Greetings from Tarragona, Reader,

I’m sitting a stone’s throw or two from the Mediterranean Sea after spending most of my first week in Spain doing a museum-a-thon in Madrid.

If you like art, you’ll love Madrid.

I’m not usually a big Picasso fan, but his Harlequin with a Mirror has a wonderfully trippy quality that gets lost in reproduction and Guernica up close is as epic as they say it is.

Spending time in front of Bosch’s famous triptych, TheGarden of Earthly Delights, was another highlight. The insane beauty of its panels is truly a marvel to behold.

And it may not be what Bosch had in mind, but it’s also a great depiction of the guṇas, the three qualities of material nature.

But the painting that made the strongest statement about an issue on the minds of modern yogis was, appropriately enough, the work of a modern artist: Woman in Bath by American Pop Art icon Roy Lichtenstein.

Lichtenstein’s most significant paintings transform mass-produced advertising and comic book imagery into one-of-a-kind works of fine art.

The result is a critique of American consumer culture that addresses the question, “What happens to an image when it’s moved from one context into another?”

Substitute the word “yoga” for “image” and you’ve got an interesting way to think about cultural appropriation.

Pop Art takes something that’s ubiquitous, ordinary and culturally familiar and turns it into something rare, extraordinary and culturally significant: fine art.

Appropriation does the opposite: it takes something that’s extraordinary, atypical and culturally alien and turns it into something commonplace, familiar and culturally banal: a workout.

In the case of Pop Art, the fact that you can purchase a bath towel in the museum gift shop with Woman in Bath printed on it is both ironic and funny.

In the case of yoga, not so much. The commodification of India’s spiritual symbolism and the reduction of yoga’s postural component to fitness programming is indeed worthy of serious criticism.

But it’s just as easy to make someone’s position on cultural appropriation a black and white purity test as it is to use quotes from sacred texts as segues into sales pitches for teacher trainings.

The topic deserves at least as much critique as criticism. A good place to start is by acknowledging that modern postural yoga came into being through a series of adaptations, including in yoga’s motherland: India.

As documented in yoga scholar Mark Singleton’s book, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice, yoga as we know it today evolved from a combination of intersecting Indian yoga traditions, European physical culture, gymnastics, bodybuilding, medicine, photography, and Indian nationalism.

Thus, modern postural yoga is, in form if not in substance, is a product of cultural exchange rather than of cultural appropriation.

This isn’t especially unusual and shouldn’t be surprising. Traditions within one culture rarely develop in isolation; they develop by virtue of contact with other cultures.

The most prominent Indian teachers who brought yoga to the west understood this. They adapted and reformulated yoga in response to modern conditions, sometimes incorporating practices that were nowhere to be found within traditional yoga.

Case in point: the unprecedented invention of the brahmacharini ashram by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami in the 1960s to accommodate single American women who wanted to study and practice bhakti-yoga full time. The very idea of a “single woman” was categorically antithetical to Indian cultural norms up to that time but a reality of Western culture that had to be taken into account in order to successfully transplant the spiritual culture of devotional yoga from India to the West.

If the cultural context of yoga in the west is different from the cultural context of yoga in India, then we have ask a slightly different question: Can we change the context in which a practice is performed without changing what the practice is ultimately for?

I think the answer is a qualified “Yes.”

Yoga can be taught outside its culture of origin with genuine respect, understanding, and spiritual depth.

Yoga can also be taught by someone from its culture of origin in a way that reduces it to a commodity.

The spiritual significance of yoga isn’t found in its outward form nor is it regained by kowtowing to the essentialist frameworks of illiberal decolonialism; it’s found in the consciousness of yogis who embrace the spiritual context of the yoga tradition and set their intentions for their practice accordingly.

This doesn't limit our practice in any way because any intention we have for our practice — physical fitness, stress reduction, pain management, etc. — can be nested within the context of a broader spiritual intention.

Placing our practice in a spiritual context begins with asking ourselves what we’re cultivating through our practice and what kind of life it’s helping us to realize.

The answers may inspire us to address another question “What happens to consciousness when it’s moved from one context into another?”

What do you think? Feel free to share your thoughts with me — I'll always be happy to hear from you.

Wishing you all good fortune,

- Hari-k

P.S.: If you do write, please note that it may take a little more time than usual for me to write back because I'll be galavanting around the south of Spain for the next few weeks — thank you in advance for your patience.