Thread by @AlexandraErin

If you're a white person doing secularized yoga, literally no one can stop you. If it's important to your sense of self and wellness, no one can take that away from you.

So why get defensive or argumentative when people are talking about it as an appropriated religious practice?

No one has the power to stop fusion food or whatever. If you feel hot shame or guilt when talk turns to the cultural roots of things we've colonized... deal with the feelings, not the people who are talking about it.

Honestly, the fact that the great cost of conquering so much of the world is that occasionally we get made uncomfortable is itself some Hunger Games Capitol level of cartoonish villainy. We don't need to lean into the dystopia.

So somebody on Twitter says "You could have just sat there and ate your food." I mean. Colonization means that we can just sit here and eat everybody's food. Dragged on TwitteR? We're still getting away with murder.

Let the conversations happen. They don't need our input. Learn to sit on your hands. Sit with the feelings. Feel them. Live in them.

Then figure out what you're going to do about them.

Every single time we lash out because someone said something about racism or cultural appropriation or colonization that made us feel bad... we're perpetuating the things we feel we're unfairly being held accountable for.

Which shows that it's not unfair.

Listen. I'm not interested in arguing about the roots or meaning or place of yoga with anybody. Nor, in this thread, threshing out the bigger questions of secular vs. cultural vs. religious. That's not what I'm doing here.

I'm just saying -- the point of discourse on these topics is *not* to make you feel bad. Guilt is not a goal. Those reactions come from within you, they are about you, they can only be dealt with by you.