Yoga As Embodied Resistance: Workshop with Author Anjali Rao [donation-based]

We are thrilled to welcome Anjali Rao, a yoga scholar and author, as well as the former president of Accessible Yoga (a nonprofit aligned with our mission of ensuring accessibility and equity in yoga spaces to people of all backgrounds).


Anjali will offer an engaging workshop around her new book, 'Yoga as Embodied Resistance: A Feminist Lens on Caste, Gender, and Sacred Resilience in Yoga History'.


This event is part of our monthly workshop series for our trauma-informed teachers, and we are opening up to the public. All are welcome to this meaningful, donation-based discussion.


OPTIONAL HOMEWORK TO PREPARE: If you would like to order her new book in advance, or listen to it via audiobook, it will enhance the discussion and workshop content.


ABOUT THE BOOK

Yoga as Embodied Resistance illuminates the essential—but often unseen—relationships between caste and gender in yoga. Bridging scholarship, history, and cultural analysis, yoga educator and practitioner Anjali Rao exposes how caste oppression, patriarchy, and colonization impact contemporary practice and offers readers radical ways to re-envision a yoga grounded in liberation, inquiry, discernment, and even dissent.


Rao calls upon us to realize the work of co-creating a compassionate and courageous world, uplifting the stories of women and gender-expansive people who confront caste and gender dominance. The stories, or kathas, reflect different parts of yoga history from the Upanishads, the Puranas, and the Bhakti renaissance—and highlight the seismic shifts in consciousness about the potential of spiritual teachings for social change. She explores:

- Foundational histories of yoga, caste, and Hinduism
- The tensions among yoga, nationalism, anti-colonialism, and Indigeneity
- The impacts and intersections of yoga, gender, caste, and culture
- Brahminnical appropriation and its relationship to eros, spirituality, and loving devotion
- Sanskritization, vernacularization, and the impact of patriarchy on bodily expression
- Bhakti as a subversive tool of personal agency and anticolonial resistance


MEET THE AUTHOR

Anjali Rao is a yoga educator-practitioner whose work deconstructs the dynamics of power in yoga with a multidisciplinary approach integrating philosophy, art and history. She offers insight into the stories that have been obscured by heteropatriarchy, orthodoxy, and colonization. She is currently pursuing her Doctorate in Philosophy and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies, exploring the formulation of movements of dissent and resistance in the religio-spiritual context. She is on the faculty of many yoga teacher training and continuing education programs. She is also the host of The Love of Yoga podcast, where she shares thought-provoking conversations with yoga scholars and activists on the frontlines of liberatory movements.

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