On a college campus in Canada, a free yoga class was banned because of one issue: it was considered offensive to a culture.
This was the Indian culture, where yoga has deep spiritual meaning and importance to the Hindu religion. It is a practice to calm one’s mind and experience the release of a mind that is clear and calm, in tune with the divine reality. This is achieved through various poses and chants. The basic aim of yoga is as a physical form of meditation and the goal is to be liberated from the cycle of rebirth and death that religions like Hinduism and Buddhism.
As a side effect, it is really good for stress relief and developing flexibility. Yoga comes in a variety of forms and some versions are really useful for physical development. An example is Hatha yoga, which consists of a variety of physical techniques. These techniques include various postures and poses, which is what is popular in the West as yoga and is taught in all those yoga classes. And why they have weird names like “dog pose” and “warrior pose”. The yoga popular in America is basically all this exercise with some deep, rather complex mystical roots.
The PC police/cultural critics often argue that yoga has been appropriated by the West and used for their own selfish purposes. They claim to take yoga and its associated rituals and mysticism and package it into a system of exercise and stress relief. And the fact that people practice it today solely for those reasons is damaging because it is exploiting a previously oppressed culture. They argue that it's not right for white people to come in, take over India, and then get away with doing all those cool postures and poses the Indian yogis do.
As an Indian, I must disagree with them.
While India did indeed suffer under British rule and was later chopped up into several countries upon independence, we’re over that stuff; India’s main concerns are China and Pakistan, not British imperialism rising again. And second, the form of yoga that is practiced, Hatha yoga, is all about strengthening the body and making it more flexible. Yoga was introduced to the West by Indian teachers, who really had no problem with people practicing it solely for exercise and health benefits. In fact, folks like B.K.S. Iyengar emphasized that part because they hoped people would get interested in the more religious aspects of it later, which was the case. And given that Iyengar lived to be 95, its clear that he really knew what he was teaching.
And quite frankly, I find it amazing that yoga is popular in America. It’s a part of my heritage that makes it easier for me to bridge the gap between my American self and Indian self; it’s a cultural activity that can be enjoyed regardless if you are a yogi from New Delhi or a farm boy from Kansas or a liberal hipster from San Francisco. It's truly transcendental.
So please hear me out PC police. Stay away from yoga because me and a billion other Indians don’t consider it offensive that people in the West use yoga for physical exercise. We’ve been doing it for centuries and many of us didn’t even care about the spiritual aspects of it either.