Yoga instructor Jennifer Scharf
A Canadian university citing the controversy over yoga and “cultural issues” has decided to cancel a free yoga class.
The Daily Mail is reporting on the decision of the University of Ottawa to cancel a free yoga class that has been offered for the last seven years. Around 60 university students participated in the program.
Jennifer Scharf, who has been teaching the class, said she was recently notified by the school’s Center for Students with Disabilities that there are “cultural issues of implication involved in the practice” as well as “a lot of controversy lately” about how yoga is being practiced and which cultures those classes are being taken from. The staff said many of these cultures “experienced oppression, cultural genocide and Diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy” and warned that “we need to be mindful of this and how we express ourselves while practicing yoga.”
Scharf complained to the Ottawa Sun, saying that she was “not pretending to be some enlightened yogi master” and that the point of the program “isn’t to educate people on the finer points of the ancient yogi scripture. The point is to get people to have higher physical awareness for their own physical health and enjoyment.”
Scharf, a yoga instructor at the Ramas Lotus Center, said the complaint that caused the program to be shut down came from a “social justice warrior” with “fainting heart ideologies” who was in search of a controversial issue to attract attention. She claims people are just looking for reasons to be offended by anything they can find these days.
“’There’s a real divide between reasonable people and those people just looking to jump on a bandwagon,” she said. “And unfortunately, it ends up with good people getting punished for doing good things.”
But Romeo Ahimakin, acting student federation president, said the decision to suspend the class wasn’t due to a complaint but because they wanted to make it more inclusive of certain groups that “feel left out in ‘yoga-like spaces’.”
“We are trying to have those sessions done in a way in which students are aware of where the spiritual and cultural aspects come from, so that these sessions are done in a respectful manner,” Ahimakin told the Sun.
Scharf suggested changing the name of the class from yoga to “mindful stretching” but the school decided to suspend it entirely due to fears that the teachings could be seen as a form of “cultural appropriation.”
This term refers to incidents when a dominant culture borrows symbols from a marginalized culture to use as a kind of fashion statement – such as the wearing of indigenous headdresses by hipsters.
While some argue that cultural appropriation doesn’t apply to the modern yoga movement, others disagree and say that anytime we take something from another tradition and fashion it into something that we call our own, we are misappropriating someone else’s culture and/or, in this case, beliefs.
