i don’t get it.

That in itself is a patronizing attitude..as if these cultures need we mighty whites to step in and tell them when and how they are being exploited. I guarantee-fucking -tee that it is not people from India doing the objecting.

Honestly, I think someone in management got a bug up their bum that the children were learning some scary brown people religion and yanked it for that. Because that’s what happened in several other schools in America.

To be fair, I’ve seen a couple of Indian people writing about how western-style yoga practice violates the spiritual point of yoga and how they’d like it to stop, but they seem to be a minority. In any case, I think most people would agree that doing concrete good for disabled students is more of a priority than…

... wow, that’s mindblowingly stupid. It sounds like the school just didn’t want to offer the class for whatever pragmatic reason (like, they wanted the space for something else, etc.) and was scrambling for an excuse.

This here is exactly why we can’t have nice things. Who gives a shit about the ‘cultural implications’ of yoga class. How about we just be happy that disabled folks have this class as an option?

I’ve studied yoga in both India and the west, and while people in the Indian yoga community do enjoy making fun of all the dumb crap promoted as “yoga” in the west (dog yoga, $100 Lululemon pants etc.), I’ve never heard anyone take offense to the mere idea of Western people teaching or practicing yoga. This just seems…

Oh my god. Give me a fucking break. This is the kind of shit people are talking about when they say progressives are out of control offended by everything. Let’s just all never do anything again ever because along the way there was definitely somebody who was hurt during the development of said anything. We can all…

You can pry my coffee from cold dead colonialist hands.

In an ideal world, cultural appropriation would only be called out if it was someone who expressed something racist or discriminatory about another culture.

This one hit close to home. I have a 4-year-old with developmental disabilities. He loves to climb and dance and is very physically active, but his challenges mean team sports aren’t happening for him. His preschool does yoga sometimes and he *loves* it. It’s one of the few things where he’s on something close to a…

Sorry, but that post drove me to have a swig of bourbon, right out of the bottle. Then I screamed at the cat for a minute or two. I am doing much better now.

“there are cultural issues of implication involved in the practice.”

gaaahh! things that frustrate my brain: 1. the fact that i don’t understand that email. 2. seeing this type of programming taken away. as a parent of a special needs son, i see the need for these kinds of programs and they are few and far between! (am also a kid’s yoga instructor).

Horseshoe politics: when your tryhard “cultural sensitivity” uses the same exact logic as religious extremists.

Oh for fuck’s sake, it’s STRETCHING. I had no idea it was possible for a culture to have dibs on breathing and stretching. I have no idea what those emails are even trying to say.

Why not say, “Hey our budget can’t sustain this class, sorry!” Why all these obvious lies making them sound ridiculous. This would've been a non-story. I don't get it!

You know, many of these cultures are also cultures that have oppressed and been extremely violent towards others that they viewed as “lesser” than them because their beliefs happen to be overtly based on a notion of religious supremacy. Heaven forbid we stop treating every other non-western culture as some sort of…

“Yoga—like coffee, tea, math, syringes, and many other things people put to good use on a daily basis—has its origins in a culture that was infected by the long, sickly arm of Western colonialism.”

I don’t understand anything in that email. Not a word.