Yoga - when does appreciation become appropriation?
In this two-part series, Kadambari Raghukumar talks to New Zealand practitioners about the commodification of ancient Indian practice.
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Megan Sety is a US-born yoga student and teacher and India-born Vinny Lohan is a wellness and social entrepreneur.
Over the past three years, the pair say their relationship with yoga and the New Zealand yoga community has seen an evolution of sorts.
"I just found many ways to rationalise that what I was doing was okay, to excuse my role in contributing to commercialisation of yoga."
In some ways, their journey has taken the form of efforts to find paths to newer, more nuanced ways of both practicing and sharing an ancient physical and spiritual practice.
What's needed, Sety and Lohan say, is a new path that avoids reducing the practice of yoga to just physical form while acknowledging its Indian roots and encouraging more inclusivity in classes.
"If you teach it, you really need to deeply, honour and respect all of it. That's, I think, where it's been problematic - where we cherry-pick in a way particularly that's attached to profit"
"Inner transformation and the science of consciousness - that is the power of yoga," Vinny says.
"Systems which have the ability to bring about a transformation carry a lot of power. The dilution we are seeing in yoga is actually a dismissal of indigenous power.
"Knowledge truly does belong to everyone. The problem that we are seeing is that certain people have taken that knowledge and the power that comes with it and held it. "
