"Harpinder Kaur Mann writes with humility and grace, sharing complex topics on marginalization with great skill. She draws the reader in: her story is also my story. As a 1.5 generation Indian American, yoga therapist, and Ayurvedic doctor, I resonate with Harpinder's calling in of yoga as an inclusive, life-affirming, home-coming, transformative practice. I hear her stories of how Western yoga has commodified Indian cultures, and I appreciate her skillfulness in weaving narrative with theory to help us move forward with more love and liberation collectively. Thank you, Harpinder, for your magnificent contribution. May we heal legacies of generational and cultural trauma in our selves and our communities. Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu (May all beings in all the worlds be liberated)."
Liberating Yoga
From Appropriation to Healing
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Available June 3, 2025
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Yoga teacher Harpinder Kaur Mann shows yoga practitioners a path to reclaim yoga from appropriation and recenter the practice where it belongs.
In the West, the practice of yoga comes to us stripped of cultural context. Colonized and appropriated by capitalism, dominant culture, fitness trends, and body shaming, yoga in America today is associated with expensive classes, trendy athleisure products, Corepower, Lululemon, and white women. However, yoga is not a one-hour fitness class aimed at stretching and flexibility. Yoga is a spiritual practice from South Asia with the ultimate goal of connection, self-realization, and liberation.
In Liberating Yoga, yoga teacher Harpinder Kaur Mann draws from her own perspective as a Sikh-Punjabi woman who was alienated by the way yoga is practiced in the United States but found her way toward reclaiming the spiritual practice for herself. Mann demonstrates that moving away from appropriated forms of yoga and back to yoga's roots is the only true path to healing--both for yoga practitioners who desire to engage responsibly in the practice with cultural appreciation, and especially for folks who have been marginalized who wish to reconnect with their ancestral spiritual practices and reclaim their full identity.