Stop Overthinking and Show Up Instead

Just walk through the open doors.

Photo by natasha t on Unsplash

I think about white women who do yoga a lot. I don’t mean this in a fetish sense: I mean this very quizzically.

This isn’t a think-piece about the cultural blindness that comes when an ancient Eastern spiritual art gets recontextualized and reappropriated as a fashionable fitness craze. No, that’s been done before, and it’s been done better. But I would like to discuss what people get out of it.

This isn’t breaking news. Apparently, other people have asked these same questions. From two separate academic surveys in 2013 and 2014:

More than 90 percent of people come to yoga for flexibility, stress relief, health, and physical fitness. But, for most people, their primary reason for doing yoga will change. Two-thirds of yoga students and 85 percent of yoga teachers have a change of heart regarding why they do yoga — most often changing to spirituality or self-actualization, a sense of fulfilling their potential. Yoga offers self-reflection, the practice of kindness and self-compassion, and continued growth and self-awareness.

It’s interesting to see this laid out in so few words, in a Western context, and juxtapose the practice of yoga with its roots. The modern mystics appear to be finding the same sort of peace…