Deep Cut pulls from our bonus episode archive to unearth previous ideas that remain relevant today.
News from Alabama: after a 23-year ban on yoga in schools, generated by a Republican moral panic, Governor Kay Ivey signs a bill that lets kids do yoga again, but with some restrictions:
"All instruction in yoga shall be limited exclusively to poses, exercises, and stretching techniques. All poses shall be limited exclusively to sitting, standing, reclining, twisting, and balancing. All poses, exercises, and stretching techniques shall have exclusively English descriptive names. Chanting, mantras, mudras, use of mandalas, induction of hypnotic states, guided imagery, and namaste greetings shall be expressly prohibited."
Those who promote yoga as universal goodwill welcome this Indian art form being made more accessible for children in a State with terrible educational markers. Hindu nationalists, on the other hand, might be outraged at a secularized version of yoga, stripped not only of references to Hinduism but of signs of any type of Indian spirituality. And a lot of white yoga progressives will look at this policy—mostly from the urban North— and worry about authenticity and appropriation.
How will the children feel?
In considering who wins and loses with this new development, Matthew reviews recent U.S. yoga-war history: battles between the Hindu American Foundation and Yoga Journal, the rise of Christian non-yoga-yoga "Praise Moves", and Encinitas Union School District got sued for allegedly violating the Establishment Clause by contracting devotees of Pattabhi Jois to teach the kids yoga.
It's not a stretch to see an overlap between this theme and the medical-moral panic over vaccines. In both cases, the focus is on the imagined corruption of children, whether by poison, politics, or inner quiet.
Go to HelloFresh.com/50conspirituality and use code 50conspirituality for 50% off plus free shipping.
Deep Cut Intro Music
Single Origins — Pete Kuzma
Show Notes
Alabama lifts three-decade-old ban on yoga in public schools—with a catch.
New study ranks Alabama as 43rd for student achievement, grade of D+
12 Reasons Why Yoga is NOT Good for Christians
Hindu Group Stirs Debate in Fight for Soul of Yoga
Hindu American Foundation: Hindu Roots of Yoga
Shukla's letter: Is Hindu a bad word?
Explained: The Hindu American Foundation’s defamation case against Hindus for Human Rights founders
Audrey Truschke's tweet
Over 300 Writers, Academics and Scholars Repudiate HAF's Attempt to Silence Hindus for Human Rights — Hindus for Human Rights
Detroit's Satanic Statue Has A Political Point to Make
Encinitas school yoga lawsuit stretches on
Yoga-for-Trophy-Wives Fitness Fad That’s Alienating Discipline Devotees
Next Article Yoga's Culture of Sexual Abuse: Nine Women Tell Their Stories
Candy Gunther Brown amicus brief for the plaintiffs, against the yoga programme
Mark Singleton amicus brief for the defendants, for the yoga programme
Chris Chapple amicus brief for the defendants, for the yoga programme
Yoga Alliance amicus brief for the defendants, for the yoga programme
Sedlock v. Baird - Brown’s summary
SEDLOCK v. Yes! Yoga for Encinitas Students, Intervener and Respondent
Yes! Yoga for Encinitas Students filing
The World's Most Influential Yoga Teacher is a Homophobic Right-Wing Activist
Translation of the Dattātreyayogaśāstra, the earliest text to teach haṭhayoga
Barkataki: How to Decolonize Your Yoga Practice
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Conspiracuality Podcast.
My name is Matthew Remsky, and this is a deep cut from our archive.
It's called What Will Yoga Do to Our Children?
So two years ago, when the culture wars were at a slightly lower pitch, for instance, this is several months before James Lindsay unleashed OK Groomer on the world, initiating a new escalation of moral panickery around the fate of all the little children.
I published this quiet little essay on a news story out of Alabama about how Governor Kay Ivey signed a bill that ended a 23-year ban on yoga being taught in K-12 schools in the state.
But the catch was that the new yoga programs had to be stripped of any extra-physical meaning.
It was a quiet story, as I said, but I think there's a lot in it when we consider the most volatile front in the culture war, the inner lives of children.
Almost every item on the reactionary hit list, from the literature they say is grooming them, to critical race theory, to vaccines, it's all about trying to read and also control the black box of the child's experience.
And this becomes a key feature of the ableism wielded against autistic children especially, because their uniqueness turns them into the morbid fetish object of conspiracy theorists and in some cases the aspirational fetish object of the new ager.
When RFK Jr.
says that he can look in a child's eyes and tell if they are vaccinated or not, he's not just talking about poison or injury.
He's imagining his way into the child's mind.
The decades-old concern over yoga in schools, especially amongst evangelical Christians, has always been framed around nativist concerns.
Children should not be exposed to false idols, only Jesus and the flag.
Of course, this has racist overtones as well.
But in this essay, I argue that there's a deeper anxiety at play when parents get spooked by their children doing yoga or breath meditation.
It's that they may find quiet.
Empty space, perhaps a way of thinking on their own.
They might find the internal room for change, reconsideration, new discoveries, or questions.
And that is perhaps far more dangerous than idolatry or the fear that the child could suddenly change teams.
finding internal space might encourage the child to stop playing altogether.
What will yoga do to our children?
An interesting story came across the transom last week.
The headline and slate was, Alabama lifts three decade old ban on yoga in public schools.
With a catch.
So, after a 23-year ban on the teaching of yoga in the public schools of Alabama, new legislation is opening the doors again.
And it's undoing, according to the report, quote, a 1993 Alabama Board of Education move to prohibit the practice of yoga, as well as meditation, in the state schools.
A push that was fueled by what the Montgomery Advertiser described as a moral panic among the state's right-wing conservative set.
Okay, so they're lifting this ban on yoga, but they've imposed some conditions, and here's from the text of the bill.
All instruction in yoga shall be limited exclusively to poses, exercises, and stretching techniques.
All poses shall be limited exclusively to sitting, standing, reclining, twisting, and balancing.
All poses, exercises, and stretching techniques shall have exclusively English descriptive names.
Chanting, mantras, mudras, use of mandalas, induction of hypnotic states, guided imagery, and namaste greetings shall be expressly prohibited.
So, on one hand, this story is about a red state with some of the lowest educational achievement ratings in the country, loosening up, seeing the light, allowing kids to do some damn yoga, although without all of the ostensibly religious trappings.
If there are any, we'll get to that.
But on a deeper level, this story is about how a culture war over religious identity, with serious implications for geopolitics, becomes narrowed down to an obsession over the inner lives of children.
Okay, so where am I coming from with this?
I'm turning 50 this year, and when I went to an anachronistically traditional Catholic school in the 1970s and 1980s, I was taught to pray all of the prayers.
Often the prayers were performed in public, in class, at church rituals.
And I remember a lot of tension between the words and the meanings and the bodily affect one was meant to have, an affect of deference or surrender.
As a crowd control technique, it had its utility.
Teachers couldn't tell if you were having the appropriately pious feelings, but they could tell whether you had stopped goofing off, whether you were placid.
The other performative zone for prayer in my world was occupied by the nonna squads.
These were older Italian or Portuguese women, often in mourning, wearing black, who would sit together in a section of the church to somberly and really, really quickly recite the rosary.
They were also stiff and resolute in their own way, but not like us boys.
It was more that their recitations were holding the rhythms of their communities together, much like their recipes held together their tables.
Their husbands had died of lung cancer, chain smoking on the construction or landscaping crews.
Their sons were out drinking.
But the rosary held them in history like a glittering fence around a perfect garden.
In the prayer instruction I received, there were a few hints that pointed to what prayer might be like in privacy.
There was this one kindly closeted gay priest who welcomed us to a retreat one time with a joke.
I hope you all brought your mirrors because we're going to do a lot of reflecting this weekend.
Sometimes you'd see the priests alone in the chapel.
I remember seeing Father Armstrong in the dingy school chapel, sitting in these slanting bars of dusty sunlight.
I remember wondering if he was lonely.
I also remember that if he went to confession, you were given prayers as penance, and those were to be done in private, of course.
I remember being haunted by the verse from St.
Matthew.
When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men.
But when you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father who is unseen.
So my take was that Jesus was saying that the inner life was private.
It had nothing to do with these buildings, or with anything a person taught you to do, or with any display.
I think that later on I took that verse into my writing life.
Before the internet, writing was an utterly cloistered process for me.
I do know one man who works like that still.
He's in his 70s.
He writes novels that are exquisitely untouched by the online world.
He has no social media accounts and never will.
Imagine that.
I wonder if I'll ever have that level of solitude again.
I remember that in the first room I rented in the Annex in Toronto, 1988, there was no plaster on the walls.
I was 17.
I had a desk and a chair made from milk crates.
I had candles at night because the lights were out.
I stayed up most of the night to write, maybe waking up with a few lines completed.
And that was my pre-internet confessional.
That's what prayer eventually became for me.
The one thing about that prayer, however, that was never in doubt, whether in the public performance or the private experience, was the content of belief.
The content was Christian mystery and doctrine.
The object of the prayer was God or Jesus or the Holy Spirit.
Once in a while, as a child, I would sit under the dome of the cathedral, alone, and give my inner voices permission to be quiet.
But I could only really do that within the container of the prayers, As though they had cut the proper grooves into my mind to make sure the blessings of God would flow inward and properly and support what I already knew to be true.
That creation was of God and so was human growth as well as trials and the triumphs that would bring us back to Him.
I can't actually remember when I became agnostic and then perhaps even atheistic.
It had to do mainly with seeing the blatant hypocrisy of clerics.
Seeing how wide a gap there was between the platitudes and the behaviors.
I remember that quite quickly, sitting in the cathedral, shifted from a glowing awe to a sense of anxiety as my piety dissolved.
That said something about the awe.
The awe had clearly been a defense against something more palpable.
And one day, the most disquieting thought occurred to me.
I could think anything in here.
I could think about history, war, boxing, gambling, pop music, pornography.
The content of that cathedral could be pushed out, and I was free to fill it with anything.
And that was terrifying.
It was as though my mind could turn into Pandora's box, only in reverse.
So in my early 20s, I'd been agnostic or atheistic for several years at the point at which my partner at the time brought me to a meditation teaching on a rainy night in Dublin.
It was some Tibetan guy.
I hated every minute of it.
I felt like I was crawling out of my skin as he nattered on and on in his terrible English.
But then he gave the first meditation instruction.
On the inhale, ask yourself the question in your mind, Who am I?
On the exhale, answer that same question, Don't know.
Who am I?
Don't know.
Who am I?
Don't know.
It might have been three or four rounds into the practice before I realized that I was weeping.
And why was that?
Because it seemed in that moment to me that the emptiness of that cathedral in my childhood did not need to be filled with garbage and seductions if I opened myself up.
It could be a place where I admitted that I did not know what life was or who I was.
And if I could admit those things, maybe I could stop pretending that I'm supposed to have it all figured out.
Perhaps something new would be available.
These days, as a father, I get to witness this with my children almost daily.
I can watch their eyes widen and deepen with some nameless learning.
Now, I don't use words like sacred much, but that's how I describe the best of these moments.
And the defining principle is, I don't know what they are learning, specifically.
I know that it's ambivalent, it's complex, that it's digging in deep, and it will lead them to some unknown place.
So back to the Alabama story.
I just can't get these memories out of my head when I think about this culture war in the U.S.
about yoga in schools, in which Christian parents are convinced that yoga is a Trojan horse of good feelings that will open their children's hearts to Satan.
Now, if I was 10 years old today, I might find myself in a school health or phys ed class where the meditation instructions of that Tibetan Lama, whoever he was, might be served up in the language of mindfulness or contemplation.
The instructor would probably be a young woman, someone who got her yoga teacher's certificate while she was going through teacher's college.
And what would I feel listening to her instructions?
When she told me to relax my shoulders and eyes.
To follow my breath.
To watch my thoughts float by like clouds.
I mean, I can't entirely be sure, but I do know it would be light years different from what I grew up with as a Christian.
To have an adult give me permission to be within myself?
To not think any particular thing or in any particular way?
I can't imagine how it might have changed my brain, opened it, relaxed it, unplugged it from the anxious wheel of productivity.
I wonder if it might have changed my core protective strategies of always having something to think, to write, and to say.
Of always having to fill up the dangerous empty space.
Because I imagine that the instructor's main message would be,
hey, that empty space is safe.
But is it safe, really, from a Christian point of view?
you.
So it was more than a decade ago that I came across Praise Moves, a Christian alternative to yoga, founded by Dr. Lorette Willis in 2001.
Let's take a listen to a class.
Let's begin by standing for a moment of prayer to consecrate our time here with the Lord today.
Heavenly Father, we come to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
We dedicate our workout to you and purpose to invest this time in your word to become fit witnesses for you in spirit, soul, and body.
I present my body to you today, Lord, this temple of the Holy Spirit.
Today is the day that the Lord has made.
We will rejoice and be glad in it.
Amen.
Let's begin our day by standing in Mount Zion posture using correct body alignment, or CBA for short.
Stand with your feet a few inches apart.
Relax your knees.
Rest your weight on the outsides of your feet.
Tuck your pelvis under, tightening the glutes and abdomen.
Rotate the shoulders back, pointing thumbs behind you.
Now keep the shoulders rolled back as you bring your palms back to face your thighs.
With shoulders rotated back, reach down with the fingers and lift up through the crown of your head as if you're trying to add another inch to your height.
Breathe deeply.
Our scripture for the Mount Zion posture is from Psalm 125.1.
Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever.
So I love this.
Like, she really wants this yoga to not be yoga.
She's talking about a workshop.
She's doing the Mount Zion posture when it's obviously like mountain posture with all of the Iyengar instructions.
She's got a scripture verse in there.
And part of me says, like, why not?
Why shouldn't this Christian woman invent a new way of enriching her prayer life, or at least relieving its boredom?
Why shouldn't she multitask and get some Bible study in with her exercise?
But of course, it's more than that.
Of course, it's about establishing and affirming and reaffirming a particular kind of identity.
And it's pretty chatty-cathy, if you ask me.
I feel like she completely obliterates the possibility that the yoga practitioner could have any kind of inner quiet or exploration while breathing and moving.
She seems compelled to fill up the space.
Now, on her site, Willis has a whole slew of articles about how yoga and Christianity are incompatible.
In one of the articles, she lays out her 12 points of conflict.
She's got about half of these right.
I'm just going to read them.
So, first she says, Yoga is dedicated to a different Lord, Lord Shiva the Destroyer in Hinduism, known as the First Yogi.
I mean, that's true in some streams and it's not true in others.
The second point is, yoga leads people away from Christ.
Perhaps.
Thirdly, yoga poses are offerings to the 330 million Hindu gods.
to be true in some places, but it's not true in the Hatha Yoga literature, for example.
So that's a little bit off.
Number four is, yoga has a spiritual nature that is psychic and metaphysical.
I'd agree with that.
Number five, yoga is the missionary arm of New Age spirituality.
Yes, I mean, in a globalization sense, that's bang on.
Sixth, Willis says, so-called Christian yoga was founded by Hindu leader A.K.
Muzumdar.
So Christian yoga is yoga.
We cannot combine religion, Hinduism she has in parentheses, with a relationship.
parentheses, knowing Jesus Christ as Lord.
Now, A.K. Mazumdar was an Indian modernizer of yoga who proposed a kind of Christian yoga in the 1920s.
That's what she's referring to there.
Number seven is yoga is highly sensual in nature and opens the door to focusing on feelings
more than on faith.
Well, yes, that's very true, Dr. Willis.
Number eight is, yoga focuses on manipulation of life force energy through pranayama breathing during exercises.
Dangers, according to Ephesians, Chapter 2, verse 2, quote, "...the prince of the power of the air," unquote, and Paul is not speaking of oxygen here, she says.
This is dabbling in a spiritual realm we are not called to play with.
Her ninth point is that you influence others.
So even if you, as a believer and follower of Jesus Christ, are strong enough not to be affected by the subtleties of yoga, what about the new believer or unbeliever watching you?
Might they be led away, as my own mother and I were led away many years ago?
So, Willis has this backstory of having been indoctrinated into yoga before reconnecting with Jesus.
Number 10 is, yoga is only a first step in the practice of metaphysics.
It easily opens the door to experimentation with new age spirituality practices.
I think that can be reasonable.
Number 11, which I'm going to come back to, is really important.
She says, yoga says, quote, empty the mind, unquote.
Christianity says, quote, be transformed by renewing the mind, unquote, on the word of God.
Romans, chapter 12, verse 2.
Then lastly, she says, after a yoga workout, a person is highly impressionable, especially after being told, empty your mind and be open to certain energies.
So, during the relaxation period at the end of a yoga session, when a person is most vulnerable, that is when someone can be most impressed with the New Age philosophy.
Okay, so that's Willis.
And she isn't the only interpreter here from the Christian right, but she does do a good job of summarizing the issues.
So, Willis founds praise moves in 2001.
In 2010, her agenda gets some pushback, but also a kind of paradoxical support from an unlikely quarter.
An organization called the Hindu American Foundation launches the Take Back Yoga Campaign.
So, what's the Hindu American Foundation?
It's a group of highly educated professional NRIs, or non-resident Indians,
who formed a DC-based lobby group and a think tank in 2003 to resist what they said were negative representations
of Hinduism in education and entertainment.
They really, really want everyone to believe they are not ideologically aligned
with Hindu nationalist politics back in India.
But many of the major themes line up.
So, for instance, one big initiative was for them to pressure the state of California into editing school textbooks and their religion sections, especially those that referred to Hinduism, So, they wanted the textbooks to say that caste was less of a social factor in pre-modern India than it actually was.
They also wanted the textbooks to say that women had a higher social status in pre-modern India than they actually did.
And they also wanted the textbooks to say that the Aryan invasion premise, by which Indologists and archaeologists for about a century now have argued that the Indus Valley civilization was colonized by groups of Indo-Aryans from Iran and other northwestern regions, is only a theory.
Now, so far as I can tell, the scholarship on this very complex topic is still contentious around this.
But what is clear is that whatever the historical truth is, or will be shown to be, nationalists in India would definitely prefer to think of the culture that evolved through Vedism into modern Hinduism as indigenous to the continent and not imported.
And this makes a lot of sense from a post-colonial point of view in which the idea is to relocate cultural strength from within.
But the Hindu American Foundation also wants to present Hinduism as being more homogenous and historically continuous than it actually is.
And all of these ideas fit the pattern of something known as Saffronization, by which Hindu nationalist reformers have tried to simplify Indian religious history and culture to fit a robust nationalistic mold.
Now we covered a lot of the implications of this in episode 50, which was about Narendra Modi's disastrous COVID response, and that was with our guest Sheena Sood.
Now the other thing that the Hindu American Foundation wants to say, and this is how they really broke into the news cycle back in 2010, is that yoga is proprietary to Hinduism.
Let's take a listen.
Did you know that yoga is one of the six schools of thought, or darshanas, of Hinduism?
The goal is union with the divine.
Yoga is from India, the spiritual homeland of Hinduism, and is mentioned in various Hindu scriptures.
The Bhagavad Gita discusses four types of yogas—knowledge, action, devotion, and meditation.
Often, yoga practice begins and ends with the chanting of Aum.
Om is a sacred sound in Hinduism, representing the divine.
Yoga postures and breathing exercises, the two limbs that are most commonly associated with yoga today, all have
Sanskrit names.
Yogic texts, like the Yoga Sutras, were written in Sanskrit, the classical language of Hinduism.
Many yoga postures are named for Hindu deities and sages.
The sun salutation, or surya namaskar, is rooted in worship of the sun.
Hindus have long worshipped the sun as essential for life.
Do you have to be Hindu to practice yoga?
No!
Yoga is one of Hinduism's greatest gifts to the world and can be practiced and appreciated by all.
Learn more on Hinduism and Yoga at HinduAmerican.org.
Okay, so that sounds nice, but as we'll see, it's both simplified and politicized, and that makes sense.
These are not scholarly or fact-checked materials.
Also, I hate to point this out, but the page this video sits on is called The Hindu Roots of Yoga, and it opens with a quote from Patabi Joyce, the founder of Ashtanga Yoga.
Quote, The essence of yoga is to teach oneness with God, unquote.
Now, the statement, take it or leave it, it's kind of banal.
It's also sectarian.
There are other definitions of yoga, many others.
But what really discredits the historical presentation of this particular page is that Joyce was a sex predator who contributed nothing to anyone's understanding of spirituality, Hindu or otherwise.
So more on how he connects to this story in a bit.
So in 2010, the Hindu American Foundation kicked off a take back yoga campaign by picking a fight with Yoga Journal for not referring to Hinduism enough.
In a very melodramatic letter entitled, Is Hindu a Bad Word?
Suag Shukla, who was listed at the time as the Hindu American Foundation's legal counsel, began with quotes from a recent Yoga Journal issue.
So on page 36, Shukla quotes the journal as writing, quote, classic yogic texts such as Patanjali's Yoga Sutra and the Bhagavad Gita.
Dot dot dot, unquote.
And then there's another quote from page 65.
65, quote, there are examples of this in all devotional traditions, mystical Christianity,
Judaism and Sufism, and especially in the Bhakti tradition of India, unquote.
So that all sounds okay, right? Well, not according to Shukla, who gets into his grievances
in the body of his letter, writing, Dear Editor, After reading this month's articles,
Eat Like a Yogi, The Essence of Life and Everyday Ecstasy, and admiring the prominently printed
Aums throughout the magazine, I couldn't help but wonder, how many ways are there to avoid the word
Hindu? I I have read Yoga Journal for a number of years now and have found great wisdom in the experiences, insight, and advice shared by so many who have been inspired by the tradition of my birth and that of a billion others.
However, I have become increasingly bewildered and disappointed by what seems to be an intentional and systematic disregard for Hinduism as a religious and spiritual tradition and its contributions to the world over the past 5,000 years.
As a practicing Hindu and second-generation Hindu-American, I find the repeated references to the teachings and philosophy of Hinduism as Ancient Indian or Ancient Yogic or Eastern to be, frankly speaking, disingenuous and disrespectful.
Sure, Hinduism or Hindu are not terms the ancient rishis aka ancient yogis of India used to define or label themselves, but in modern times it is the word that is associated with those of us who happen to have been born from the history and into the generations who have sought solace in these life teachings.
Those of us who too are striving to live our lives according to the Hindu principles of Ahimsa, Bhakti, Brahmacharya, Satsang, and Seva.
Ekam Sat Vipraha Bahuda Vedanti, or the truth is one, the wise, call it by many names.
And Vasudeva Kutumbakam, or the world is one family.
Okay, so that's very rousing.
But the problem is that the term Hindu is originally an extronym that was applied by the Persians and the Greeks to the geographical residence of the Indus Valley.
It wasn't originally a religious descriptor.
Now there are long arguments about when Hindu becomes a self-identifier associated with religious commitments or lineages, but the earliest the historians pin it to might be the 8th century of the Common Era.
Now, whatever the truth about the term is, for the Hindu American Foundation to claim that yoga has Hindu roots doesn't really hold up, given that the root yoga texts are philosophically and culturally diverse, even the texts that they're referring to in that little video.
And the diversity is such that some of them are arguably atheistic.
And also, these texts predate the concept of a coherent Hinduism by centuries.
Now, this isn't just a semantic problem.
It's also political.
Because if yoga predates the confluence of diverse practices now known as Hinduism, and historically it has been practiced by Jains, Buddhists, Muslims, and atheists, all true, if you claim that yoga is essentially and eternally a Hindu practice, You're making an exclusionary statement, and as you do that, you are serving the soft power agendas of Hindu nationalism, which generally seek to marginalize practitioners of other religions.
Now, unsurprisingly, Yoga Journal totally screwed the pooch with its response.
Some admin, I can't find the source beyond the quotation on the Hindu American Foundation website, reportedly responded to Shukla's letter by writing, quote, we avoid the word Hinduism because it carries too much baggage.
Obviously, that did not go over well.
Now, earlier I said that the Hindu American Foundation really doesn't want to be associated with the Hindu nationalism of the BJP and Narendra Modi.
Now, how much do they want to distance themselves or conceal the ideological parallels?
So much so that they've launched a defamation lawsuit against a progressive, non-resident Indian organization called Hindus for Human Rights.
After officials of Hindus for Human Rights were critical of the Hindutva response to the COVID crisis in India, And when they went further and were quoted by Al Jazeera as worrying that PPP funds received by the Hindu American Foundation during the pandemic might go to help Hindutva political organizations in India.
From a review of the lawsuit in Scroll magazine, quote, the Al Jazeera articles published in April
said that federal COVID-19 relief funding amounting to $833,000
had been given to the Hindu American Foundation and four other US foundations,
which the reports alleged, quote, had ties to Hindu supremacist and religious groups.
So the Hindu American Foundation rejects that claim and is suing Al Jazeera,
the Hindus for Human Rights organization, and a Rutgers religious studies scholar
named Audrey Truschke, who made the mistake of retweeting the story.
And apparently the claim is for $75 million in damages.
So, what do you think?
Thank you.
Thank you.
Peace.
So, we've got Christians scared of yoga, Christians who used to practice yoga turning yoga into praise moves and not using the word yoga anymore, and then devout Hindus in America saying, of course yoga is Hindu.
What is this all about?
How could anyone evaluate the content, the inner reality of anybody's yoga practice?
It's impossible to say, but one clear way of chewing on the problem really hard is to think about what it might do to children.
Let me just go back to Willis and her praise moves for a moment and that point number 11 that really stands out for me.
She writes, Yoga says, empty the mind.
Christianity says, be transformed by renewing the mind on the word of God.
Romans 12, verse 2.
So, when I read that, it feels like the panic amongst Christians over yoga in schools isn't just about the foreign invasion of minds.
It's also about whether they will be able to surrender internal control over their children.
Whether they will be able to allow children to self-authorize, to decide what to focus on and when, to decide what to value, and what they can let evaporate.
It's a paternalistic anxiety about order and control, not unlike those fostered by nationalist movements.
So the Great American Yoga Identity Crisis came to a head in 2013 in Encinitas, California.
Now, Encinitas is a fitting place because it's the first township in the U.S.
to see a yoga studio dedicated to physical practice.
That opened back in the 1970s.
And the whole region is kind of like Yoga USA.
So the Encinitas Union School District had contracted with the Joyce Foundation, so let's just put a flag in that name, to sponsor yoga services from their teachers to the tune of $533,000.
Now this program ran from 2011 to 2016, but it was challenged halfway through its tenure by a lawsuit in which Christian parents of the school district challenged the yoga program as a violation of the Establishment Clause.
Okay, so for non-Americans, the Establishment Clause is part of the First Amendment and it guarantees freedom of religious belief.
The clause takes its name from the following sentence, quote, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
So the way this plays out in the US is that not only constitutionally is the country not going to outlaw or discriminate against religious practice, ideally, but it also won't promote religious practices.
But this is a promise that many point out is betrayed in fundamental ways all the time.
In the Pledge of Allegiance, for example.
In prayers that start government meetings.
In Christmas crushes that are placed on public property.
Even the phrase, in God we trust, shows up on the filthy rotten lucre.
One of the funniest conflicts over the Establishment Clause involves Satanists who argued that if the Oklahoma and Arkansas state legislatures could display the Ten Commandments, they should have the right to install their eight and a half foot tall statue of Baphomet.
Who is a winged, goat-headed, humanoid symbol of the occult.
So, in Oklahoma they legally forced the removal of the commandments by bringing a suit, and in Arkansas they gained legal standing to sue.
Okay, so back to Encinitas.
The Joyce Foundation is named for Pitabi Joyce.
He's the founder of Ashtanga Yoga and the personal guru, at that time anyway, of Joyce Foundation founder Sonia Tudor Jones, who is the wife of billionaire investment broker Paul Tudor Jones.
Now by the time that news of the decades of sex crimes committed by Joyce broke in 2017, there had been prior news reports in 2010 but they'd been largely ignored, the Joyce Foundation had rebranded as Sonema.
But to this day, Tudor Jones is still a big promoter of the Joyce family.
Even though there's been no accounting for Joyce's crimes, the extent of which were estimated by one victim to consist of over 20,000 individual sexual assaults over several decades.
These were committed under the guise of quote-unquote adjustments.
Now one weird thing that happened over the lawsuit involving the Joyce Foundation yoga program was that when the trial began, the foundation attempted to claim just off the bat that the accusations of the parents were overblown, that the Encinitas United School District program had nothing to do with Hindu religious belief or ritual.
But, I remember going to their site at the time and being presented with a grinning portrait of K Patabi Joyce on the homepage.
Now, I can't find this page anymore.
It's disappeared.
I don't have the original URL, but I clearly remember that he was right there on the homepage, decked out in saffron, wearing his Brahmin thread, garlanded with marigolds.
And, you know, for any Christian parent in Encinitas who went to the website, this would not be very reassuring.
And at that point, they didn't even know about the abuse history because Ashtonka Culture had covered it up.
There was also a pretty clear subterfuge undertaken by Joyce Foundation teachers in the courtroom during the lawsuit itself.
There's one picture of the proceedings where a teacher named Jennifer Brown is giving testimony in favor of the program and she's trying to show that yoga is not religious.
And she's down out of her chair in the hearing room demonstrating for the court how she teaches the children.
So she's sitting on the carpeted floor in lotus posture explaining that she calls lotus posture crisscross applesauce when she's teaching it to the children.
This is a really sticky argument because anyone who knows Ashtanga Yoga culture knows that lotus position is endowed with deep spiritual and esoteric significance.
Now, it's possible that this particular teacher didn't know or didn't believe this, but it is not possible that the program itself does not point strongly, if silently, towards these ritual movements and meanings.
And isn't it worse for the Christian parents to make such a slick argument?
Because the whole thing is about trusting adults with the internal lives of children.
So, in the lawsuit, which was called SEDLOC v. Baird, SEDLOC being the plaintiffs, the Christian parents, and Baird being the board representative, the Christian parents really brought the heat.
They actually went out and headhunted Christian Religious Studies academic Candy Gunther-Brown to provide an amicus brief to the court that attempted to prove that it was impossible to divorce yoga from Hindu or Indian spirituality.
Now Brown is no slouch.
She's Harvard-educated, she's well-published, and she brought extremely convincing arguments.
She argued that yoga emphasized the spirituality of bodily ritual.
She talked about the spiritual goals of Hatha Yoga.
She talked about how the sun salutation cannot be said to not express worship of the sun.
She talked about yoga had further religious influence over Euro-American spiritualities like Theosophy.
She quoted Jon Kabat-Zinn as asserting that mindfulness meditation was quote-unquote Buddhist.
And she pointed out that the program specifically promoted Ashtanga Yoga, which has religious concepts wrapped up in it, like the yamas and the niyamas.
Brown also noted the teaching of Patanjali's Eight Limbs, and she referenced the posters of yoga terms that were hung up in the classroom, you know, covered in Sanskrit language.
She also noted that the classes began with Anjali Mudra and Namaste, that they included chanting, and that there was this general endorsement that practice would lead to some kind of enlightenment.
Now, guess who Candy Gunther-Brown quotes in her brief?
You guessed it, the Hindu American Foundation.
Paragraph 81 starts with the statement, Hindus warn that yoga will cause Christians to adopt Hinduism.
Then she goes on.
Prominent Hindu spokespersons warn that Christians who practice yoga will inevitably adopt Hindu religion.
Sanyasin Arumugaswamy, the managing editor of Hinduism Today, attests that Hinduism is the, quote, soul, unquote, of yoga and that, quote, a Christian trying to adapt these practices will likely disrupt their own Christian beliefs, unquote.
Aseem Shukla, MD, a surgeon and co-founder of the Hindu American Foundation, warns that
Christians who practice yoga may inadvertently enter the Hindu path to realize one's own
divinity.
But be forewarned, yogis say that the dedicated practice of yoga will subdue the restless
mind, lessen one's cravings for the mundane material world, and put one on the path of
self-realization, that each individual is a spark of the divine.
Expect conflicts if you are sold on the exclusivist claims of Abrahamic faiths, that their god
awaits the arrival of only his chosen few at heaven's gate, since yoga shows its own
path to spiritual enlightenment to all seekers, regardless of affiliation."
Bye.
So Brown's brief just goes on and on.
It's like a slam dunk.
And she was so convincing that the briefs filed by the Encinitas Union School District in favor of keeping the yoga program didn't focus on refuting her claims, but rather tried to show that yoga didn't necessarily have to promote religious ideology.
So the school board tapped the fine modern postural yoga scholar Mark Singleton for a brief and he wrote the following, quote, Many of the most popular forms of yoga practiced in the United States today stem from the Indian tradition of Hatha Yoga, whose most visible feature is asana or posture practice.
The striking thing about Hatha Yoga in tradition is the strong current of universalism and lack of sectarian identity.
The most important example of this is the Locus Classicus of Hatha, the Hatha Pradipika, more commonly known as the Hatha Yoga Pradipika from circa 1450, The Hatha Pradipika does not align itself with metaphysical teachings or beliefs that would identify it with one particular sect, nor does it contain the kind of sectarian features that one might expect from texts of this period with strong religious affiliations.
Hatha Yoga in its classical medieval formulation does not belong to any particular religious group.
The Hatha Pradipika is the culmination of a process that had been going on for a long time in India where yoga practice became detached from particular religions.
The Dattatreya Yogashastra, an earlier text teaching Hatha Yoga, is clear on this matter.
Anyone can practice this yoga no matter what their belief.
Some believe in God.
They are the Brahmins.
Some believe there is no God.
They are the Buddhists.
Some practice renunciation.
These are the ascetics.
And some focus on the good to be had in this world and have no belief in a hereafter.
These are the materialists.
The Dattatreya Yogashastra clearly conveys that yoga was for everyone and that it did not belong to any single religion.
So one can reasonably claim, in fact, that versions of yoga such as these are self-consciously non-religious in the sense that they are not partisan to a particular metaphysics or dogma or set of rituals.
Nonetheless, it is clear that throughout its history, yoga has been an important feature of many of the sectarian systems that we would today call religions.
We find yoga techniques in many varieties of religion.
Hinduism, as well as among Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Muslims, and others.
And as Dattatreya's text suggests, we also find it being practiced by those with none of the beliefs that we would today call religious.
Moreover, Hatha Yoga also comports pragmatic, non-metaphysical, and even banal concerns for the health of the body.
In other words, to recognize Yoga's long association with Indian religions does not mean that Yoga is, quote, inherently religious.
So the school board also tapped Professor Christopher Chappell, who runs the master's degree program in yoga studies at Loyola Marymount University, so he contributed a brief as well, and he took a distinctly more sort of syncretic and multicultural approach, writing, In my experience, yoga may be taught and practiced without promoting or advancing religion.
Yoga has been correctly associated with Indian culture and civilization in Professor Candy Gunther-Brown's declaration.
Therein, she specifies the practices of yoga can be found in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.
But she neglects to note that yoga is also practiced by Sikhs, Muslims, and Christians in India and elsewhere.
Professor Kar W. Ernst of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, notes that a Hatha Yoga manual known as the Amrita Kunda was circulated in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and Urdu versions from the 17th century onward in Persia, Turkey, and North Africa, as well as in India.
In my own experience of Christian communities in India, it is commonplace for yoga imagery to be employed to evoke Christian ideals and for Christian hymns to use Sanskrit terminology and Hindustani melodies.
For instance, an image of Jesus as yogi graces the altar of one of the churches of the Jesuit seminary in Pune.
A true and correct copy of this image is attached hereto as Exhibit B.
And then further down he writes, I have witnessed the teaching of yoga at the Accelerated School, a public school on Main Street near downtown Los Angeles.
The students eagerly participated in moves such as the rooster, the donkey, the snake, the child's pose, and relaxed breathing exercises.
In this context, similar to that described in the Encinitas Union School District's curriculum, no indication was given that yoga Yoga was from India. The students were calmed by the
experience and according to their teachers were able to focus more effectively on their studies.
Philosophy, mathematics, architecture, literature, the sciences, all these disciplines have their
origins deep in the history of world civilizations, whether arising from the Middle East, Africa,
Europe, Asia, North America, or South America. World culture has been enriched by contributions
from all these cultures.
Incorporating yoga movements first practiced in India into a program of physical education is appropriate, particularly where the teachers are careful not to impose religious meaning in their classes.
In my opinion, this appears to be the case with the Encinitas Union School District Yoga Program.
So that's Professor Chappell.
Also, the Yoga Alliance, which, as you'll remember, provoked the ire of the Hindu American Foundation, also filed a brief in favor of the board.
And in the end, the school board won a qualified victory in the case.
So from the Associated Press in July of 2013, quote, Yoga is a religious practice, but not the way that it's taught by the Encinitas Union School District at its nine campuses, the San Diego Superior Court Judge John S. Mayer said in Monday's ruling.
Mayer said the school district stripped classes of all cultural references, including the Sanskrit language.
He noted that the lotus position was renamed, quote, crisscross applesauce pose.
The judge said that the opponents of the yoga class were relying on information culled from the internet and other unreliable sources.
Quote, it's almost like a trial by Wikipedia, which isn't what this court does, unquote, Mayer said.
Now, Candy Gunther-Brown went on to publish her brief in a book along with some comments on how the lawsuit was resolved, or at least is for now.
Quote, California Superior Court Judge John Mayer found that yoga is, quote, religious, unquote, and Ashtanga yoga is, quote, cornerstone of EUSD yoga, unquote.
But, she goes on, because a reasonable child would not perceive the yoga program as endorsing or disfavoring religion, the program is constitutional.
Mayer's primary example of how the program removed religious, mystical, or spiritual trappings is that the program relabeled Lotus Position as criss-cross applesauce, but then she disagrees with this with a parenthetical, though it did not.
An appellate court found that Hinduism is a, quote, religion, unquote, and expressed, quote, little doubt, unquote, that public school Ashtanga Yoga is unconstitutional, but determined that the yoga program in Encinitas is not Ashtanga Yoga because the program subtracted Sanskrit and cultural references.
Which leads us all to today and Alabama's subtraction of Sanskrit and cultural references.
So what's happening here?
What have we got so far?
Well, we have Christian parents prepped by decades of Christian anxieties around the decline of Christianity.
We have a super wealthy yoga aficionado who happens to be devoted to a guru who's also a sex criminal who tries to bring yoga to the public schools of Encinitas.
And the Christian parents there know that this isn't your aunt's praise moves, and they are suspicious of the Trojan horsing of Hindu religiosity into their children's brains.
They sue.
They tap a Christian religious studies professor to support their cause, and she quotes modern Hindu nationalist sources to prove their point.
And in response, the school board taps white scholars who argue, yeah, nah, yoga doesn't have to be religious or Hindu, which is pretty close to supporting the argument that yoga can be secularized altogether.
And who hates that argument?
Two groups who you really wouldn't expect to be finding common cause, and yet here we are.
Hindu nationalists on one side, who abhor the notion of calling something yoga without the appropriate piety and obeisance.
And, on the other side, progressive social justice advocates who worry about how cultural appropriation can gut practices like yoga of their authenticity.
Okay, so what's happened since 2013?
The conflict has deepened and become richer, but it hasn't really gotten any clearer.
On the Hindu nationalist side, the rise of Modi has brought new life to the field of yoga as soft political power, especially with the institution of International Yoga Day as a global spectacle, hosted and administrated by India.
In academia, the work of Mark Singleton to illuminate the origins of the modern yoga movement as a syncretic mixture of European physical cultures and a reconstructed set of medieval Indian practices has gone largely unchallenged and continues to develop.
Other researchers, like Andrea Jain, have been prolific in pointing out the braiding together of nationalistic and neoliberal influences, both Indian and American, in the yoga scene.
She and other researchers have played a big role in complicating the naive Orientalism of the mass-market yoga world, with her reports on charlatans like Baba Ramdev, who is the most popular yoga teacher in the world, But who also shills for Hindutva politicians and believes yoga can cure homosexuality.
Meanwhile, a progressive movement to foster sensitivity towards the realities of colonial injustice has sprung up in the yoga world, as if in mirror image to these right-wing pressures.
Decolonizing yoga has become its own aspirational goal, with trainings now in things like honoring yoga's roots.
One complication, inevitable perhaps in hindsight, has been the Me Too tidal wave that has swept through the yoga scene.
It began in about 2017.
That so many Indian charismatic leaders, Pattabhi Joyce, Bikram Chowdhury, Swami Vishnu Devananda, Mata Amritanandamayi, Sai Baba, and Iyengar were perpetually, sexually, or financially, or physically, or emotionally abusive towards their students has muddied the waters for those who seek the authentic lineage and leadership these figures pretended to sell.
What's worse is that the drive for cultural sensitivity, whether made in good faith and with good education or not, has often conflicted with the drive to expose and end institutional abuse.
So when Gayle Treadwell, a white woman who spent decades serving Mata Amrita Nandamayi and investing herself fully in the language and cultures of South India to do it, published her memoir detailing abuses in Amma's
organization, she was called, among other things, Hinduphobic.
And the same term was hurled at me when I published my book on Patabi Joyce.
And now we have the Alabama yoga ban lifting.
To review, yoga is now legal in Alabama schools, as long as all instruction is limited exclusively to poses,
exercises, and stretching.
All poses are limited exclusively to sitting, standing, reclining, twisting, and balancing.
Oh, I suppose they're trying to eliminate Yoga Nidra or Shavasana because there's no lying down.
Then, all poses, exercises, and stretching techniques shall have exclusively English
descriptive names, and definitely chanting mantras, mudras, use of mandalas, induction
of hypnotic states, guided imagery, and namaste greetings shall be expressly prohibited.
I don't think any of the adults I've talked about in this essay will be happy with this
kind of blank slate of a practice.
Bye.
But there is another category of adults who I think might take to it.
These would be educators, child psychologists, and secular-minded yoga teachers who want to legitimize yoga as a public health intervention and who are not so interested or concerned in the culture war aspects.
But then, what about the children themselves?
I imagine they're going to get a badly needed exercise program that offers quietude and self-regulation.
They'll be given permission to go inside and rest, to look for an inner peace.
They're going to be instructed mainly by young women whose main message will be that they should take stock of their internal states and look for sources of inner agency.
I can't help but think that that's a good thing.
And it might also remove them for those 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes at a time from the culture war battlefield of who gets to put what into their heads.
So those who would promote yoga as a universal good, like the Hindus for Human Rights organization, We'll likely feel quite happy that this Indian art form is being made more accessible to the children of Alabama.
And on the other hand, Hindu nationalists will likely be outraged that this secularized version of yoga is stripped not only of references to Hinduism, but of references to every type of Indian spirituality.
And there will be a lot of yoga progressives looking at this new policy, mostly from the outside, and they'll be concerned, and not without reason, that the children of the Alabama public school system will benefit from this Indian practice without recognizing where it comes from.
They might grow up thinking that, like football or baseball, it's simply part of their own heritage.
And in this way, the realities of history will fade, and the children will be deprived of considering the rich and complicated legacy of colonial extraction and exchange.
All of these are reasonable concerns from various points of view, and certainly parents have the right to decide how their children will be influenced.
But I do have this funny feeling that for the children of Alabama, this strange ruling will work out for them.
I mean, for one thing, in order to maintain their curriculum without harassment from vice principals and principals and parents associations, the instructors are going to have to be super careful about not interjecting the classes with any type of religiosity, whether it's Hindu or pre-Hindu or Christian or post-Christian.
They'll be super careful about letting the kids find their own way.
The bias will be towards non-intrusiveness.
And I wonder if in the end, this means that the children actually do get to inhabit and navigate an open space.
An empty space.
A space free of both religious doctrine and culture war anxieties.
A space free of the endless concern of whether or not you are doing something right.
Whether you are making somebody happy.
Whether you are adopting the appropriate view.
I think what every stakeholder in this particular culture war has on the line, perhaps without wanting to admit it, is that we really have no idea who we would be if, as children, we were asked not to believe, but rather to feel, and given time to do just that.
To have been able to sit in that church, in the auditorium, in the library, I'll round this essay up by saying that I don't think it's a stretch to see an overlap between this theme and the medical and moral panic over vaccines.
Because in both cases we're talking about the imagined corruption of children, whether by poison, by attitudes, or alternative histories.
We spend a lot of time on this podcast talking about the ways in which the idealization of naturalness or purity can have a very powerful and sometimes very confusing impact upon how people view their worlds.
The Christian families in Encinitas wanted to keep their children free from the intrusions of a foreign faith, while the right-leaning Hindu-American foundation would really love to keep the subject of yoga free from historical and cultural complexity.
And what about those young white progressives?
What kind of pure yoga do they want?
How authentic must it be before all of their shame and self-criticism dries up?
With so much distrust all the way around, what won out in Alabama is a secular approach, which for some might feel milquetoast, empty of real meaning.
And yet strangely, it's in that forum that yoga can become much more like a scientific object, an intervention on physical and psychological planes that may produce results that could be measured much more easily and meaningfully than what a child believes.
So I wonder whether this very bare-bones, hyper-material version of yoga is in some ways comparable to a vaccine.
Defined by science and public policy instead of faith.
After all, the postures and breathing don't care what you believe in any more than the mRNA tech cares about your religion or culture.
I wonder what kind of immunity this yoga might provide against the ideological warfare that these children will be subjected to for the rest of their lives.
