Just because the practices of yoga that you choose to do are traditional and the ones in the United States aren’t doesn’t make them any less important to the person who’s engaged in it. As a student of yoga I am always learning and wanting to improve my techniques. I have learned how to center and balance myself both emotionally and physically after having surgery that left me unable to walk. Yoga was the practice that has helped me for today — I can walk on a sidewalk without falling off from loss of balance.

You really don’t need to be so hateful — if you practice karma yoga as you say you do, I’d expect at least that.

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Does anyone here even know that yoga means “union with the Divine”? Do you even know that the Indian yoga tradition is incredibly rich and includes many, many different kinds of yoga, including bhakti yoga (the yoga of devotion), jnana yoga (the yoga of knowledge), karma yoga (the yoga of good works), raja yoga (the yoga of meditation), etc.? What you people practice is only one type of yoga, hatha yoga, and you don’t even practice it properly or in its appropriate context.

For the record, I’m a gay South Asian woman. My issue is not with the emphasis on how gay relationships could benefit from (hatha) yoga. But the way you people trivialize our yoga traditions, make it seem like they are yet another extension of your narcissistic egos, something you can use to improve your sex lives or pick up more sex partners, is deeply offensive and frankly racist to me.

Did you know that the vast majority of yoga traditions recommend celibacy as a necessary part of spiritual practice and a spiritual life (regardless of one’s sexual orientation)? Did you know that even the yoga tradition that permits *some* sexual activity under *highly* controlled conditions, left-hand Tantra, also sees celibacy as a goal of spiritual practice? No, of course not, because Westerners are too racist to care about or to respect the philosophical beliefs of other cultures.

In summary, yoga is a serious spiritual practice. Your California brand of it is an insult to one of the oldest civilizations in human history.

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I love doing yoga but I have to do power yoga. If I do anything slower than that, I’m going to get annoyed and stop. I think that defeats the entire purpose of meditation and all of that jazz, but when I’m sweating my proverbial balls off onto a yoga mat, I feel at peace with everything. Intense movement is my meditation!

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After I went to yoga classes twice a week at the gym, I knew the poses well enough to do them by myself. It’s awesome!!! =)

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