Courtney will discuss her integration of Indigenous knowledge with yoga by emphasizing the importance of honoring the land and its cultural significance. She will explore the process of how she aims to educate her community on decolonizing both land and culture, highlighting the historical context that shapes contemporary realities. Through the practice of yoga, she will demonstrate how mindfulness can empower individuals to better understand their present circumstances and take control of their future.

Did women practice yoga in premodern India? Though women are not positively enjoined to practice yoga in textual sources on early haṭha sources, Ruth Westoby reads against the grain to situate the extent to which women may have been practitioners in these sources.

The documented history of asana yoga in South Africa goes back to the 1960s, when a group of white women from the province of Kwa-Zulu Natal (which used to hold the largest Indian population outside of the subcontinent before being overtaken by the United States) traveled outside the country to the island of Mauritius and the neighbouring state of Botswana to learn from BKS Iyengar. They began to teach in home studios and gradually grew a student base among white female contemporaries, who became the major demographic of yoga practitioners post-democracy and into the modern age. While this is not entirely different from the yoga practicing population in the Global North, in a country where the majority of the population is of colour, it highlights an elitism based on race and class and raises questions about accessibility, inclusion and the wellness gap in a developing country. In this paper, Firdose will consider the practices of health and healing across a range of South African cultures, with a focus on the Indian diaspora and consider to what extent they are represented in contemporary yoga.

Following the initial research with Ruth McNeil, Martha Henson has been considering how the destabilisation effect they found could or should be recognised and factored into the sharing of yoga scholarship. Ruth and Martha felt strongly that the recent boom into research on yoga history and philosophy should be democratised, made accessible to wider interested audiences, and together explored what this might mean in practice. What can or should yoga practitioners and teachers do with the research findings of yoga scholarship? How could this be a genuinely collaborative process, potentially bringing insight back into academia as well?

There are questions of power here, potential imbalances that need to be mitigated, as well as an awareness and respect for the individual experience and relationship to practice. Through a series of workshops with small groups of local yoga teachers and enthusiasts on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, Martha attempted to create a space which recognised potential destabilisation and allowed for it to be processed, and to open knowledge sharing up in both directions. She will share her findings from this initial work.

Ruth McNeil, in collaboration with Martha Henson, has been examining the impact of pursuing an MA in yoga studies on individuals with a background in yoga teaching. Early findings from interviews with MA students and yoga teachers show that there is a disconnection between scholarship and practice. Our research has revealed that non-MA yoga teachers felt their yoga teacher training was sufficient, many believing that there were no gaps in their knowledge, and were generally unaware of yoga studies scholarship, particularly that which might contradict their yoga teacher training. In contrast, MA students reported feeling that their yoga practice and teaching was wholly separated from the academic context. This pursuit of yoga studies with the academy appears to destabilise some students, fundamentally challenging their existing perspectives and understanding of yoga. Many of these students end up feeling the need to renegotiate their yoga practice and teaching, or even to leave it altogether, unable to reconcile their original training with what they have learned in the MA.

Ruth will share her own experiences of undergoing this process, including the initial disorientation it caused and the struggle she underwent to rationalise and integrate this new understanding. However, she will share how the destabilisation eventually became liberation, freeing her from past preconceptions, bringing new ideas and energy to her teaching, practice and further research.