Pleasure to meet you. I’m Ximon and I practice vinyasa yoga. I’m enthralled with the ways this practice facilitates harmony between my body and spirit. It stokes a fire inside me that’s hard to ignore.
Yoga found me in my early teens in the form of American produced yoga videos from producers like Gaiam and YogaZone. I have generally practiced a very westernized style of vinyasa yoga all my life.
At age 32, I entered a teacher training that started in person, then concluded online later that year.
Can you guess the year?
My teacher training took place in a time battered by global, aggressive waves of change. That power sent me into a period of reflection on what this practice means to me.
As a content warning, my journey to yoga, fitness, and wellness includes body shaming by a relative, and I ruminate on how thin white body-centered yoga influenced many years of my practice. If you are sensitive to that, consider skipping this post and reading my short About Me as an alternative.
My path to yoga began when I was around thirteen years old. I was gifted a Gaiam Yoga VHS tape with Suzanne Deason and a purple yoga mat that I still use today. When my mom’s friend gave me that as birthday present, I very clearly remember my mom saying, “Lower body yoga? Yeah, you need that.”
She had no filter for her fatphobias around me or about me. Perhaps even now my connection to yoga carries a thorn of shame for my body. I followed Suzanne’s twenty-minute crackling VHS tape for countless days after school in junior high and high school, always needled by the pursuit of the thin white body.
My next instructors via a YogaZone DVD were white. And it was numerous videos later until I found a DVD titled Dosha Yoga lead by South Asian instructor Hemalayaa Behl.
I was not a frequent in-person student up until the last three years. Most of that has to do with cost barriers, especially when I was a teenager and full-time college student. When I have gone to classes, there are more opportunities to find teachers of color and South Asian descent than I saw in videos.
Generally though, many studios I attended upheld westernized practices and hierarchies within the classroom – and I say that as an observation, not as a judgement. Every class is in a different phase of recognizing that yoga cannot be forced into a hierarchy. At the last studio I attended regularly, I noticed some teachers subscribe to hierarchies, some do not, and that either way the format of yoga taught in this studio was created to prioritize fitness rather than spiritual inquiry.
Attending group classes ultimately taught me that it is my responsibility to meet myself on the mat with compassion for my limitations and the limitations of others. If idealizing the thin white body is a concept we are healing from collectively, then I am not the only one in the room affected by this wound. Healing looks different on everyone, and some are still fighting to exist in a system that feels like it will never honor their worth. What I can do is be a model for self-love and acceptance, and that capacity is different every day.
The thin white body still plagues me. It strikes at me and leaves me wondering if all this is just part of an aimless pursuit to see that body reflected in the mirror. At the root of my practice, there remains a knot that keeps me connected to the lie that the thin white body effortlessly balancing in crow pose is the goal. I have to actively give myself grace, knowing that my young psyche was pressured to conform to a white supremacist idealized female body for a very long time.
Not until social media came along later in my twenties did the global conversation around self-love begin to break down the illusion that my body was “not worthy”.
When the intrusive thoughts like this weigh heavily, I breathe. I remember that our breath is cure. I remind myself that when I engage with yoga, I am engaging in thousands of years of history.
Within that wide expanse of time we have a lot to hold. We will find hierarchies that we do not agree with, we will see heroes fall from grace, and we will witness injustice across different iterations of the practice. We will come to our practice bearing the suffering of a world that the originators of yoga may not have foreseen, and yet their teachings still influence us to choose connection and peace through yoga’s foundations in Hinduism and South Asian spirituality.
As a white/mixed lineage person without a cultural connection to South Asia, I strive to produce content that is both anti-racist and rejects cultural appropriation. In practice this is done through research, listening, understanding, and adaptation.
To other non-South Asians that practice yoga, specifically those of us who came to yoga via westernized media, I deeply encourage you to research yoga’s history (both its origins and modern history), and to honor that our practice descends from Yoga, one of the six major philosophical schools of Hinduism. Make time to listen to yoga teachers and practitioners from South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. Cultivate a gratitude for the many generations of teachers that came before us, and think critically about the channels with which its popularity grew in the West.
I hope that what you find draws you into a transformational relationship with yoga as a community beyond the physical practice. Incorporating the spiritual lessons of yoga into my practice and my life continues to help me find serenity amid chaos.
Yoga is a beautiful, diverse confluence of time and culture. We can hold its imperfect history in the West as a story continuing to unfold, and make the choice to connect wisely with this long-cherished cultural, spiritual practice.
We will always be students of these histories when we meet on the mat.