Pravāha: On Practising Yoga

Pravāha is to flow. A monthly newsletter on writing, building a practice, and embodying creativity

This month is a bit of a different format and I am including an excerpt of some writing recently published. Earlier this month the Growing Up Indian in Australia edition of the wonderful Black Inc. Books series was launched. There were multiple launches across the country that involved the Indian-Australian community and I was honoured to be part of the Sydney event with local bookstore Better Read Than Dead.

Growing up second-generation and mixed-race, I never felt like I had any real claims to being part of the diaspora community or identity. My own family was ‘different’ and we didn’t appear like the classic migrant narrative trope - my family married into Anglo-Australian families, worked in the creative arts and academia, and my mum was a Marxist-Feminist. I felt connected to my ancestry and culture through my family, but it was also something that felt quite individual at times. It was only as I was listening to everyone speak on the night, and from reading the pieces in the anthology, that I realised so few people truly felt like they belonged in any clear way to an Anglo-Indian community or felt connected to that migrant trope, and that this diaspora identity was hardly a homogenous thing. I spoke about this along with the editor Aarti Betigeri & some contributors on ABC Radio National Nightlife Program and you can listen here.

On the night I read from my piece, Practising Yoga. This is a satirical piece about some of the hurdles I have faced in my own attempts to practice, learn and teach yoga in Australia. I wanted to show how something as deceptively simple as going to a yoga class, can actually conjure a whole series of moral conundrums around appropriation, cultural heritage, shame, spirituality, beauty standards, along with a search for identity. I have been hearing back from readers who feel similar dilemmas which has been connecting and reassuring!

The book is now out and available if you want to read more from the various wonderful contributors!

Practising Yoga

“Everyone in this city seems to be training to become a yoga teacher. More often than not it is the attractive girls. The ones that partied hard and took drugs at rave parties and were desperate to escape their skins while men gravitated towards them when they were young to act as their saviour as they scoured the planet, moving, always moving. And now they exhale heavily and run retreats in Bali where they journal their emotions and get high on raw cacao and Instagram their multi-coloured tight-lycra bodies in picturesque headstands, and it is unarguably a better existence, yet there is still the hint of the unstable, the look of the desperate, the unhinged enlightenment in their eyes as they sweetly ask to me sign up to retreats that fund their newfound lifestyle.

They always mispronounce namaste. It shouldn’t matter.  I should let it go. I should release my judgement. It’s different for me; my family speak Hindi and Tamil and Sanskrit. Sometimes I act superior, but the truth is I don’t speak these languages myself. I question my own knowledge of a culture when I wasn’t born in the country, and have many unanswered questions about my own ancestry. I often feel like I am being told about my identity through the mouths of 200-hour Anglo yoga teachers. Just because I can say the words and have the blood, does it really mean I have some claim over them? And if I really think I am that good, maybe I should do my own practice rather than paying twenty dollars to sit here with the internal dialogue running, berating myself, trying to be a better human, all the while waiting with a nervous, apprehensive tic for the twanging mispronunciation of
Na-ma–staaay. 

In class, the teacher tells us to let go of our egos, and then spends five minutes telling us to thank ourselves for turning up on the mat today, and thank ourselves for doing the practice, and thank ourselves for being so special, because we are special. By the end my head is swelling. Sometimes I go to yoga just for the ego boost.

On weekend wellbeing retreats the yoga women wear their hair in braids; they wear jewellery from the markets and indigo scarves with Indian cotton dresses. They talk loudly about Rajasthan and Rishikesh and performing puja and transcendental meditation. When I was growing up, my mum tried to dress me in Indian clothes and I would look aghast and hope no one from school would catch me or hear her thick accent when she said the word puja.

A boutique yoga store is selling metal tongue scrapers for forty dollars. I remember when I was a teenager and I had a sleepover and my mum tried to show my girlfriends how to use a tongue scraper and how disgusted they looked and I wanted her, or me, to fall into a hole in the ground. Now, the scrapers sit among the neutral beige shades as nag champa and Ram Dass house remixes fill the ambient space, and I consider buying one.”