Kate's Yoga Blog

Prompt: My Yoga Experience (12/14-online) Summarize your practice experience over the semester. Your final journaling should reflect the knowledge you have gained over the course of the semester, using your experience to make sense of the history and philosophy of practice. Response: I went into this class seeing yoga as a form of exercise and as a type of spiritual practice, although I wasn’t sure of the specifics of that spirituality. I saw many skinny, vegan, barefoot influencers on Instagram becoming yoga teachers or going on yoga retreats in foreign countries and I very much bought into the image of western yoga as a healthy lifestyle one should seek to attain. I went to many heated power yoga classes and dabbled in a few yin practices and believed I knew the general way a yoga class could go. It appears, however, that I really knew nothing at all. This class really opened my eyes on the origins of yoga, the different schools and adaptations the practice has gone through to...

Prompt: Is Yoga a Religion? Much of the criticism of yoga in the West as "cultural appropriation" comes from the position that yoga in India is part and parcel of the religious traditions of Hinduism. Do you believe Yoga is a religion? Support your position from experience and the materials presented in class. Response: While yoga in the traditional sense correlates with popular eastern beliefs of reincarnation and connecting to a higher reality, yoga itself was never a religion. A spiritual practice, yes, but the idea of yoga being a religion was only brought about as a way to separate it from hatha practices as shown in "Naked in Ashes" and make it more palatable to the west. To me, yoga feels as if it has religious elements, but it has always felt like more of a spiritual practice that can be done regardless of one's religion. I have always seen yoga as a mind quieting practice, rather than some sort of connection with a religious deity.