S. is inextricably bound up in the country’s history of racism, capitalism, and settler colonialism. When she walked out of the workshop, Stanley broke from what she calls the white American “yoga-industrial-complex.” For her, yoga in the U.S. The teacher smirked and told her that if she did not feel a connection to Classical yoga, it was because she did not know enough about the practice.Īs Stanley writes in Yoke, “Classical yoga, the Vedas, and Sanskrit are rooted in South Asian culture, with particular connective tissue in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, among many other faiths.” For her, the teacher’s approach to yoga not only appropriated South Asian traditions, it also erased Stanley’s Black American lineage: “it made me feel as though I was being told to steal someone else’s cultural identity and nullify my own.” Stanley told the group she did not see herself as a Classical yoga practitioner. When she had called out cultural appropriation and the lack of South Asian representation in her earlier yoga teacher training, none of the other trainees saw it as a problem. She knew she would likely be the sole dissenting voice in the room. Stanley found the courage to raise her hand. She had made a name for herself as a “fat, Black, queer yoga teacher in a predominantly thin, White, and very straight yoga industry.” And she was growing increasingly uncomfortable with how white Americans-including the tattooed man leading this workshop-had taken up yoga. Stanley’s first book, Every Body Yoga, had just come out. She found herself increasingly uncomfortable as he encouraged his students to see themselves as part of a South Asian lineage of Classical yoga.

His arms were tattooed with Sanskrit, the ancient Indo-European language of classic yoga texts like the Yoga Sutras. In Jessamyn Stanley’s 2021 collection of autobiographical essays, Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance , she recalls taking a class with a popular white yoga teacher in North Carolina and feeling uneasy. By Harmonist staff 1 Review: Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptanceīy Vani Kannan, originally published by The Revealer.

Yoke by Jessamyn Stanley