DAdima practice Yoga every day.
She had studied in London, but had just returned to India to start practicing, around the same time she married a naval officer. His mother encouraged her to drop out of college after her wedding, which she did. Her first son was born that year, and soon after her second son, my father.
Dadima used to do yoga every day. She practiced when she left Bombay and went to Colorado in 1980 while her husband remained to transport slaughtered sheep to the Middle East. She pursued her practice while raising two teenage boys in a white town in a red state. When only the cold winters became dark and heavy and she missed her home, she returned to the large rug in her bedroom to ground her body and breathe. Rooting is an important part of yoga. You put down roots to stand up. The root chakra, located at the base of the spine, is the foundation of safety and security. When your roots are firmly grounded, you will be more balanced, more stable, and able to move with more grace.
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I started yoga as a teenager when I was one of the only desi kids attending a white school in Colorado. It was a way to take a deep breath, tap into my family tree, and reach out to my growing limbs. As a young queer person, this was one of the few spaces I felt like I could truly be fully present. I was an angry third-culture kid in a hippie town without much of a sense of home. In hippie towns peace and enlightenment offerings were bundled in expensive prayer flags and bushels of white sage, and joints were stuck behind the ears of snowboarding Buddhists and Deadhead yogis. I will take what I can get.
Most of the yoga I know was taught by white people. My early instructors were YouTube personalities, gym teachers, or ski enthusiasts with side jobs. They taught me basic choreography, cat, cow, dog downwards and upwards, and booked all the classes by rattle. Namaste. But years after I started practicing yoga, when I heard my teachers use Sanskrit words in their asanas, I learned that there was more to yoga than stretching and deep breathing. One International Yoga Day, a friend and I attended a core-strengthening yoga class at a local studio. The lecturer declared the holiday to be a centuries-old celebration of peace and love. I hesitated. Prime Minister Narendra Modi created Yoga Day in 2014 as part of his authoritarian, Hindu nationalist, and caste-supremacist policies in India. Yoga can be violent.
When your roots are firmly grounded, you’ll be more balanced, more stable, and able to move with more grace.
Yoga became popular in America in the 1960s. Although it has been a spiritual practice in India for thousands of years, its popularity in the West has focused primarily on asanas and physical forms. The person credited with this achievement, BKS Iyengar, was one of the first people to teach yoga to Westerners. His focus on body conditioning and willingness to embrace props sets the stage for the future of yoga, complete with matching workout sets, $100 accessories, and “6 easy yoga poses to tone your abs.” It was set. It would be easy for me to get annoyed with Iyengar about this if Dadima hadn’t recently told me that the yoga studio she joined in Bombay decades ago was Iyengar Yogashraya. The same forces that brought yoga to American hippies also made it accessible to my grandmother. It gave her the space to be in control of her own body. The same force made me draw it closer as well. Our practices, although different, come from the same roots.
A few years ago, my cousin and I attended Dadima’s yoga practice. Our movements were a little different, but pretty much the same. surya namaskar, she said. My Americanized brain had a hard time interpreting the Sanskrit and translating it into poor Hindi. I think she does sun salutations like she does. chaturangaI became an upward facing dog. We were flopping around like overturned cockroaches while she kicked her legs up over her head to stretch her hips. Despite having been practicing yoga for eight years, I felt like a baby deer or a cartoon elephant constantly slipping on a banana peel next to my 80-year-old grandmother.
meaning of words yoga In Sanskrit, it can be translated as “yoke” or “union.” It is the union of mind and body, personal consciousness and universal consciousness. I like the idea that yoga might also be able to bring together my white and brown selves, who sometimes feel tension with each other. Sometimes you just catch the right wave and find your flow. Like my grandmother, I move slowly and quietly.Asana Sanskrit and English float in my head. Other times, I can’t speak at all. The practice of unity is a challenge and is never completed. Sitting or huddled together always creates a sense of tension. The trick is just to keep breathing.