With Yogis Vivekananda and Baldwin
June 21 is International Day of Yoga. This day was first recognized by the United Nations in 2014 in order to raise global awareness of the physical and mental benefits of this ancient spiritual practice. Today, the global yoga industry is worth over $130 billion, though much of this money is funneled to companies and individuals who may not know much about the origins of the practice, and its radical applications for self-love and community healing.
Yoga is personal to me because it has given me a gateway into connecting with the essence of who we are as conscious beings. Even though I was raised in a Hindu family, my Western education and surroundings of the 80s and 90s made me feel ashamed of this transformative science. I distanced myself from this practice and succumbed to the false stereotypes about this practice that continue in American legislatures and classrooms to this day. However, I re-discovered yoga in college after my mother gave me a copy of Paramahansa Yogananda’s An Autobiography of a Yogi. This book was the beginning of my healing journey — healing depression, self-doubt, and numerous internalized racial biases I held about myself and people of South Asian descent.
I went deep into studying the origins of yoga, becoming a certified yoga teacher, as well as taking advanced courses in this science of inner transformation. Throughout this process of re-education and unlearning, I was mystified as to why and how no one had taught me any of it.
Yoga was first introduced on American lands in 1893 when Swami Vivekananda, an Indian Hindu monk, was invited to speak at the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago. Here was this dark-skinned Indian man with a turban who arrived in America from a colonized India to share the message of Sanatana Dharma (or the eternal way), our interconnection, and yoga, or what he termed our innate oneness. It was certainly a powerful moment. While Vivekananda was invited to this event, we have to remember that no person of African ancestry was permitted to attend, given the deeply pervasive and false belief that our Black siblings are inherently inferior. This was a few years before Jim Crow would be law across the American South and three decades before people of Indian and Asian origin would be barred from immigrating to the United States — something that wouldn’t change until 1965.
The word “racism” didn't exist yet at this time — this article offers a background on the first time racism as a word was used in 1902 — but Vivekananda was very familiar with the hatred and separation this soon-to-be-coined word espoused. He came from what is now the subcontinent of South Asia, a land that had been brutalized and colonized by the British (alongside the French, Dutch, and Portuguese) because of this budding concept of racism, for the pure purposes of material extraction — extraction of people’s labor and of natural resources.
As an Indian, he had experienced this hatred firsthand daily in his homeland as well as during his first visit to America. He shares in his book, Karma Yoga:
“When I came to this country and was through the Chicago Fair, a man from behind pulled my turban...on another occasion in the same Fair a man gave me a push. When I asked him the reason… ‘Why do you dress that way?’” (page 47)
These experiences were not new, but what was unique about Vivekananda was his ability to see through people's actions and relate to the conscious being within them. He writes, “Our first duty is not to hate ourselves; to advance we must have faith in ourselves first and then in God.” (page 15) He noted that any person who espouses an attitude of racism — and other prejudices we refer to as “-isms” — also holds within themselves a subconscious belief of inadequacy, unworthiness, and even self-hatred.
This is where the teaching of yoga comes in. Yoga teaches the ability to know oneself and to truly love oneself through the practices of the body postures (asana), breathwork (pranayama), chants (mantra), visualization (yantra), meditation (dhyana), and work (karma). Together, these practices result in the cleaning of our body, mind, and spirits of the toxins of the ego-driven greed, hatred, ignorance, and entitlement we too often encounter in our day-to-day lives.
People of the dominant racial caste have long held and propagated these misled beliefs of superiority, entitlement, and separation. Over time, these poisoned ideals led to colonization, enslavement, and genocides of people globally, the legacies of which continue to this day. The lessons we learn through yoga can be applied to overcome these toxic beliefs, to break down our racial caste system, and to learn to be better to one another, too.
James Baldwin, the iconic author and, might I add, a yogi in his own right, also understood this deep truth about the need for self-love and acceptance as a path toward accepting difference. Excerpted in the New Yorker, he wrote:
“White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”
Baldwin saw it too: connection to the self is integral to loving and accepting others, to looking past our differences and simply loving one another as we are. Yoga teaches us to be present and notice ourselves and others in the moment. Unfortunately, too few of us, from average people to our elected officials and world leaders, take the opportunity to notice and be present. The people in dominant cultures see others not for who they are, but for the stories they have created about these groups — stories often rooted in hatred. This is how stereotyping and discrimination are born: we do not see the person in front of us, only the false story we have been led to believe. Yoga’s teachings of presence and love can help us unlearn this instinct.
Today and every day, I hope that more of us will recognize yoga for its transformative power to shift our society. If we can all create the space to practice, to notice, to be mindful, to be present with each other and with ourselves, we can truly bring about the sweeping change our society so dearly needs. Whatever your path looks like, I hope you’ll join me in honoring this timeless practice, both for its deep roots and for its meaningful purpose today.
If you’re interested in learning more about yoga as a practice, I recommend downloading and practicing yoga on the Insight Timer and the Open apps as well as checking out the Setu community for diverse yoga teachers and practitioners.