Nell Frizzell: Yoga, like flour and eggs, is what you make it

Last time I tried to do a yoga class, an angry Australian man the consistency of a cheesestring shouted at me for “flooding my system with empty wetness”, after I tried to drink some water. I was in some foul-smelling corner of a north London leisure centre surrounded by people in petrol spill Lycra, listening to the slow release of methane while the receptionist outside did a little light filing to Magic FM. It was about as far from the gurus of northern India as it is possible to be. And yet, as long as nobody actually harms themselves in the classes, I would defend even his right to practise yoga in any way he wishes, the wiry Antipodean arsehole.

I am sister to a half-Indian yoga practitioner and daughter to a English yoga teacher, so I have some sympathy with the opinion that “there are cultural issues of implication involved in the practice [of yoga]” – which was the complaint made by staff at the Centre for Students with Disabilities where the free classes took place, and upheld by the Ottawa Student Federation. I would also make the case that yoga, like flour and eggs, can be what you make it.

It may have been a while since I regularly practised, but even I can feel my sphincter twitching into full paschimottanasana at the prospect of yoga being relabelled “mindful stretching”. And yet, for many, this is what yoga is – a little bit of bending. Yoga is not necessarily a religious practice. Nor is it held in aspic. If, as for many, it catalyses an interest in the cultural, spiritual and historical movements that came together to create it then that’s lovely. If you decide to go on a yoga retreat to India and while there go and stay in an ashram and learn more about the unfathomable rules of dharma and karma, then that’s great. If you decide, after a few months of doing yoga down at your local Buddhist centre that you’d actually like to know more about the philosophy behind the yoga sutras, then I’m happy for you. But it is by no means culturally insensitive to go to a free yoga class just because it makes you feel better. Or because you like the bending.

There are plenty of things that could, and should, act as a daily reminder of the harm we wreaked through colonialisation; tea, sugar, tobacco, coffee, the word “pyjamas”. We should be wary and we should try to make amends. But in many ways, yoga is often treated with more respect, with greater cultural sensitivity than the people still growing the crops and providing the services upon which we, in the west, rely.

Of course it’s embarrassing to see a grown man in drawstring cotton churidars and a tie-dye vest with the om sign printed across his nipples, crowing about the rigidity of his navasana pose. And of course it’s cloying to listen to a woman in buttock-sucking high-shine leggings talking about the chi in her smoothie as she wafts out of an eye-wateringly expensive yoga class held on the fourth floor of some metropolitan members club. And, of course, it’s all a long way from the philosophical and physiological practices put down by Patanjali in around 100BC.

But yoga has been stretched into a new entity, one far removed from the cultural circumstances that first spawned it. And to practise that, however you see fit, is absolutely fine. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to do a little mindful stretching, followed by a heavy session of thoughtful bending and some rugged cognisant twisting.

Reni Eddo-Lodge: Yoga needs to be wrenched away from the hyper-flexible, white elite few

It’s worth questioning why, over the years, the face of yoga has transformed into something that’s thin, white and blonde, paired with clean eating, and part of an aspirational lifestyle. Are you a real yogi if you don’t execute your practice at six in the morning? Is it authentic if you don’t upload a picture of it online as the rest of the world is stumbling out of bed, while smugly tucking into a breakfast acai bowl topped with chia seeds? I can sympathise with Ottawa’s students in this respect. Yoga really does have to become decolonised, wrenched away from the perception that it’s only for a hyper-flexible, super-thin and very white elite few.

But the metaphorical yoga feathers have already been scattered. At this year’s Glastonbury (admittedly in the healing fields), I overhead someone say “I do loads of cocaine at the weekends, but then I do yoga to centre myself”. I’m sure this is not what the yogis and yoginis of the classical sanskrit of the Puranas intended all those years ago. As a practice with at least three different strands that have evolved over hundreds of years, it would be impossible to undo the westernification of yoga in 2015. At the handful of classes I attended in a church hall in Tottenham, I saw all types of people getting to grips with the flexibility of their joints. Whether it’s used as a holier-than-thou tool, as a tactic to balance out excessive drug use, or practised similarly to its origins with the spirituality that comes with it, yoga flexed by slightly clueless white bodies is here to stay.

That’s why I’d rather take my yogic lead from women like Jessamyn Stanley– fat, black, body-positive and the antithesis of the willowy white women Instagram club. But at the root of this news story, about a fairly small event on a university campus, is a pushback against student activism as a whole. Because a cancelled yoga class on a campus in Canada affects no one but the students who go there. Annoyed students will push back on the decision to cancel, more annoyed students will argue the case for why it shouldn’t return, it’ll be hashed out among themselves. That’s how these things go.

You should ask yourself why these “students do thing on campus” stories fascinate you so much. From one side of our mouths we complain that young people are a listless, apathetic generation obsessed with staring at their phones. But when students are deeply engaged in political environments that they can collectively change, starting things here and stopping things there, we sneer and insist that they are censorious, sensitive and downright ridiculous. So which is it? We want young people to be political until they start talking about race – then, suddenly, it’s the wrong kind of politics.

In her essay Against Students, Goldsmiths lecturer Sara Ahmed writes “the instances of apparent censorship (translate: student protests) seem to generate more discourse and discussion rather than preventing discourse or discussion”. This is the exact opposite of shutting down debate. An act like this one usually starts it. In the meantime, people who really want to do yoga without thinking about its history and cannibalisation will cough up the cash, students will continue to stake their claim on the spaces they frequent, and the world will continue to turn. There’s no need to get quite so het up about it.