In his book Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice, Mark Singleton details a British Sanskrit Professor's 1891 study Brahmanism and Hinduism in which the author states his intention to explain to English-speaking Indian readers the nature of their own sacred texts and spiritual-cultural influences.

Cue the screeching car tires and the whiplash-inducing head-spinning. British colonial rule had an undue influence on the way India's story got told to the Western world, and part of that story includes the sowing of the seed of yoga that grew into a fractured transnational phenomenon.

There is a great gulf between the yoga practiced hot and sweaty in a gym and the yoga of the Bhagavad Gita. Singleton suggests these two yogas are homonyms rather than synonyms, and though I'm much more aligned with the latter version (the Gita was my introduction to the practice), I believe the truth is somewhere in the middle. Perhaps these yogas are cousins, sharing the same ancestral notion of yoga as a journey toward integration of the small, separate self to the consciously connected divine self—an avenue for the seeker to chart their own course and to hone their own story.

The question so lyrically put by Lin Manuel-Miranda – cue music from Hamilton: "Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?" – rings especially true during Black History Month. As Sun & Moon guest teacher Dianne Bondy reminded us this past weekend in her powerful Path to Equity workshop, Black history in America is no different than American history as a whole, but whose voices do we hear the loudest? Are we ready to hear the ones who speak for themselves?

As yoga helps each of us hone our personal stories and integrate a truer sense of self, we also become better listeners, better able to discern which story is ours to tell and which ones are ours to hear.

~ Annie Moyer