Decolonizing Yoga: from Critical to Cosmic Consciousness: Feminist-Informed Yoga and a Jain Way of Life

By Punam Mehta Ph.D.

This book was written for diasporic South Asian women who have experienced microaggression or discrimination in modern yoga spaces in Canada or abroad.

Punam Mehta, Ph.D. reveals how the yoga movement in Canada has been harmful to yoga’s grounding in Jain history, to South Asian social and cultural development, and to Jain diasporic women born and raised in Canada.
She argues that marginalized women could recenter themselves by practicing yoga to overcome discrimination based on their race, gender, sexuality, class, and/or abilities within the context of today’s culture.

The author seeks to answer questions such as:
• What is the theoretical foundation of feminist-informed yoga in contemporary culture?
• How can a feminist-informed yoga be applied as a healing approach to marginalized women?
• How can contemporary yoga offer simple ways for marginalized women to feel good about themselves?

The author highlights the removal of Canadian-born Jain mothers and more generally, South Asian mothers who face systemic racism in yoga studios. She also reveals how yoga, practiced in the Jain way of life, offers a holistic approach to well-being and spiritual health.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Apr 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665721967

Punam Mehta Ph.D.

Punam Mehta, Ph.D., earned a Bachelor of Science, a Bachelor of Arts Honors, a Master of Science and a Doctor of Philosophy in Applied Health in Manitoba, Canada. She is a faculty member in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba where she loves to teach the next generation of students. She has worked as an infectious disease epidemiologist and a yoga teacher and has many years of experience in critical public health and gender studies.

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Copyright © 2022 Punam Mehta, BA(H), BSC, MSC, Ph.D.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-6657-2197-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-2196-7 (e)

Archway Publishing rev. date: 04/14/2022

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1 What is Feminist-Informed Yoga and the Yoga Traditions?

The Guru, Guru Traditions, and Guru Consciousness

The Impact of Decolonization

Why Feminism?

Feminist-Informed Yoga and Violence against Women

Modern Posture Yoga Movement

Why Does This Keep Coming up? Cultural Appropriation, Spiritual Materialism, and Commodification of Yoga

Yoga Traditions and Trauma

Addictions and Feminist-Informed Yoga

Feminist-Informed Yoga and Shamanism

Chapter 2 Feminist-Informed Yoga, Yoga Traditions, and Marginalized Mothers

Feminist-Informed Yoga and Marginalized Mothers

Decolonization of Motherhood and Yoga

Marginalized Mothers and Yoga Traditions

Cultural Appropriation, Spiritual Materialism, and Commodification in the Context of Marginalized Mothers

Trauma and Marginalized Mothers

Addictions and Marginalized Mothers

Shamanism and Marginalized Mothers

Conclusion

References

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Yoga is a gift for the world and it doesn’t belong to anybody. This book is about the ancient traditions of yoga and is just one part of yoga’s story, my story, that I share with you and I hope to open the world up to a broader view of the world of yoga, that I was lucky enough to learn in my youth.

Foreword

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by Becky Thompson Ph.D., MFA, RYT-500

Dr. Punam Mehta envisioned this precious book to be one that people could tuck into their back pockets, carry with them to work, to their yoga practice in a quiet place in their house or a yoga studio, when walking in the woods, and as company at night. From the epigraphs by Audre Lorde and Angela Davis to Punam’s wise words about yoga as a path to cosmic consciousness, Punam invites us to recognize yoga as an earth-based practice capable of global collective healing.

As a child of refugee parents from South Asia via Uganda, Punam was taught young that a Jain way of living, one that centers on nonviolence, stilling the mind, and worshiping nature, is powerful protection from the unhospitable terrain of living in a colonizing country. From her mother especially, Punam learned that yoga includes ritualized routines often practiced in one’s own home. A Jain life gave her ways of surviving even when up against forces that sought to separate yoga from its ancient, woman-centered roots. Punam learned that no glimpse of the infinite can occur without calming the mind’s storm. And that it is up to us, as sentient beings, to calm the storm in order to survive as a species.

Central to this calming is an understanding that there is no difference between the soul of humans and animals—that all living beings are equal. Punam also teaches us that yoga spaces that are exclusive (where First Nations, immigrant, LGBTQ, people of the South Asian diaspora, and mothers are not welcome) have strayed from the union of the mind-body-spirit. Hindu nationalist attempts to co-opt yoga renders invisible Muslim, Jain and other religious faiths and truncates yogic practices that predated Hindu and Buddhist doctrine. As a woman, mother, and a scholar raised by yogis and a yogi herself, Punam moves us far beyond the marketplace of yoga as a nationalist or capitalist symbol as she embraces the whole of yoga—its promise of unbounded consciousness.

Punam Mehta is a 21st century shaman/woman welcoming us to life-saving states of consciousness. She encourages us to tap into the energies of animals and spirits, to remind us that we come from and will return to nature. She teaches us that while the commodification of yoga threatens to split yoga from its roots, yoga continues to find ways to survive—with mothers who practice with their babies and elders, with LGBT practitioners who see their bodies as sacred, with Water Protectors and tree-climbing protesters. Yoga has always found a way to survive. It slips into places that people and politics cannot. The cosmic consciousness Punam illuminates in this book is a talisman, a salvo, a gift. Go forward, this book. Carry all of us on.

To my mother for teaching me about a Jain way of life and for smashing the patriarchy every day with great humility.

And to the mothers, I have had the privilege of teaching yoga classes to over the years on Treaty 1 Territory.

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare. (Audre Lorde)

There is no radical transformation without self-care. (Angela Davis)

Preface

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Decolonizing once viewed as the formal process of handing over the instruments of government is now recognized as a long-term process involving bureaucratic, cultural, linguistic and psychological diversity of colonial powers. (Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwi Smith in Decolonizing Methodologies)

Offering a recontextualization of yogic traditions through a feminist and a cultural lens is an inclusive pathway toward understanding the deeper cosmic consciousness of the universe. This book also provides a practical component with a theoretical foundation of feminist-informed yoga rooted in the ancient Jain way of life.

I kept this book short, but if you read closely, you will see that many threads in these pages that are relevant for practicing yoga in a patriarchal society. We have seen rising incidents associated with nationalism and tribalism in these times, and we need feminist-informed yoga now more than ever.

This book was written first and foremost for diasporic South Asian women and particularly those whose ancestors lived a Jain way of life. More broadly, I hope it speaks to any South Asian woman who has experienced microaggression or discrimination in modern yoga spaces in Canada or abroad.

I want this book to bring hope and love to your heart that we as a human race can overcome hate; it can contribute to a deeper understanding of yoga traditions. In particular, this book should serve as an entrance for those engaged in critical consciousness raising work such as social justice activism.

I hope that healing can happen across different cultural and ethnic groups. This book is also written in the spirit of truth and the hope of reconciliation and not as a forced offering. Given that Canada is a decolonizing country, it was vital to contribute my expertise as an emerging academic in the subject area of yoga scholarship in this way. This book offers pathways for indigenous women and in particular mothers who have experienced years of colonial oppression and approached it with fierce resistance and resilience who might want to practice yoga as a healing practice and to understand how colonization has impacted and continues to impact South Asian women, in particular, diasporic women raised in a Jain way of life.

I am trying to create a space for those who come after me and allow the light of my ancestors to live according to the principles of yoga traditions. In his final letter to his daughter, Albert Einstein wrote that the ultimate force of the universe is love, and this is the most powerful unseen force that scientists often forget. Yoga is an earth-based spiritual practice that roots our minds, bodies, and spirits in love. As hooks explains, love is the will to extend oneself to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth (2000).

A liberating yoga offers people tools beyond addictions, beyond disembodied ways of coping, beyond the glorification of merchandise, and beyond mirrors that privilege the front body while ignoring back-body wisdom. The sāmkhya philosophy, the spine of feminist-informed yoga, is lifesaving. Feminist-informed yoga teaches us that quieting for people of color, trans people, survivors, and single mothers is still left out of yoga spaces. It is not quieting the mind; it is a form of numbing. Feminist-informed yoga moves us into an area of universal consciousness where nonviolence toward ourselves and all sentient and insentient beings is revered.

Introduction

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Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully I can hear her breathing.

(Arundhati Roy, War Talk)

The idea of Consciousness-raising was that before women could change patriarchy, we had to change ourselves. We had to raise our consciousness. Therefore, revolutionary feminist consciousness raising emphasized the importance of learning about patriarchy as a system of domination, how it became institutionalized and how it is perpetuated and maintained

(bell hooks, Feminist Theory)

On June 21, 2014, the announcement by the United Nations on the International Day of Yoga by Resolution 69/131 to celebrate yoga throughout the world was rejoiced. This event, however, missed something hugely important in its understanding of yoga.

After twenty years of practicing yoga in gyms and studios, on beaches, and in my basement, I felt I was drowning in mixed feelings about the state of yoga in the world. The International Day of Yoga opened my eyes to more-profound and more-extensive divisions of yoga in my mind, and as I researched the topic, I found that yoga was deeply entrenched in the material world to the point that body dysmorphia was rampant in mainstream yoga studios. As a South Asian woman born and raised in a Jain way of life in Canada, I experienced internalized racism. Mainstream yoga studios are not safe spaces for people like me and many others.

We constantly hear news about wars, displacement, conflicts, natural disasters, and global warming, and this news infiltrates our psychology in unknown and often depressing ways. Many of us feel overwhelmed by tragic global events and cannot process them.

Some readers may have experienced trauma, addiction, violence, pain, and suffering due to sexism, homophobia, racism, disability, and classism. In this book, an overarching concept is global collective healing from pain inflicted on us due to human suffering, bondage to the material world, and lack of freedom. Many of us need such healing but might not have thought about it.

When you bring up the word yoga, you get a reaction that somehow there is deeper goodness or transformation that exists in contemporary culture. When you meet yoga teachers, you want so much to believe that they are on a higher spiritual path than you are and that somehow all that stretching and bending allows them to offer something more profound than what our current culture offers. However, you are being duped into believing this false narrative manufactured due to our loss of collective human spirituality and our relationship with the natural world.

Contemporary yoga offers us a simple way to feel good about ourselves, but as my statistics teacher used to say, There is no free lunch in life, so to do yoga, be a yogi, you must do the work. This work is what the theory of feminist-informed yoga offers. This book is also about decolonizing our relationship with ourselves, and that is what feminist-informed yoga brings to the world.

Yoga has a much deeper meaning than is commonly understood in contemporary culture. In this book, I drew on my ancestors’ way of life rooted in the ancient traditions of yoga. I center my argument on the exclusion of these traditions from Western thought and culture. These were excluded from Western culture, which is centered on a Judeo-Christian way of life. I drew from critical concepts such as modernity and coloniality and particularly the production of knowledge through a Western lens that enforces practices of study and thinking while minimizing discourse and practices in the lives of non-Western traditions (Imas and Weston 2012).

Furthermore, I center my argument in feminism; Mohanty (1998) states that much research explains women as white, cisgender, and middle class, but women are diverse. In this book, I use decolonial feminist theory to challenge what counts as knowledge and its knowledge production. Decolonial feminist theory centered on gender in the project of decolonization was fundamental. For me, a South Asian woman, this was based on experiences of being marginalized in Canadian culture. I wanted to construct a new Asian feminist theory about gender to create new possibilities, reframe and recontextualize knowledge about yoga traditions, and offer new ways of knowing and thinking about yogic traditions.

In this book, I drew upon my lived experiences as a Jain woman of color who grew up in a home where I was taught a Jain way of life. As the foundation of my identity, these teachings were passed on to me but were highly misunderstood in contemporary Canadian culture. Throughout my life, yoga has been