When do people become too sensitive regarding cultural issues?
This week at the University of Ottawa, a yoga instructor who conducted a free class for the university’s Centre for Students with Disabilities for seven years was told it was being cancelled. The students union sighted “cultural issues” as the reason for ending the class.
Yoga developed in India years ago and is associated with multiple religions including Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism. This is apparently the issue which developed regarding yoga on the school campus, is it cultural appropriation?
Cultural appropriation is a sociological term regarding one culture adopting elements of another culture and is seen as a negative exchange.
The instructor said she doesn’t focus on the spiritual side of yoga, but explained her class could be called “mindful stretching” for that very reason. She’s focused on helping people become physically aware and to learn different stretches, including proper breathing, to help your body feel relaxed and healthy.
So, is yoga a religious practice and is it offensive for people to simply teach the “mindful stretching” aspect if they are not associated with one of the religions yoga developed within?
To me it seems that it is a stretch to say yoga has cultural issues surrounding it because of the fact it is just stretching. Lots of people stretch, we have a stretching routine I do with the Vipers which someone once referred to as yoga, because we use some of the same stretches.
We use a similar breathing pattern to yoga as well, however, that type of breathing in fact while stretching has proven to improve your stretching. It’s also a relaxation technique people with anxiety are told to use: breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, breathe out longer than you breathe in.
To many people yoga is what I was going through with the girls, simply stretching. Yoga, however, has numerous poses and moves people utilize. By calling it yoga people are actually acknowledging that it is a practice developed elsewhere and is giving credit to that practice. I don’t really see how it is a “cultural issue.” No one is suffering through the use of yoga and no one experiencing racism or anything along those lines either.
Yoga is associated with at least three religions in the world, religions that promote peace and unity, so can it not be used as a non-religious practice? Is yoga not something which aligns more with spirituality or to simply relaxing and keeping healthy?
Did it even start out as a religious practice or was it adopted by the religions it’s now associated with? It’s a very old practice and the best form of flattery is imitation, so the Western world wanting to embrace yoga is actually a good thing, is it not? We know that it grew from practices in India and that it’s associated with spirituality, we don’t attempt to downplay that, but we simply use it for a different aspect.
For the people who are claiming to be spiritual leaders as well as yoga instructors, there might be an issue there, but as for simply utilizing yoga poses and breathing, I don’t personally see any issues.
People and cultures share things, it’s a small world and we pick and choose things that we like from amongst our own culture and from other cultures. It happens and it’s not always a bad thing.
