On appropriation and appreciation of Yoga

I grew up with yoga, not in a studio with polished floors and curated playlists, but in the heartbeat of India, where it lived in everyday breath.

I grew up surrounded by it.

Yoga was in our mornings, in our classrooms, in the quiet hum of my father chanting OM before the world stirred awake.

It wasn’t something to schedule. It was simply a way of life.

Years later, a well-known person from the city asked me if my training in Rishikesh the yoga capital of the world was “any good,” because, to him, it seemed too commercial. Rishikesh. A city filled with seekers, yes but mostly Western ones.

People who looked like him. People who fly in, extract what they want, stamp their name on it, and then question my roots in the very place their practice tries to imitate.

This is what colonization does. It confuses the colonized into believing their own knowledge might not be legitimate enough.

But I didn’t come to yoga through a teacher training certificate.

I came to it through life through blood, through repetition, through culture. I came to it through watching Indian women in sarees and salwars stretch and breathe, not in Lululemon leggings, but in wisdom passed down through generations.

Yoga wasn’t something we branded.

It wasn’t a business model.

It wasn’t filtered through apps and slogans.

It was sacred. It is sacred.

So when I see yoga in the West fragmented, rebranded, whitewashed….

I feel the weight of what’s been taken.

It’s not just the practice, but the erasure.

The absence of Indian voices, Indian faces, Indian teachers in a space that was born from us.

Do you ever ask yourself why?

Why don’t you see more Indian yogis represented?

Why is traditional yoga too “slow,” too “spiritual,” too “cultural” to be popular?

Why must it be modified to be palatable?

This version of wellness , detached from community, from dharma, from sacredness triggers something deep in those of us who carry the intergenerational wounds of colonization.

It isn’t just about yoga.

It’s about memory. Identity. Loss.

I stepped away from teaching yoga for a while.

Not because I stopped believing in it, but because I needed to return to it, not through the lens of how the West wanted it from me,

but through the eyes of my ancestors,

through the stillness of my own soul,

through a decolonized lens that honors where I come from, not just what I can offer.

Yoga isn’t mine to sell.

It’s my inheritance to protect.