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[quote=Anonymous]I feel the need to emphatically state this, after having my white, atheist friend insist to me that she was a "yogi" because she was a certified yoga structor and doing yoga help make her feel emotionally centered.

Um, no. You are not a yogi.

1. Yoga isn't a corporate fitness program where you can just get certifications like you're teaching fucking pure barre and Pilates. It's a religious practice, and the physical asanas are just one very, very narrow part of it. "Namaste" does not have a watered-down New Age meaning like, "I bow to the light within you." It means "I bow to the God within you." External yoga is useless without internal yoga - meditation, pranayama, etc - and the purpose is to achieve union with the Divine.

2. You feeling good about yourself does not mean you can appropriate a religious practice, strip the religion out of it, corporatize it, and repackage is at "wellness" or some crap like that. Also, Om symbols and malas aren't decorative, thanks.

3. Do not talk to me about how Yoga has its roots in a Vedic religion that pre-dates Hinduism and Buddhism. Vedic practices led to Puranic practices, and Vedic practices are still widespread in the Hindu community today. They are central, in fact, as the Vedanta comes straight from the Vedas, not the modern Puranic flavor of Hinduism. Yoga's explicit purpose is to achieve union with God also excludes it from being a vaguely Buddhist/Jain practice, since neither of those religions believe in worship or a creator deity (though they do have deities, at least Buddhism does, but they don't have a creator and they don't want union with a creator).

4. Playing semantics with the term "Hinduism" is grasping at straws. At this point, it definitely does not just refer to "people in this particular region", even if the name originated from that meaning, and the vastness and diversity in the Hindu religious complex does not preclude it being considered one religion. Westerners have no problem using the term "Hinduism" to define a single religion in polls, national surveys, news articles and any other writing...but when it comes to discussing yoga, then we have to argue about what Hinduism means.

I just had to get that off my chest. Thanks for reading![/quote]

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