In addition to being overly focused on poses (asanas), there’s a glaring lack of diversity in yoga in the West.

While some groups, like Street Yoga and the Prison Yoga Project, have taken important strides in reaching out to underserved communities, a more radical approach is needed to change yoga into a real “union” of people from diverse backgrounds.

A truly transformative approach to diversity in yoga would be to follow in the footsteps of Western Buddhist centers. Not the large ones that function mainly as places to attend week-long or weekend workshops (Kripalu already does that for the yoga world), but the smaller Buddhist sanghas made up of people who have joined together to follow a shared spiritual path.

Many Buddhist centers are run as non-profits, with members of the community contributing their own time, money, and experience. If the center needs to stock its library or purchase a new computer for the office, they raise funds through membership drives or fundraising events. In this way, they are able to open their doors to a more diverse group of people—those who can afford to pay more do so, and those who are struggling financially are welcomed without question.

Buddhism Struggles With a Lack of Diversity

Even with its reputation for compassionate action, Buddhism in the West is not immune to a lack of diversity. In fact, it has long struggled with the same issues that are now faced by the yoga world. Many of the early North American converts to Buddhism were white men. When they came back from retreats in places like Tibet and Southeast Asia, they set up sanghas that, in turn, attracted more people just like them.

Recently, though, Buddhist centers have started to bring more mindfulness to the question of diversity.

“One of the challenges facing American Buddhism,” according to the Pluralism Project at Harvard University, “is the need to fully recognize the experiences of Asian immigrants in the U.S., Asian Americans, European Americans, African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, as well as all other people of color who practice Buddhism.”

This unique perspective of Buddhism on diversity is one that can easily be applied to the yoga world.

Buddhist Centers Reach Out to the Community

“Diversity is one of the consequences of serving people,” Paul Haller, abbott of the San Francisco Zen Center, said at a BuddhaDharma forum on diversity. One of the sangha’s programs targets a drug rehab center that deals mainly with working-class people from minority groups.

“Inevitably, several of those people do want to visit the center, and that has been a learning experience for us,” said Haller. “The class difference stood out, so we had to devise strategies so that it wouldn’t feel so difficult for these guys.”

Reaching out to different groups of people through Buddhism—or yoga—forces you to reassess not only how you interact with people, but also how you see the world. In yoga, this type of self-reflection is known as svādhyāya.

The path toward diversity is long, and often challenging. For Buddhists, the first step involves encouraging people who would not normally attend a center to show up on the meditation cushion or, if that doesn’t work, to reach out to them in the community. This may also include finding—or training—teachers with more diverse backgrounds.

Buddhist centers are becoming more mindful about nurturing new people when they arrive, rather than treating them in a generic fashion. Centers across the country hold retreats and meditation groups targeted specifically at certain groups of people, such as those of color. This, they say, helps reduce the isolation that minorities have often felt in sanghas.

The Path Toward Greater Diversity in Yoga

The work in Western Buddhist centers is far from over, but it does offer inspiration for the yoga world. In an interview with Hadji Jones, Yoga teacher Rodney Yee said that yoga needs to find ways to meet people where they are in their own walk of life. This is certainly true, but it requires moving beyond just making drop-in classes and yoga videos more accessible.

The yoga world often talks about karma yoga—selfless service to people and the world. In order to increase diversity in yoga, this type of “service” needs to be more than an afterthought, more than looking for ways to help others after you have filled up your studio with paying customers.

Creating the same kind of community that Buddhists have in their sanghas would go a long way toward encouraging more people to study—and live—yoga. Currently, this sense of connection between students and teachers, or among students, is very rare in the yoga world.

The majority of students attend classes at a studio, maybe buy a bottle of coconut water, and go home to their own separate lives. They are as much a part of a yoga community—sometimes called a kula—as McDonald’s patrons are part of a fast food community.

There is hope, though. Once you let go of the concept of yoga as a business, you can focus on forming a more diverse “union” of people. People who are not only interested in learning how to do yoga poses, but also willing to nurture the yoga tradition. In this way, the water of yoga can continue to flow into many, varied pools.

“Yoga is about trying to make this world one people, one person, one place, to find some kind of unity, and still somehow preserve the diversity, and so forth, that we all have and that we all share in this world.” — Kofi Busia, Omega Institute

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Photo: Reclining Buddha at Long Son Pagoda (c) 2012 Sarah Worthy (licensed under Creative Commons License)