Welcome to Week 5 of my series on gender and spirituality. This week and next I'll be featuring people whose spiritual practices are based on Hinduism.

In the interest of transparency, I (the interviewer) am a cisgender Protestant woman which may have influenced the questions I asked.

A special thank you to my interviewee, Maya!

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Maya is a yogi, which she defines as “not full-on Hinduism, [yogi is] the American spinoff of it [and there are] lot of differences in the practices. […] It’s a spiritual practice, but there are all the deities in Hinduism still”.

Maya spent parts of her childhood living at the ashram, a spiritual commune. She remembers getting up at 5am and using various texts for study. There were also communal practices involving Kirtan, a musical form that uses Sanskrit chants as a form of meditation. The ashram was run by gurus, whose status depended on “various levels” of enlightenment. Maya said “I would not be religious or spiritual in any other way. I wouldn’t feel comfortable in another spiritual practice. I lived with [yogi] but I don’t know everything”.

When I asked Maya if she felt yogi was gendered like many other spiritual traditions, she said “yogi has a lot less to do with gender, [… there’s] not one gender having control, and it's not super orthodox.[...] I’m sure [being a female yogi] has intersections in the larger scheme of things but being one hasn’t affected the other”. ” She couldn't remember any particularly sexist interactions influencing the way she experiences spirituality.

Maya sees yogi as essentially gender-neutral, though she gave the caveat “I’m coming from a status of Western and white”. She sees Western culture as far more patriarchal because “religion and patriarchy work hand in hand in Western culture."

As far as other religions, Maya doesn’t “see all religion as gendered male” as many of my interviewees do. She remembers being told as a child about Muslims and people of color "practicing patriarchal [religious] traditions" but as an adult she realizes these stereotypes to be untrue.

Maya’s final words in the interview were “you can’t know things about another [person’s] religion and not necessarily [everything] about our own”.

That last point is crucial to this series as a whole; spirituality and gender are very personal experiences and we shouldn’t assume (or judge!) other people's experiences by the words they use to identify themselves. This is especially true for people with privilege (I'm looking at you and challenging you to do better, my fellow Christian cis humans). One person can’t speak for a whole community, but that doesn’t make their words or their identities invalid.