Yoga in the Vegetable Garden, 2022

Performance by Leticia Izrego & Rodro Rodriguez

In a time of global crisis, the conditions are ideal for a return to rural life — without, of course, giving up yoga (so trendy these days). This is how we created YOGUERTING, a series of postural hygiene exercises focusing on the parts of the body that suffer most from hoeing, weeding and watering.

Mainstream yoga emerged when avant-garde artists began looking beyond the United States for ways of life more closely connected to nature, distancing themselves from a civilisation they considered brutalised. This laid the foundations for countercultural movements with an idealised vision of India, which ultimately fell under capitalist doctrines.

The result was a colonised, watered-down version of yoga — what academic S. Gandhi calls «the great yoga industrial complex» — associated with thin white women and transformed into a social media trend featuring impossible poses. These images encourage us to compete and pursue happiness through the consumption of clothing and accessories, linking yoga to the stresses of modern life, success and productivity.

When a dominant culture appropriates elements of oppressed cultures for profit, this is known as «inappropriate cultural appropriation». Examples include the exploitation of exotic symbols (tattoos or nightclub decorations) or the transformation of a millennia-old tradition into a pastime for the elite. The introduction of fitness dumbbells into yoga, driven by an obsession with the body, is another example of how non-experts oversimplify complex Hindu concepts, trivialising a culture and replacing harmony with exhibitionism — when yoga is precisely the opposite of an affirmation of the ego.

As a result of this popularisation, there are now countless schools offering diplomas at exorbitant prices, sometimes with little regard for the quality of their training. Cases of sexual abuse in yoga and meditation have also increased, leading to the creation of the NGO «Basta de Abusos en el Yoga» (Enough Abuse in Yoga), which seeks to break the silence surrounding abuse within traditional master–disciple structures.

Western cultural hegemony is stripping yoga of its nature and roots, treating it as just another trend and subjecting its symbols of identity to the rules of the market, with damaging consequences.