The Yoga We Were Sold: On Seeing What We Were Taught Not to See
· Erika Smith Iluszko
There is a finding in social psychology that has stayed with me since my university years. We are remarkably good at spotting bias in other people, and remarkably poor at spotting it in ourselves. Researchers call it the bias blind spot. The lens we look through is the one thing we cannot see.
I have practised yoga for more than three decades. For much of that time, I believed I was seeing yoga clearly. I read the texts, I sat with teachers, I practised every day. And yet I was looking through a lens I had never been asked to examine: a lens ground for me long before I was born, by empires, scholars, travellers and, later, marketers.
Perhaps I began to notice that lens because, I have lived much of my life between places (Asia, The Americas, the Levant & the Gulf Region, & now Europe). My life has moved between languages, English, German, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi (+ Sanskrit), Mandarin, Nihongo and the Tagalog (I have not mastered any of these languages and some are completely gone) of my mother’s family, and between very different ways of seeing the world.
When you live between worlds, you are never fully at home in any single one. That can be lonely. It is also a gift. You begin to notice the lenses that people rooted in one place never notice, because they have never had to look through another. What one culture calls “obvious”, another calls strange. Living in between taught me that “obvious” is usually just a lens we have forgotten we are wearing.
This blog is an invitation to pick up that lens and turn it over in your hands. Not to throw it away in shame, but to finally see it. Because what we do not see, we keep repeating. And in yoga, what we repeat, we teach.
If you practise, if you teach, if you run a yoga studio, if you have ever bought a mat with a mandala on it: this is for you. It was also, first, for me. And if you are South Asian, you may have lived these blind spots from the other side, as the one being described. You do not need me to explain them, and I hope you will tell me where I still get it wrong.
What we “know” about other cultures is never innocent. For centuries, European scholars, writers, painters and administrators produced an enormous body of knowledge about “the East”. That knowledge did not simply describe. It invented. It created an image of a whole region of the world that was mystical, sensual, timeless, irrational and passive.
That image was a mirror. The “East” was defined by everything the West believed it was not. If the East was irrational, the West was reason. If the East was frozen in the past, the West was progress. The image told Europeans far more about their own fears and longings than about the people they claimed to describe.
Describing is a form of power. Whoever is allowed to describe a people, with authority, holds power over them. The describer becomes the expert. The described become an object: studied, explained, spoken for, and assumed unable to speak for themselves.
The image outlives its origins. Empires fall. The pictures they painted stay. They pass quietly into novels, films, advertising and, as I came to realise, into yoga studios.
My own blind spots
It would be easy to write this essay as if I stood outside it, pointing. I don’t. I have my own blind spots, and some of them are woven into my own family history.
My mother’s family is Filipino. The Philippines lived more than three centuries under Spanish rule and nearly half a century under American rule. The colonisers described us too. William Howard Taft, the first American civil governor of the islands, called Filipinos America’s “little brown brothers”: childlike, in need of guidance, not yet ready to govern ourselves. The same grammar Said traced in European writing about the Middle East was spoken over my mother’s islands. It shaped how my family was seen, and at times how they saw themselves.
I do not claim my family’s history is the same as India’s. Colonialism took different shapes in different places, and I am careful not to borrow South Asian experience as my own. But the grammar was related, and learning to hear it in my own family helped me hear it everywhere else.
I saw that gaze most clearly in something that seemed, at the time, completely ordinary. When I was younger, it felt as though almost every Filipina, Latina, Japanese, Indian etc. I knew wanted fairer skin. Whitening soaps and creams sat on bathroom shelves like any other necessity. Women shaded themselves from the sun, not for their health but to stay pale. A light-skinned mestiza face was what beauty looked like on billboards, in magazines and on television. And so many beautiful women worked hard to bleach away their own warm, beautiful, golden tone.
No one ever called it a colonial wound. It was just called being pretty. That is exactly how a blind spot works. Centuries of rule by people with paler skin had quietly taught us that their faces were the standard and ours were the problem. The coloniser no longer needed to be present. We carried his gaze into our own mirrors and turned it on ourselves. So I know, in my body, what it is to be described by others. And yet, for years, I did not see how I myself was taking part in describing others. I, too, used the language of “ancient secrets”. I, too, chose images for flyers because they looked “spiritual”. I, too, at times passed teachings on in the language the Western yoga market expected, without asking whose voices that language left out. Being descended from the colonised does not make me immune to the coloniser’s lens. That was one of my hardest lessons. Blind spots do not care about our heritage or our good intentions.
What helped me see was a Filipino concept my mother’s world carries: Kapwa. It is often translated as “shared self”, the recognition of myself in the other. Kapwa does not say “we are all the same”. It says: your being is bound up with mine, so I owe you care, accountability and presence. Orientalism describes a gaze that turns people into objects. Kapwa refuses that distance. It asks me, again and again: if this practice is part of someone’s self, their ancestors, their gods, their struggle, how do I stand in right relationship with them?
Blind spot one: the yoga that lives in the past
Close your eyes and picture “real” yoga. What do you see?
For many of, it is a sage in a cave. A lone figure on a riverbank at dawn. Palm leaves, stone temples, an old man with a long beard. Notice what is missing: a traffic jam in Bengaluru, a Dalit woman teaching a class, a heated argument between two Indian scholars about what the Yoga Sutra actually means, a smartphone. This is the first blind spot: the belief that the East is timeless. That its truth lives in an ancient past, preserved and unchanging, waiting for us to come and collect it. It sounds like reverence. It is actually erasure. When yoga’s “real” home is placed in a mythical past, the living people of South Asia, with their modern lives, politics, debates and struggles, quietly disappear. They become background scenery for our spiritual journey. Listen to how yoga is marketed: “ancient wisdom”, “5,000-year-old secrets”, “timeless practice”. Each phrase freezes a living tradition in amber. And each one tells the Western seeker that the most important thing about India happened a very long time ago.
Ask yourself: When I imagine yoga’s roots, do I picture living people, or only ruins and legends?
Blind spot two: the mirror
This is the part of thinking I find most uncomfortable, because it turns the lens back on us. The image the West built of the East was never really about the East. It was a mirror. Europe painted onto it whatever it lacked or longed for. So ask what Western yoga has painted onto India. We are exhausted, so yoga becomes a cure for burnout. We are anxious, so it becomes a nervous-system reset. We are obsessed with self-improvement, so it becomes optimisation: better sleep, better focus, a better body. We have lost faith in our own religions but still want meaning, so it becomes a spirituality with no obligations, no community and no gods we have to answer to. None of these needs is shameful. But notice what happened. A vast, argued-over, living set of traditions was quietly reshaped into the exact answer to our own problems. We did not find yoga. We found ourselves, reflected back in Indian clothing. The mirror is the hardest blind spot to see, because it flatters us. It tells us we are drawn to yoga because of its wisdom, when often we are drawn to it because of our wounds.
Ask yourself: What do I need yoga to be? And what parts of yoga do I ignore because they don’t meet that need?
Blind spot three: taking without asking
Empire treated other cultures as a storehouse. Texts were carried to European libraries, statues to European museums, knowledge into European universities. The East was a resource to be gathered, catalogued and used. Now walk into a yoga shop. Ganesha on a candle. OM on a leggings waistband. Sanskrit in a decorative font on a tote bag. A Buddha head as a garden ornament. Mala beads as a fashion accessory. A tattoo of a mantra whose meaning the wearer has never looked up. Each of these objects began as something sacred to someone. A prayer. A deity. A syllable that, for millions of people, holds the whole of reality. In our hands, they become atmosphere. Décor. Branding. The blind spot here is not bad intentions. Most people who buy these things feel admiration, even love. The blind spot is the assumption that admiration gives us the right to take, without context, without relationship, and without asking what it means to the people whose ancestors made it sacred.
Blind spot four: waiting for science’s permission
In some texts, the West is described as is reason and the East is feeling, intuition, superstition. The West thinks; the East dreams. Watch how this plays out in yoga. We trust yoga once a Western study has “proven” that it lowers cortisol or improves flexibility. We love pranayama once it has been renamed as breathwork and is published in a journal. Meanwhile, the philosophy, the devotion, the ethical disciplines of the yamas and niyamas are politely trimmed away as “too spiritual”, “too woowoo”, not what the customer came for.
I say this as someone who loves science. I study fascia research and bring it into my teaching. Evidence matters. But notice the hierarchy hidden in the habit: a practice refined over centuries by generations of South Asian practitioners only becomes “real” when a Western laboratory signs off on it. That is not neutral curiosity. It is the old mirror at work. Western knowledge is the measure; Eastern knowledge must pass the test.
Blind spot five: whose voice you trust
The sharpest edge of this hypothesis is about voice. The describer speaks. The described is spoken for. In the colonial period, European scholars translated Sanskrit texts, ranked them, and decided which traditions were “authentic” and which were “degenerate”. Philosophical, textual yoga was admired. Embodied hatha practices, the practices of ascetics and ordinary people, were often dismissed as crude. Those judgements shaped what reached the West, and they still shape what we teach. Now count. Who wrote the yoga books on your shelf? Who taught your yoga teacher training? Who headlines the festivals, sells out the retreats, sets the prices, runs the big studios in Vienna, Berlin, London? Who is interviewed as the “expert” when a magazine writes about yoga? In the yoga world I have moved through for three decades, the answer has been overwhelmingly white. Non-white teachers are too often absent, or present in a narrow role: invited to chant, to bless, to perform “authenticity”, but rarely to lead, to critique, or to be paid as the authority. What I am asking you to notice is that authority over yoga has flowed, again and again, away from the descendants of the people who created it.
Ask yourself: If I list the ten people who most shaped my understanding of yoga, how many are South Asian? How many are women? How many are alive?
Blind spot six: the romantic reversal
Here is the trap waiting for those of us who have started to see. Having noticed the old image, we are tempted simply to flip it. The West is corrupt and shallow; the East is pure and wise. Indian teachers are automatically authentic; Western teachers are automatically suspect. Somewhere there is an untouched, original yoga, and our job is to restore it. We would have recognised this immediately. It is the same image, turned upside down. The East is still a fantasy, still frozen, still serving our need for a story. The truth is messier and more alive. Indian teachers were never passive objects in yoga’s journey West. Swami Vivekananda stood before an audience in Chicago in 1893 and consciously reshaped yoga for Western ears. Krishnamacharya built a dynamic posture practice in Mysore. Yogananda, Iyengar and many others made bold, creative choices. They were agents, not victims.
Historians like Mark Singleton have shown that much of today’s posture-based yoga is itself modern, a meeting of older hatha traditions with gymnastics and physical culture from the colonial era. There is no single pure original to return to. And yoga is political in India too. It was a symbol of anti-colonial pride. Today the Indian state promotes it as a national emblem, and Hindu nationalist voices use it to tell a story of yoga’s past in which Muslims, Dalits and other communities have no place. Romanticising “authentic Indian yoga” can unknowingly feed that exclusion.
Blind spot seven: “we are all one”
This is the blind spot I find most dangerous, because it wears the robes of wisdom. My practice and my teaching are rooted in Advaita Vedanta, the philosophy of non-duality. Its central insight is that the individual self and the whole are not two. There is, ultimately, no separation. It is tempting to use this truth as a shortcut. If there is no real East and West, no self and other, then surely all this talk of power and history is beside the point? We are all one. Let’s just breathe. I understand the appeal. But non-duality is a truth about ultimate reality. Power, history and inequality are truths about the world we live in now. Using the first to dismiss the second is spiritual bypassing, and it is everywhere in Western yoga. “We are all one” can become a very comfortable way of not noticing who owns the studio, who gets paid, whose image sells the retreat, and whose grandmother’s prayer is printed on the merchandise.
The Advaita I have spent my life with points the other way. If the other truly is not separate from me, then their dispossession is my concern. Their silencing is my silencing. Non-duality does not release me from justice. It makes justice impossible to ignore. This is why I have never trusted the image of the serene yogi who floats above the world’s harm. Clarity is not detachment from suffering. Sometimes the clearest seeing produces fire.
Ask yourself: When do I reach for “oneness” to feel better, rather than to act better?
The question you should ask me
If you have read this far with a critical eye, you may already be asking it. Erika, your studio has a Sanskrit name. You teach Advaita Vedanta. You are not South Asian. Aren’t you doing exactly what you describe? It is a fair question, and I would rather ask it of myself than wait for you to.
Manas is a Sanskrit word for the sensory, processing mind: the part of us that takes in the world and makes meaning of it. We chose it because the practice we teach begins there, with awareness, not with the shape of a pose. At Manas Yoga, purposeful movement is joined with conscious breath, and our approach is educational: we want students to understand their own bodies and make their own choices. Asana will look different on different people, because we differ in body structure, history, nutrition and life. There is no single correct shape to perform. That is also why we try to make our classes accessible and free of judgement, pressure or demands. Yoga for every body means all body types, abilities, ethnicities, identities, orientations, religious backgrounds, ages and levels of experience. No perfect poses, no designer activewear, no pretence. You can see some of that diversity in the people who teach with us: have a look at our team. Advaita is not a brand for me; it is the philosophy I have studied and lived with for most of my life.
But sincerity is not an alibi either. So here is what I try to do, imperfectly. We teach yoga’s history, including colonialism and caste, as a full module in our teacher training, not as a footnote. We work with scholars of decolonisation and put their work on our reading lists. We keep asking whose voices are missing from our faculty and our programme, and I know the answer is not yet good enough.
I do not have a clean resolution to this tension, and I am wary of anyone who claims to. What I can offer is to keep the question open, in public, and to let it change what I do.
Learning to see
None of this is meant to make you stop practising. Yoga has given me more than I can say. It can give you that too. But a practice that asks us to see clearly cannot stop at the edge of the mat. The lens we look through is part of the practice.
Seeing a blind spot is not a single moment of insight. It is a discipline, like any other sadhana. Here are some practices that have helped me, and that I offer to you.
- Trace your sources. For every text, technique or teaching you pass on, ask where it came from, who translated it, and who decided it mattered. If you don’t know, say so, and go and find out.
- Learn before you use. Before you chant a mantra, wear a symbol or name a class in Sanskrit, learn what it means to those who hold it sacred. If you can’t use it with understanding, let it go.
- Change whose voices you learn from. Read, study with and pay South Asian teachers and scholars as experts, critics and leaders, not as decoration.
- Audit your mirror. Look at your flyers, your website, your own reasons for practising. Whose image is this, whose need does it serve, and who benefits?
- Let oneness move you to act. When you feel the pull of “we are all one”, let it lead you towards responsibility, not away from it.
I am still practising all of these. I still find new blind spots, often in places I thought I had already looked.
So I want to end with a question rather than an answer. What images first drew you to yoga? Who painted them? And now that you have seen the lens, what will you do differently?