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In Search of The Wild Yogini: Retracing the Indigenous Roots of Yoga
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Pooja Prema
Pooja Prema is a first-generation Indian-American performing artist, facilitator, writer, and cultural activist based in New England. Throughout her eighteen-year career, Pooja’s work has centered on visionary ec...
For the ancient yogini - at once a mythical divine creature and a mortal woman - yoga was far more than asana. The wild yoginis and yogis/siddhas of India of practiced ritual and meditative sadhanas in wild and unorthodox places that were a far cry from the pristine studios where yoga is currently housed. Most often sky-clad or wearing a regional version of sari or dhoti, there were no Lululemon pants, no mats, and no props. There were no certifications, no teacher trainings, and certainly no ™ (trademarks). Yet the roots of these tantric and ascetic yogic practices (whether Hindu, Buddhist or Jain) can be traced still further back - or deeper in - to the largely unrecorded history of forest dwelling tribes (Adivasis) whose practices of embodied wisdom-keeping and ritual were based in the wilds.
In this session, Pooja Prema explores these radical roots of yoga as pathways to critically re-examine modern-day yoga, and reconnect to feminine and earth oriented ways of knowing. Ultimately, she also invites us to begin to trace our own personal roots— back through our own lineages and to the literal soils, forests, mountains and rivers of our ancestors, to the places where their bones were burned, buried or otherwise offered to the Earth. Together we’ll explore the ramifications this has for us as Desi and non-Desi practitioners and cultures— on decolonizing & re-contextualizing our own practice, understanding and relationship to yoga.
Key Takeaways:
- A glimpse into the tantric origins of yoga and the place of female power within it.
- A fresh perspective on the proto-tantric indigenous/Adivasi roots of yoga, and a reclamation of yoga’s endogeneity within the Subcontinent.
- An experiential and imaginal-based approach to retracing ancestral roots, rather than via colonial structures: the difference between learning and being “schooled”.
- How these roots exist not merely in the past, but are very much alive within the current landscape of indigenosity throughout the Subcontinent: meeting the embodied wisdom of grandmothers and helping to preserve them.
- A new invitation toward yoga’s purpose and possibility in our present moment based on these understandings.
WEBSITE- PoojaPrema.com