For Everyone, from Someone
Attribution, Asteya, and Neocolonialism in Yoga Today
An inquiry by Sandi Higgins
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Recently, I made a post addressed to yoga teachers in my Instagram community:
Stop stealing from the Hindus. Practice asteya. Give credit where it is due.
It sparked some debate, which is a good thing. This debate isn’t new, but it deserves a fresh conversation.
Here’s where I stand: yoga can benefit everybody, regardless of religion. That does not mean it came from nobody.
I’ve had students walk into my classes in the United States of America who didn’t know that yoga comes from India, that the word yoga itself is a Sanskrit word (not an English one), and that Hindu traditions spent more than two thousand years practicing, debating, and developing yoga before the West turned it into a multi-billion dollar industry after adopting it only over the past century.
To my Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Jain, Buddhist, agnostic, atheist, labeled or non-labeled friends: I respect your paths. I’m not asking you to become Hindu. I’m curious to hear more about how yoga has deepened your own religious or spiritual commitments. I’m only asking that those of us who benefit from yoga acknowledge the traditions and people who have made that possible.
Here’s where we’re headed in this essay.
Where am I coming from? My Background In Brief
How colonial patterns continue after colonial rule ends. Neocolonialism
Why yoga can belong to everyone and still come from somewhere. Yoga Is for Everyone. And It Comes from Someone.
Why I frame the problem as stealing rather than cultural appropriation. “Stealing” vs. “Appropriation”
Why universality and historical attribution answer two different questions. Two Different Questions
What the universalist argument shows, and what it doesn’t. Even the Universalist Case Points to Asteya.
Why we don’t have to fear religious roots in a secular society. Religious Freedom Without Religious Erasure
What attribution, relationship, and repair can look like in practice. So What Can We Do?
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My Background In Brief
I’m an American who came to Hinduism rather than being born into it. I grew up with a vague sense of Irish Catholic ancestry and attended Catholic religious-education classes through Confirmation as a kid, but never really connected with church life because I didn’t find there the conversations and tools I needed for understanding my own suffering or exploring spiritual experience directly. Looking back, though, I have come to appreciate something I didn’t fully recognize then: the commitment to service that religious communities can foster. Whether it is a church, temple, mosque, synagogue, or another gathering place, I think it is very healthy and powerful to be part of a community that understands that helping others is part of spiritual life. In yoga, we call it sevā: service offered without making oneself the center of it.
I found in yoga and Indian philosophy something else I had been searching for: practical methods for working with the mind, body, breath, suffering, and consciousness, and a more palpable sense of direct connection with the divine. I studied yoga, Indian classical music, and Buddhist meditation before discovering a growing love of Hinduism through its texts, temples, teachings, practices, and people. Let me not forget the food, too!
For roughly twenty years, my creative and professional life has also involved studying, documenting, promoting, and collaborating with Indian cultural traditions and artists, particularly in yoga and classical music. For the past year, I have had the privilige to live and work in Mysuru, Karnataka, developing and facilitating programs that blend yoga, natural farming/permaculture, and India’s sustainable heritage with land-based learning experiences and retreats.
I’ve practiced Vinyasa Yoga for over twenty years, taught various approaches to yoga across the USA and India, including Aqua Yoga, for more than a decade, and I’m traditionally authorized to teach Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga in the Mysore lineage.
No one is paying me to speak up for the Hindu roots of yoga (but if anyone wants to start, I’m open to the discussion, so do let me know!). I’ve probably spent more money studying yoga and traveling to India than I’ve ever earned teaching it. I’m not currently associated with any particular political party or partisan agenda. I speak because of what Hindu spirituality has given to me personally, and because I think such gifts deserve acknowledgment, advocacy, and inquiry.
Neocolonialism
Neocolonialism is what we call it when colonial power relationships continue operating in new forms, economic, cultural, and intellectual, without direct occupation. Colonialism doesn’t disappear when formal rule ends. The British Raj is gone from India, but colonial thinking is not.
One of colonialism’s most painful contradictions is that what comes from a people can be highly valued while the people and culture it comes from are devalued. India has known centuries of colonial conquest, from Mughal rule to the British East India Company to full British domination, under which wealth, labor, resources, and knowledge were extracted while the authority to value and profit from them were centered elsewhere.
That’s the pattern I want to address here in contemporary yoga. The expansion of yoga beyond Hinduism isn’t a problem; many yoga gurus have encouraged it. The question is how it is expanding. Yoga has an ecology, and ecology is about relationships. When the stewards of a relationship are devalued, a balance in the ecology is disturbed, like mangroves eroding at the edge of the sea. Without the protective barrier of mangroves, coastlines collapse, greenhouse gases are released, and ocean towns become highly vulnerable to deadly flooding. In the sincere effort to make the benefits of yoga more universal and accessible, we may be eroding the very thing we claim to serve.
Yoga Is for Everyone. And It Comes from Someone.
Universal application and historical attribution are two different things. They aren’t mutually exclusive. We can, and need to, honor both in the practice of yoga. Hindu traditions have historically played an indispensable role in preserving, developing, and transmitting yoga to the world.
I’m writing from the United States, where I was born and first met yoga, and Americans have been wrestling with this distinction for a while. Yoga here inspires both fascination and fear: a multibillion-dollar industry embraced by people of many religions and none, and an ongoing debate over how much of yoga’s religious and cultural heritage can enter public schools. The debate went mainstream in 2010, when the Hindu American Foundation’s “Take Back Yoga” campaign was spotlighted in major American media outlets including The New York Times, “Hindu Group Stirs a Debate Over Yoga’s Soul”. The question is still open:
Can we affirm yoga’s universality without repeating the patterns of colonialism in which knowledge and labor are extracted, universalized, and detached from the people who cultivated them?
Asteya, non-stealing, is one of the foundational ethical commitments of classical yoga, the third of Patañjali’s yamas (restraints) after ahiṃsā (non-violence) and satya (truthfulness). It’s fair to ask whether those of us who teach yoga have applied it to the very thing we teach.
“Stealing” vs. “Appropriation”
The words we use to name a problem frame the problem, and I think “cultural appropriation” has taken the problem off track from its solution.
It is the nature of culture to be shared, adapted, and evolved, and in the process people borrow from each other. That isn’t inherently harmful; Indian culture itself shows how outside influences can be absorbed and made one’s own. Frame the issue as appropriation and we end up confused about whether cultures can be shared at all, or we get paranoid about who has permission to practice what, or even scared to simply try something on to see if it’s a fit. The term “appropriation” also arrives in a particular Western political vocabulary that can make people afraid to engage with another culture, or vice versa, become defensive about the engagement of others with one’s own cultural context before real ethical questions are even raised.
Misappropriation is another matter, a distinction Dr. Ananda Balayogi Bhavanani draws in his talk “Yoga and Cultural Misappropriation”. He also warns against framing it as Us versus Them or Indian versus Western.
So I prefer to use the word “stealing” to frame the problem.
Stealing is clearer: taking something valuable while erasing where it came from. And it brings the question home to yoga’s own ethics and principle of asteya, non-stealing.
Adapt a culture, blend it with your own, make it relevant to your life, but don’t take it as though it came from nowhere or no-one.
Two Different Questions
In response to my Instagram post, a friend I met in Mysuru, an American yoga teacher and therapist made an argument I imagine many non-Hindu yoga teachers hold: yoga predates “Hinduism,” its wisdom is universal, it invites us to transcend worldly identity, and similar practices may have existed in other ancient civilizations. So why insist on a Hindu, or even Indic, connection? Yoga belongs to humanity.
Part of that is true, which is exactly why it persuades, and why it can be mistaken for a final word on the debate. Yoga does invite us to see ourselves beyond worldly identities, and Hindu gurus have encouraged its universality so that everyone can benefit from its practice. But when does the argument for universality become a Trojan horse for neocolonial extraction?
Part of the problem is the reduction of two questions into one. One is philosophical: are the truths yoga points to universally applicable? The other is historical: through which traditions were yoga’s practices, concepts, vocabulary, texts, and philosophies developed and passed on? When a philosophical answer is offered to a historical question, little is resolved. We need to distinguish these two questions and leave room for both answers.
Take gravity. We can believe it’s a universal truth and still name the people and traditions who helped us understand it. The universality of gravity doesn’t dismiss the particularities of its scientists. Newton and Einstein are household names. Universal truth doesn’t cancel cultural transmission; it’s the reason transmission matters. A truth anyone can access is also a truth someone had to first articulate, demonstrate, and share. We put statues of scientists and artists in public places for a reason: who gets honored in our collective memory reminds us of what specific people have accomplished for the greater good of all.
Of course the study of consciousness doesn’t belong only to Hindus, and knowledge of breath doesn’t belong only to India. But the particularly beneficial systems of consciousness and breath we call yoga reached us largely through Hindu traditions in India.
British colonialism distorted Indian knowledge by extracting it from the communities and traditions that cultivated it, filtering it through European categories, and relocating the authority to define its meaning and value according to their own agenda. Today that can continue to happen very casually. We embrace words like yoga, karma, mantra, prāṇa, and ahiṃsā because they speak to universal experience, but then conclude that the traditions that gave them to us are incidental. Ironically, the Sanskrit vocabulary used to argue that Hindu traditions are irrelevant to yoga comes to us through those very traditions. Who decides, then, that the history is incidental, and incidental to whom? When a teaching is described as belonging to everyone, whose voice is doing the describing, and whose voice is missing from that description? The words and ideas are valued. The people and cultures who cultivated their meaning are devalued. Why?
Along these lines, it was also suggested in the Instagram debate that caring about attribution is a kleśa, a cause of suffering in Patañjali’s yoga, arising from over-identification with ego. But kleśa is a philosophical category. It doesn’t answer a historical question; it spiritually bypasses the question. In any case, we can only relinquish identities that are ours to relinquish. Think of identity like an address. You can take down your own mailbox, but you can’t take down your neighbor’s mailbox and tell them their address is an illusion. Unless you really want to pay their bills when they start landing on your doorstep!
Yoga’s history is complex. Vedic, Buddhist, Jain, and other traditions interacted for centuries. Perhaps something like yoga existed in ancient Egypt or Iran. But hypothetical evidence doesn’t carry the same weight as actual evidence. And the surviving record of actual evidence within Hindu traditions is enormous: yoga texts, commentaries, teachers, institutions, philosophical systems, practices, and living lineages.
The honest response to a complicated history is more attribution, not less.
Even the Universalist Case Points to Asteya
To demonstrate the universalist point, my friend shared Edwin Bryant’s 2011 interview “Is Yoga Really Universal?” in Integral Yoga Magazine. Bryant is a Rutgers professor of Hinduism and a respected scholar of the Yoga Sūtras, which I have actually studied with him in one of his online courses. I didn’t agree with him on everything, but I respect his scholarship. In the interview, he explains that Patañjali’s project is transcultural, taking us beyond identification with body, mind, ethnicity, religion, and nationality, and he points to Yoga Sūtra II.31, where the yamas (restraints) of Ashtanga yoga are understood as the mahāvratam, the “great vow” of yoga unrestricted by worldly coordinates of place, time, and community or circumstance. One of those vows is the restraint I pointed to in my original post: asteya, non-stealing. If the yamas bind everyone, non-stealing binds teachers too.
Universality doesn’t release us from asteya; it makes our understanding of it even more imperative.
But Bryant is making a philosophical argument about yoga’s aim, not a historical one about its transmission. In the same interview, he acknowledges that yoga’s earliest textual references appear in traditions we now call Hindu, naming the Upaniṣads and, later, Patañjali, while also questioning the label “Hindu” itself on the grounds that it began much later as an outsiders’ word. What remains unclear in the interview is that the traditions we now call Hindu did not wait for the word “Hindu” to develop, debate, practice, and transmit ideas that became central to yoga. Their historical contribution does not disappear because the umbrella term came later or originated outside them. A label that began as an exonym can be claimed, reframed, and fully inhabited by the people it once named from outside. Its etymology does not give outsiders authority to decide whether that identity, and the history it claims, is legitimate.
Religious Freedom Without Religious Erasure
So why is crediting Hindu traditions uncomfortable for some yoga teachers? Plainly: I think there is the fear that if yoga is openly linked to Hinduism, other religious communities, especially Christians, will push back. And it’s a fear that’s not unfounded.
Even though over 36.7 million American practice yoga, spending about $16 billion a year according to the 2016 Yoga in America Study, Alabama barred yoga from public schools from 1993 until 2021. When that ban was finally lifted, yoga poses were allowed to be taught with English names, but chanting, mantras, mudras, mandalas, and even “namaste” stayed off limits. Hinduism had to be excluded from the curriculum for the yoga to be included in the schools. In California, Christian parents in Encinitas sued over an Ashtanga program they said promoted the Hindu religion. In the end, the district won, with courts finding the program to be sufficiently secular.
So there’s a constitutional line in the USA that people are afraid of crossing: public schools are not suppose to compel children to practice a specific religion. But teaching about a religious tradition isn’t the same thing as requiring participation in it. The American answer to religious freedom has often been subtractive: remove the religion until no one objects. However, it can be additive instead. A child can learn what the Eucharist means for Christians without taking communion, what Ramadan means for Muslims without fasting, what Shabbat means for Jews without observing, what Bhakti means for Hindus without doing pūjā.
Religious freedom doesn’t require religious erasure. In fact, ignorance of religion can undermine the very pluralism that secularism is meant to protect. If the only way a minority religion can enter mainstream American awareness is by ceasing to look religious at all, while the historically dominant religion remains embedded in cultural assumptions, calendars, language, architecture, holidays, and norms, then freedom of religion is less free than it claims.
That said, American culture isn’t simply a villain here. After generations of British devaluation of Indian culture in India, yoga’s popularity in the United States has in some cases helped Indians reframe their own heritage with renewed pride. Western appropriation can cause cultural erosion in some ways and cultural reclamation in others. The story is complicated, which is why it’s worth looking at more closely with a fresh conversation (again and again).
So What Can We Do?
Non-stealing asks not just what we take but how we receive. What have I inherited? From whom? Where did they get it? Whom do I acknowledge? Yoga can be offered universally without pretending it came from nowhere or no-one.
Attribution isn’t about ownership. It can be about repair: restoring visibility, relationship, and credit where colonial processes erased them. Naming where something came from doesn’t narrow it’s applicability, it nurtures its growth inside a living relationship.
My recommendation for yoga teachers is this: if you teach yoga or run a yoga studio, reach out to your local Hindu community. Find the organizations, temples, cultural centers, and scholars near you. Invite them to speak at your studio, in your class, and offer an honorarium. Come as a student, open to learn rather than to perform respect. Listen to Hindu voices and learn about Hindu cultures. Bring them into conversation with other religions or non-religious perspectives represented at your school or studio.
Colonialism cut many people off from due pride and deserved connection in their own glorious heritage.
Those of us who benefit from that same heritage are in an unusual position to help reconnect what was disconnected, to restore pride and share gratitude, not by stealing ideas and practices without due recognition, but by engaging them more fully with honesty and curiosity, by giving credit to where they come from, and by showing up to listen to the living voices that carry the ancient knowledge of yoga forward in ways we are still just beginning to learn.
Practice asteya. Give credit where it is due. Let’s learn, heal, breathe, and celebrate yoga’s glorious heritage together.
Links and References
Hindu American Foundation, “Hindu Roots of Yoga / Take Back Yoga” (launched 2008)
Paul Vitello, “Hindu Group Stirs a Debate Over Yoga’s Soul,” The New York Times, November (2010)
Edwin Bryant, “Is Yoga Really Universal?” Integral Yoga Magazine (2011)
Dr. Ananda Balayogi Bhavanani & Renaissance Aurosociety, “Yoga and Cultural Misappropriation” (June 2021)
Yoga Alliance, Highlights from the 2016 Yoga in America Study (2016)
GBH, “Alabama Will Now Allow Yoga In Its Public Schools, But Students Can’t Say ‘Namaste’,” (May 2021)
California Courts of Appeal: Sedlock v. Baird, Encinitas School Yoga Case (2015)
