Category: Sweat

In the 1950s, a young man named Kyle Ballard worked as a waiter on the liner ship SS Lurline. The ship sailed between Honolulu and California, running vacationers back and forth between Oahu, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. It’s safe to say there were lots of married couples gathering in the ship’s dining room at mealtime.

Ballard and his fellow waiters got to know their passengers—they were assigned to the same tables every night for the entire five-day trip. Ballard still marvels at the details he and the other waiters noticed about these long-married couples.

“All the experienced waiters agreed on the same thing,” the octogenarian tells HealthyWay. “We could take all 20 people for dinner on sailing night when we first met them and jumble up all persons married at least 40 years, and we could match those couples [because] they looked so much alike.”

Even the height was similar, Ballard says, except the husband was typically a bit taller than the wife.

“Both with about the same weight,” Ballard says. “Even eating and dressing alike. We never stopped making that comparison.”

The thing is, the science backs up Ballard’s story of romantic seaborne adventures from long ago. One 1987 study found that after 25 years of marriage, couples did begin to resemble each other—as in, facially. One working theory is that spouses come to mimic each other’s facial expressions and that leads to physical changes in the face’s musculature over time. Twenty-five years later, you’ve got two faces that look more alike than they did on their wedding day.

If you think that’s incredible, or just incredibly romantic, check out these other physical and physiological changes that long-term relationships can create within our bodies.

1. You start to like the same foods and maybe even the same perfume. But it might not mean what you think it means.

There’s no need to argue over the wedding menu. You may hate onions today, but if your spouse is a die-hard onion ring devotee, give it a few years (or maybe a few decades).

A recent study in the journal Appetite makes the astonishing claim that the longer a couple stays together, the more their preferences in taste and smell line up. The researchers asked 100 couples between the ages of 18 and 68 to rate how much they liked the study’s collection of flavors and scents. Some of the couples had only been together for 3 months; others had 45 years under their belts, but most fell between these extremes.

The data revealed that “both taste and smell preferences are more similar the longer couples have been in a relationship,” according to the study’s abstract. However, in a surprise finding, the researchers report that people in happy marriages don’t necessarily love the same odors.

In fact, relationship satisfaction was “negatively related” to similar preferences in scents. So the happier people said they were in their relationships, the less likely they were to like the same smells. To further complicate matters, this finding did not extend to flavor.

So if you and your spouse still disagree about the smell of frying onions, don’t fret. You might be one of the lucky ones.

2. In the early stages, your brain chemistry goes haywire.

There’s a reason all the pop songs are about love or substance abuse. Or both. Apparently, the initial stages of an intense romantic relationship affect our brain chemistry not unlike an illicit pharmaceutical.

That’s according to David Bennett, a certified counselor and co-runner of the men’s support website The Popular Man.

“When you’re in love, your physiology changes quite a bit,” Bennett says. “And it’s the result of brain chemistry changes.”

In particular, Bennett points to three neurotransmitters that have powerful effects on the way you feel.

“Your dopamine levels go up, leading to feelings of excitement and euphoria related to your partner,” Bennett explains. That can also get you into trouble, of course.

“If your partner stops reciprocating attention (such as not texting back right away,) you’ll feel anxious and nervous,” he says. Call it love withdrawal.

Second, your brain produces extra norepinephrine, a chemical similar to adrenaline.

“This is why when you’re in love, you can barely sleep and will stay up late into the night with your partner, even if you have to get up early the next day,” Bennett says. It’s a good thing this particular effect tends to fade with time and familiarity, or else our work lives would be even rougher.

Oddly, though, serotonin levels actually drop during an experience of romantic love, Bennett explains. A 1999 study in the journal Psychological Medicine found that the loss of serotonin makes the young Romeo’s brain more similar to that of someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder, another psychological state associated with low serotonin.

“This explains why when you’re ‘in love,’ you want to spend time with your partner almost obsessively, and you jealously guard your time with them,” Bennett says.

3. That wedding ceremony line about “sickness and health” is onto something.

You might promise to care for each other “in sickness and in health,” but you’d better plan for these conditions happening to both of you at the same time. Long-married couples have health similarities that seem to go way beyond sympathy pangs.

A 2016 study published in the journal The Gerontologist lays out some of these findings, which include health similarities in some surprising areas. For instance, couples who have been married for decades and decades showed similar grip strength. That might not sound like much, but grip strength is actually a reliable predictor of mortality, so it’s a valuable metric.

Other indicators that long-married couples tended to have in common include cholesterol levels and even kidney health. No big deal, you might say. People choose spouses who are similar to themselves, maybe even on a genetic level.

But wait! The researchers controlled for that. They compared these health similarities in couples who had been married for fewer than 20 years, and didn’t find the same convergence. This seems to be something that grows over time—just like a lifelong romantic relationship itself.

4. Physical fitness habits tend to sync.

One possible explanation for the aforementioned health similarities between long-term couples is that your general predictors of health might align. We’re talking about the big two: diet and exercise.

“Couples influence each other,” says Michele Paiva, a licensed psychotherapist who specializes in body image disorders. “One person might be trying to be more healthy and the other is sabotaging them with ice cream.”

But this reciprocal influence isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Paiva points out.

“Perhaps they both go to yoga together and are vegan,” she says. That type of relationship would likely lead to better health outcomes over the years.

So if you really want to maximize the “in health” part of your marriage over the “in sickness” agreement, start working out and eating right—and do it together. It’s also important to be present and loving with one another, Paiva says.

“How the couple relates together intimately and how healthy their relationship is plays a part” in overall health over the long term, she says. “If there is a healthy relationship, there is not self-sabotage or sabotaging of the partner; there is mutual health encouragement.”

Now that sounds romantic.

5. You may feel less actual pain when your partner’s in the room.

Pain is subjective; that’s not to say it isn’t real, just that it’s a physiological event that occurs within your body and that complex factors can influence how bad it can get—what the scientists call “modulation of pain.”

A 2013 literature review published in Frontiers of Human Neuroscience looked at six studies in which romantic partners were present while their loved one was experiencing pain.

Taken as a whole, these studies support the claim that the presence of a partner reduces the intensity of experienced pain for the patient. Of course, nothing in medical science is that simple.

In order to modulate pain, the relationship had to meet certain criteria: The partner couldn’t be seen as acting out of character, and the “adult attachment style”—the overall model of how you connect to others—makes a profound difference. Still, the idea of reducing pain just by having your sweetie hold your hand is a comforting one.

Romantic Love and Health in the Long Term

Ballard points out that his experience aboard the SS Lurline was far from scientific research. It was just something he and the guys would laugh about when the shift was over.

“This was not a study,” he says. “This was nature’s real life.”

The funny thing is what the study that backs up Ballard’s experience also found. The more those long-term couples came to resemble each other over the course of 25 years of cohabitation, the more satisfied they said they were with their marriages. Presence, it seems, makes the heart grow fonder.

Opposites may attract, at least in the beginning. But after a lifetime of partnership, it seems that similarity is one key to true marital bliss. If that’s not just as romantic as taking a liner ship to Hawaii with the love of your life, we don’t know what is.

Want to check snow conditions on the mountain, how many calories are in your lunch, or where you parked your car? “There’s an app for that,” as Apple memorably advertised its iPhone in 2009. In the years since, developers have introduced apps for more than 2 million other things.

But what about…saving lives? Yes, apparently there’s an app for that, too.

In fall 2015, ABC News reported the viral story of Massachusetts teen Paul Houle, Jr., who was experiencing some back and chest pain after football practice. He thought to check his Apple Watch; its sensors registered his heart was beating at twice its normal rate. Houle alerted his family and health professionals, who then discovered he had rhabdomyolysis, a very serious condition in which muscle fibers break down and enter the bloodstream, potentially damaging major organs.

After his diagnosis, Houle spent a few days recovering in the hospital, which is much preferable to what could have happened if he’d suffered from kidney failure on the football field, which may well have happened had he gone to the next practice.

Parents are constantly struggling to get their kids (not to mention themselves) to put down the technology. In Houle’s case, it’s a good thing he didn’t. And Apple Watch’s heart-rate monitor is just the beginning of the many ways smart devices are improving our health—and even saving lives.

First Aid Kit 2.0

When a tech giant like Apple unveils its latest products, we tend to geek out over all the shiny new bells and whistles. This year, for instance, the company showcased its amusing Animoji and flashy Face ID. Garnering less attention, however, are its ambitious—if less glamorous—health initiatives.

In a project it calls ResearchKit, Apple has been teaming up with some top U.S. university medical centers and institutes, including Duke and Johns Hopkins, to develop apps for Apple products that target a battery of illnesses and disorders: Parkinson’s disease, autism, concussions, and melanoma, to name just a few.

EpiWatch, for instance, is an Apple Watch app that helps track seizures, which is particularly useful for people with epilepsy, hence the name.

Although the app can’t currently detect seizures outright, it uses Apple Watch technology to collect real-time data before and during a seizure event, including the option for the wearer to send an alert to a family member or caregiver. Johns Hopkins is analyzing the data to get a better understanding of epilepsy and improve its treatment, with an eye toward device detection and automatic notification of seizures in the future.

At Apple’s 2017 event, it debuted a new partnership with Stanford University to harness the Apple Watch for the detection of atrial fibrillation, an irregular and rapid heart rate associated with a variety of cardiac diseases.

What’s key to these efforts isn’t just Apple’s whiz-bang hardware—the sensors, gyroscopes, GPS, and accelerometers it packs into a wrist-sized bundle. It’s the data.

Big Data

While we may take it for granted, internet-based technologies have already transformed our health and lives by bringing previously unavailable or inaccessible data right to our fingertips.

Consider how we can learn more about our symptoms if we are feeling sick with a search on WebMD, how we can consult with our doctor across the globe thanks to Skype, or how we can navigate the world like never before using mapping programs like BlindSquare if we have a visual impairment.

But with wearable devices like Apple Watch, we—our very bodies—are the data. And we are lots and lots of data.

With Apple’s ResearchKit, for example, app users agree to essentially become study participants, allowing researchers to collect a volume and depth of data previously unavailable in traditional, in-person studies. These data will provide a potentially massive database no one laboratory could ever summon
, given that Apple had sold over a billion devices by 2016.

In its new study with Apple, Stanford aims to analyze all the heart data from its participating Apple Watch users to fashion an algorithm that spots heart arrhythmia with the flick of wrist, so to speak.

Now that’s not your grandma’s country doctor.

One Step at a Time

Fancy stuff, Apple. But sometimes it’s the simpler features of our technology that prove transformative.

“Those little notifications just reminded me I needed to move,” says Felicia Bolton of her Fitbit, a wireless health and fitness tracker worn on the wrist. The device had over 22 million active users in 2016.

A disabilities support worker in British Columbia, Bolton sank into a deep postpartum depression following the birth of her third child. On top of that, she was still recovering from a very difficult pregnancy and surviving the trauma of an earlier abusive relationship. “I didn’t think there was a way out,” she says of the time right after her daughter was born.

Then she turned to her Fitbit, which her boyfriend had given her for Christmas. The device can be programmed to give reminders for such activities as moving regularly.

“After [the] baby was born, I would basically sleep all day in bed, barely get up to eat. Getting those notifications made me get up to get something eat and walk around with her,” Bolton says, adding that this activity helped keep her mind “off all the bad stuff.”

Bolton’s Fitbit didn’t just nudge her to get out of bed. “The app kept me connected,” she says. Around this time, she was new to her town and her boyfriend was working long hours. She felt isolated in addition to her tendency to isolate herself post-trauma. “I didn’t realize how many of my friends and family have them.”

Fitbit allows fellow trackers to engage in encouraging challenges, such as the “Daily Showdown,” or “Who can get the most steps today?” These friendly competitions helped prevent from Bolton disappearing further into isolation with her newborn.

“The more steps I took, I got braver,” Bolton continues. “I would walk around the neighborhood. That was a big thing. [My former partner] was so controlling I couldn’t leave the house without him knowing.”

As Bolton later noted in a message, Fitbit’s sleep and calorie trackers also helped her with her struggles with insomnia and an eating disorder. But its greatest impact was clearly psychological. “It got me thinking. I have my baby to care for. I have myself to care for,” she says.

“There’s still a long way to go, but I’m so grateful my partner got me that Fitbit. I don’t know where I’d be today, but I’d probably still be in bed crying.”

Opter-ing for a Better Lifestyle

Chalisa Prarasri knows the importance of changing behaviors one step at a time.

After Prarasri studied neuroscience and biomedicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, she and her CalTech-trained physicist husband have just launched Opter Pose. Opter Pose is a unisex smart necklace/clip that tracks posture, sleep, and exposure to ultraviolet (UV) and blue light, which Prarasri says no other wearable is currently monitoring.

Blue light, a high-energy wavelength of light emitted from the many screens we use throughout the day, has a major effect on our biological clock and overall health.

Unlike other popular wearables, Opter Pose is taking a “more behavioral approach,” Prarasri says. “It’s about how can you change your behavior to change your health as opposed to how can we give you numbers and graphs and you can figure it out on your own.”

“We will track when you sleep and tell you these are the more efficient hours you could sleep,” Prarasri continues. “We will track your posture and that’s sort of real-time information about what you could be changing. Or will we track UV exposure,” prompting users to apply more sunscreen.

With Opter Pose, Prarasr
i wants to build a “smart lifestyle.” As with smart, lifestyle is a bit of a buzzword in today’s health and wellness zeitgeist, but Prarasri has very clear, science-backed vision for it.

“There are all these tiny choices we make every single day that have an impact on our health because we do it every single day. Slouching for one hour is probably not going to give you chronic back pain,” she says. “But if you are in an awkward position every day… If you get sun burnt once? Probably not a big deal, but if you are exposed all the time,” then you can develop serious problems.

The technology that makes a product like Opter Pose work is quite complicated. But Prarasri’s underlying theory for it is pretty simple: “Slight behavior change can really impact our health.”

And it’s all packaged in a sleek, stylish accessory designed to seamlessly integrate into your look—and lifestyle.

Brave New Wearables

Bolton’s story and Prarasri’s vision are nothing short of inspiring. But what if you have have diabetes, are at risk of breast cancer, or—well, you name it? There’s probably a wearable for that.

In recent years, the so-called “internet of things” has been booming in health and medicine; in the case of Clarius’ handheld, wireless ultrasound machine, for instance, doctors can use smartphones to display ultrasound images.

As the number of products is wide and the array of technologies broad—not to mention advances in medical technology itself—let’s stick with wearables to highlight a few compelling examples.

Slated for mass introduction in 2018, K’Watch Glucose is a specialized watch that allows people with diabetes to measure glucose levels with just the touch of a finger. Since 2014, Google has been testing prototypes of a smart contact lens that will continuously monitor glucose levels in tears.

iTBra can help take the time, costs, and pain out of breast examinations with its “intelligent breast patches,” which detect changes in breast tissue temperature, instantly sending off the data for clinical analysis.

And while iTBra may not be an actual everyday brassiere, smart clothing—yes, full-fledged wearable wearables—are taking off. Much of this technology is targeted at athletes, but the Owlet Smart Sock is a veritable baby monitor 2.0: Strap this soft half-bootie onto your infant, and it will notify you if there are any concerning changes in your baby’s heart rate and oxygen levels.

They’re smart, but are they safe and secure?

This all sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Wearables and other personal smart technologies are profoundly changing—or disrupting, to use the buzzword—our fitness, health education, symptom tracking, and health communication and management. But it has its limitations.

Lukasz Piwek, MA, MSc, PhD, led a 2016 study, published in the Public Library of Science Medicine, assessing the state of consumer health wearables. He and his team found that wearables hold great and exciting promises in “providing patients with personalized health data, which could assist with self-diagnosis and behaviour change interventions.” They also raised serious concerns about its barriers, including:

Safety

Users can become overly dependent on their devices, leading to a false sense of security, self-misdiagnosis, or using their device as a substitute for doctor visits. Plus, the constant availability of data can compel some to check their devices compulsively, causing needless anxiety. And people can widely differ in how faithfully or accurately they use a device, which could cause harm.

Reliability and Validity

Walk the same distances using Fitbit’s pedometer and Apple Watch’s pedometer and you may well get different results. Such margins of error raise red flags about product effectiveness. And some products don’t work 100 percent of the time, such as a melanoma app that was found to fail up to 30 percent of the time.

Security

And then there’s all that data. In many instances, users own the device—but not their own data. That becomes the property of the manufacturer, which they might sell at the risk of exposing your personal information, as even anonymous data can potentially reveal identifying information.

Finally, as devices, they can be hacked, which can compromise the very health data that makes wearables and other smart technologies so attractive in the first place.

And none of this is to mention cost. The Smart Sock costs $300, and most of the newest Apple Watches come in at $400. Not that we aren’t shelling out; the overall wearables market is forecasted to crack $6 billion in 2018.

A computer is only as smart as the person using it.

In the meantime, as doctors and engineers work out the challenges to smart tech—and as they forge ever smarter devices that we willingly integrate into our lives—maybe we can take a cue from our conscientious football player, Paul Houle.

He patiently saved up for his expensive Apple Watch, for one thing. And he used it just as that: technology. Not as healthcare and not as a substitute for seeing a physician, but as a tool that helped him get to a doctor when he needed it most.

Now that’s pretty smart.

When you think of “yoga culture,” you may very well picture a thin, most likely white woman clad in $80 lululemon leggings, green juice in hand as she heads to her boutique yoga class. Perhaps this imaginary woman bears a striking similarity to former model Tara Stiles, who’s now one of the most famous yoga teachers in the world.
In reality, the yoga culture that most people in America are familiar with is a far throw from the practice’s origins. Hailing from India, yoga is said to have originated thousands of years ago. It is thought, religion, and philosophy all embodied in movement—a practice so multi-faceted that it’s hard to describe with words.
While many of today’s Western yoga teachers are more than happy to string up prayer flags in their studios and exercise their limited vocabulary of Sanskrit words for each pose, it’s not quite as close to the real deal as it could be.

And this is where the problem lies: cultural appropriation.

What exactly is cultural appropriation?

Western society’s fascination with other cultures often pushes boundaries to the point of being offensive. Cultural appropriation has become one of the most talked-about subjects both on the internet and in real life, and for good reason.
But what is cultural appropriation? Dictionary definitions are often limiting, but Oxford Dictionaries actually explains it pretty well: “The unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society.”

Everything from hairstyles to headdresses have been involved in accusations of cultural appropriation, and the debate is never-ending.
Some people would argue that some forms of cultural appropriation are more damaging than others—for example, adopting sacred customs from marginalized cultures for fashion (such as Native American feather headdresses).

Others say that even adopting everyday cultural aspects from a group that could be considered a minority isn’t okay. Remember when Miley Cyrus started twerking and was accused of appropriating black culture?
Whether it’s slang or clothing, the cultures those things originated from have all, at some point, experienced discrimination for associating with these cultural markers. And therein lies the difference between appreciation and appropriation.
This is why it can be hurtful when Western people use these cultural markers. They’re borrowing an important part of a culture’s identity and benefitting from it, while the original culture continues to experience persecution for doing the very same thing.
[pullquote align=”center”]”Yoga is not about the yoga pants. It’s not about getting a yoga butt.”
-nisha ahuja[/pullquote]
There’s no denying that Indian culture has been highly appropriated by the West. Bindis, henna, and the Om symbol have all become fashion trends in recent years. And while many people understand the potential problem with adopting these things as fashion symbols, the same careful thought is rarely given to yoga—despite the fact that it’s one of the oldest parts of India’s history.

The Cultural Origins (and Erasure) of Yoga

To understand the potential for yoga to be culturally appropriated, it’s important to acknowledge its historical significance.
The spiritual custom of yoga was practiced throughout India for thousands of years and was strongly connected to wisdom, philosophy, and mastery of the mind. It wasn’t so much about physicality as it was energy.

Under British rule, practices like yoga and Ayurveda were demonized and even banned in India. This was just one of many steps taken to erase and control Indian culture during colonization.
British rule of India officially ended in 1947. Just over a decade later, as India was still working to reclaim and rebuild their culture, yoga was trending in America thanks to the New Age obsession of the ’60s.
Nowadays, yoga in the West looks very different. It’s mostly viewed as a form of exercise—ever heard the term “yoga body”? Luxury yoga retreats can cost thousands of dollars; every man and his dog are becoming certified yoga teachers; YouTube videos offer yoga classes to anyone with an internet connection, garnering millions of views; “drinking yoga” classes are now a thing in Germany (though this is hardly surprising considering Germany’s love affair with libations).
Amidst all of this, Indian yoga teachers are still the minority in today’s Western yoga culture.

For Indian teachers like nisha ahuja, co-founder and co-director of SOMA Ayurveda and Integrative Wellness, the way that ancient practices like yoga have been adopted into Western culture can be difficult to deal with.
“Witnessing Ayurveda and yoga become more of a trend brings up complex emotions,” she says. “There is part hope of societal transformation, but given how these medicine/spiritual systems are being practiced, it is often painful. It is painful to witness these 5,000-year-old medicine systems and spiritual paths—that my ancestors could have been killed or imprisoned for practicing during colonial rule that many teachers had to secretly keep alive—now being sold as a diluted version to be consumed by the masses and thus becoming void of its essential purpose as a spiritual path.”

Even when the spiritual purpose of yoga is acknowledged, it’s often misappropriated by those with no cultural ties to its history:
“It is equally painful when these practices/medicines/sciences are revered as spiritual paths, but Western teachers or practitioners have placed themselves or accepted the position of being spiritual leaders and gate keepers to traditions that South Asian people in that region diasporically have to navigate.”
We use these funds ahuja has spoken at length about decolonizing yoga. In fact, SOMA uses donations from its supporters and customers “to support sliding scale appointments and youth programs with marginalized youth in both the West and India (hopefully South Africa soon), so that more young folks who are excluded from the Western Yoga Industry can have holistic access to the teachings.”

She also appeared in a video on the subject called You Are Here: Exploring Yoga and the Impacts of Cultural Appropriation. She’s a firm believer that appropriation of many cultures is a product of colonization.
“It is important to recognize that this is not happening in isolation, but comes from a long history of colonization and a subconscious sense of entitlement embedded in Western/colonizing cultures of owning and having what others have,” she says. “Today, at this moment, this is widely seen in the consumption of African American cultures and cultures of the indigenous peoples of North America, and other People of Colour.”
It isn’t just Indian yoga culture that’s being exploited, either. Yoga’s diverse cultural roots are often ignored.

“Kemetic Yoga from East Africa is rarely recognized within yogic traditions by South Asian people, as well as in the ‘trendy’ yoga industry we see all around us,” ahuja says. “And I imagine for black diasporic people this is doubly painful to have another place of erasure.”
Yoga in India today is a little different from both modern American practices and its own cultural origins. There’s still a lot of debate in India over how yoga should be taught and practiced. But regardless of the debate, yoga in India is far from a fashion statement or gym alternative. It was always primarily a spiritual practice—not, as ahuja says, a method of getting a “yoga butt.”
“Yoga is not about the yoga pants,” she says. “It’s not about getting a yoga butt. It’s not about competition. It’s not aerobics or a good workout. It is not about attachment to the body. So make time to learn, study and practice the depth of the teachings of yogic paths from both South Asia and East African Kemetic Yoga traditions.”

The Appeal of the Exotic

Western wellness culture has an undeniable fascination with India. Ayurveda has become popular among proponents of natural medicine, and meditation—while not exclusively part of Indian culture—is experiencing a serious boom in popularity thanks to the mindfulness trend.
The documentary Kumaré perfectly captures America’s fascination with Indian spirituality. American-born Vikram Gandhi impersonates a spiritual teacher in order to verify if Americans will blindly accept his “teachings” as a supposedly wise, sacred Eastern guru, despite not knowing anything about him or what he’s talking about. (Spoiler alert: they do.)

Where does this fascination come from, and how is it causing yoga to be appropriated in both practice and beyond? One explanation that ahuja gives is that this obsession with yoga’s exoticism is a reflection of how Westerners hold onto the notion of “other”—a desire for the mysterious.
She also thinks that Westerners may feel more comfortable turning to Eastern practices in search of stress relief and spiritual connection rather than their own cultural roots—something that brings a sense of achievement.
“There are many European spiritual traditions that have that potential to offer this deeper connection, but many people of those lineages have also been severed from their ancestral traditions and knowledge systems,” she says. “So turning to another culture that has already been colonized allows a subconscious, continual extracting of parts of spirituality that suit their individual need for something more or for better health.”

Are Western yogis honoring or appropriating Indian culture?

It’s not that Western yogis—especially white women—should be banned from practicing yoga. Like many Indian yoga teachers, ahuja firmly believes that yoga is something that can benefit all of humanity, regardless of ethnicity.
But the problem lies in the commercialization of these culturally significant practices. Turning them into money-making schemes in the West tends to benefit those who are already in places of privilege.

It’s all too easy to claim that cultural appropriation is simply “political correctness gone wild.” But as ahuja points out, it’s important to remember the subconscious sense of entitlement that comes with an inherited position of power.
What about using yoga purely as a physical practice without the spiritual connotations? Well, that’s kind of the exact definition of cultural appropriation—taking one single aspect of a culture out of context.
That’s not to say that yoga can’t be practiced for physical purposes. But it certainly doesn’t hurt to acknowledge the rich philosophy and culture behind this ancient tradition.

One way to consciously practice yoga while acknowledging its roots is to include just one small but powerful element of its core philosophy: humility.
“Invite immense flows of humility into your day to day and your yoga practice,” ahuja says. “If you think you know a lot, are an awesome yoga practitioner, want to be known as a great yoga teacher, pause and witness the dance your ego is doing that it is leading you down a path that is the opposite of yogic teachings.”
She continues, “If others put you on a pedestal as someone who knows a lot about yoga or mediation, actively point out the 5,000-year-old traditions that millions of people have observed and practiced and maintained before you. And remind yourself of it, too.”
As for the Indian garb? Well, maybe leave that at home—unless you’re in an appropriate environment to be wearing it, of course.

“Because racism is an atrocious and painful experience People of Colour are subject to on a daily basis in the West,” she says, “be thoughtful of not wearing South Asian or other diasporic clothing, accessories, or spiritual items as either fashion or an attempt to pay homage to a culture, because the people from that culture very likely are discriminated against for wearing the exact same items and may have had to stop wearing these to lessen the racist encounters they deal with on a day to day basis. An exception to note here is when you are visiting a country or ceremony of a specific culture, it may be more respectful to wear clothing [from] that culture.”
nisha ahuja chooses to spell her name with lowercase letters for cultural reasons. You can read more about her journey and work here.