One of my teachers wrote something that’s been running through my mind.
Does entering a new country require leaving behind the deepest resources of the old one?
I have been contemplating that question in relation to my own life ever since.
Perhaps because I am half Indian and half Canadian. Perhaps because so much of my life has been spent moving between cultures. Or perhaps because, after more than twenty-three years of studying and practicing yoga, I have come to understand that some of the things we inherit are not really ours to own in the first place.
My family gave me one kind of inheritance: a connection to Ayurveda and yoga through generations of doctors and practitioners.
My teachers gave me another opportunity: to study these traditions seriously and to understand them from within a lineage.
What my teachers gave me was enormous. Each of them has profoundly shaped the way I practice, teach and understand yoga.
These ideas weren’t packaged and presented as a lifestyle. They were a way of understanding life, the body, health, discipline and the human mind.
I didn’t choose that inheritance. It was simply there.
Later, I chose to study yoga seriously. And that is where the question of lineage became much more complicated for me.
Because what I didn’t understand when I first began studying with my teachers was…
It was never really theirs to give. They had received it too.
And were carrying something that had come through their own teachers, through Krishnamacharya, Desikachar, the Vedic tradition, and the many teachers before them whose names we may never know.
My teachers each became part of that transmission for me. Through them, I encountered lessons that reached far beyond any one person.
And at some point, they handed that responsibility to me.
That is what I mean when I talk about lineage.
Lineage is not ownership. It’s transmission.
And transmission comes with responsibility.
what does it mean to carry something?
When something has been handed to you, you have to decide what you are going to do with it.
You can dilute it, change it beyond recognition, turn it into something easier to sell. Or you can study it deeply enough to understand what you have actually received before deciding what, if anything, needs to change.
I find that last part so important.
I don’t believe tradition means refusing to question anything.
Serious study requires questioning, examination, experience and discernment.
Yet, there’s a difference between questioning something because you want to understand it more deeply and changing something simply because it no longer fits comfortably into the world you are trying to sell it to.
Sometimes, I think we confuse the two. Especially when we talk about yoga.
Yoga has travelled far beyond India, and I’m one of the people who have carried it there myself.
I live and teach “yoga” in the West and around the globe. I teach people from many different countries and backgrounds. Many of the students didn’t grow up with any connection to Indian culture, Sanskrit, Hindu philosophy or traditional yoga.
And I don’t think they need to, as yoga does not require someone to become Indian or to pretend to be something we are not.
But I do think it requires honesty.
If we are going to teach something that comes from a particular cultural and philosophical tradition, we should know something about that tradition.
We should know where the teachings came from. We should understand the words we use. We should study the texts. We should know who taught our teachers. And we should be willing to acknowledge that the yoga we’re teaching did not begin with us. Which makes it so meaningful to me.
Perhaps because I have spent so much of my life studying within a tradition, I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with the need to own everything we encounter.
There can be something very Western in the desire to take an idea, make it our own, make it tangible, make it understandable, make it useful and then perhaps make it ours to teach, sell or improve.
But why does it have to belong to us? Why can’t we encounter something from a culture and tradition different from our own, sit with it, study it, practise it, appreciate it, and allow it to change us without needing to claim it?
Not everything has to be claimed as our own. Some things can be received and respected without being possessed.
And perhaps that’s one of the things I have learned through yoga: that understanding something well doesn’t necessarily mean you claim it as your own.
Sometimes it means learning how to sit with what is not yours. To listen, observe, practice and to allow the experience to speak for itself.
independence doesn’t have to mean disconnection
This is also why I’ve been thinking about this on Independence Day.
India’s independence didn’t create a completely new India. Nor the beginning of Indian civilization, culture, philosophy or knowledge.
India didn’t suddenly become itself in 1947.
Independence was political freedom from British rule. It was the reclamation of sovereignty after a long period of colonial domination.
And yet the history of independence is also complicated by Partition, displacement, violence and enormous loss. So I don’t want to romanticize it. Nor do I want to turn this into a simple story about India and Britain, colonized and colonizer, past and present.
What interests me is much more personal.
What does it mean to inherit something from a place that has been through all of that?
What does it mean when that inheritance isn’t simply food, language, family stories or geography, but a way of understanding the human being? And what happens when you carry that inheritance into another country?
I don’t think the answer is that one has to choose.
And I don’t have to become less Canadian to honour the Indian part of me. Or I don’t have to turn India into some idealized version of itself to value what I have received from its traditions.
Both things can be true.
There can be pride and criticism, gratitude and difficult history and love without romanticizing.
the gift was never theirs to give
The older I get, the more grateful I am to my teachers, as they didn’t make the teachings about themselves.
In fact, they direct beyond themselves and in my experience, that’s one of the clearest signs of a real teacher.
A teacher doesn’t need you to think that all concepts began with them. They show you where to look next.
My Yoga Sutras teacher taught me in ways that continue to shape how I think.
My asana and yoga therapy teacher taught me through practice and through the extraordinary precision of the tradition she carries.
The Vedic priest and scholar opened doors to Vedic wisdom, chanting, and the deeper relationship between sound, language, attention, and knowledge that I continue to study.
These are living teachers proving lineage is not simply something that belongs to the past. It is alive when it’s studied, practiced, questioned and transmitted by people in the present. And behind each of my teachers are their teachers and behind those teachers are teachers. This is paramparā.
Not a list of names that we can neatly put into a family tree, but a living transmission of knowledge.
It is something that is received, studied, lived and, if we are fortunate, carried forward.
And the student’s responsibility is not to collect information from it.
It’s to become capable of carrying it.
Which is quite different.
what I have spent my life studying
I have now been practicing yoga for more than twenty-three years and teaching for most of that time.
I have spent years studying asana, the Yoga Sutra of Patañjali, Vedic chanting, Sanskrit, pranayama, Ayurveda, yoga philosophy and the teachings of the Krishnamacharya tradition.
The more I study, the less interested I become in presenting yoga as something I’ve figured out. Instead, I prefer to understand the depth that lies behind these gifts of yoga.
There is always more to learn, more to question.
And there is always the possibility that what I thought I understood needs to be reviewed again.
That, to me, is one of the strengths of the tradition.
A serious tradition gives you enough profundity that you can keep studying it for a lifetime.
It doesn’t run out after a weekend workshop, depend on constantly inventing something new, or require me to claim ownership of it.
If anything, studying deeply has made me much more respectful and slightly protective of what I have received.
Not protective in the sense of keeping it away from people. It’s quite the opposite. Protective in the sense of wanting to transmit it honestly.
what I wish to carry forward
So, on Independence Day, I find myself thinking less about what belongs to India and more about what I have been entrusted with.
I don’t own this tradition. Neither did my teachers. They received something, studied it, lived it. And then, they passed it on.
Now I have to decide what kind of yoga teacher I want to be.
That means continuing to study and being willing to say, “I don’t know.“
It means not removing the difficult or unfamiliar parts of the tradition because they don’t fit neatly into contemporary yoga culture.
And it means making the teachings accessible without removing them from the context that gives them meaning.
Perhaps that is what independence means to me now.
Not severing ourselves from where we came from or being
trapped by it either. But having enough freedom, discernment and understanding to decide what we will carry forward.
I am extremely grateful for what was passed to me. Yet, more than that, I am grateful for the responsibility that came with it.
Because the gift was never theirs to give.
They were carrying it.
And now, for as long as I am able, so am I.
A Few Questions I Keep Returning to
What does yoga lineage mean?
Yoga lineage refers to the transmission of teachings from teacher to student over generations. In a traditional context, knowledge is not simply information to be collected, but something studied, practised and carried forward with care and responsibility.
What is paramparā in yoga?
Paramparā is the transmission of knowledge through a lineage of teachers and students. It recognises that what we receive through a tradition did not begin with us and is not something we necessarily own; we become responsible for understanding and transmitting it.
Does practicing yoga require adopting Indian culture?
No. Yoga does not require someone to become Indian or adopt an identity that is not their own. It does, however, invite us to understand and respect the cultural, philosophical and historical traditions from which the teachings come.
Can we learn from a yoga tradition without claiming ownership of it?
Yes. In fact, this can be an important part of approaching another tradition respectfully. We can study, practice, appreciate and be changed by something without needing to possess it, redefine it or make it our own.
About Tara Mitra
Tara Mitra is a C-IAYT-certified yoga therapist and lineage teacher within the Krishnamacharya–Desikachar tradition, with 23 years of practice and 17 years of teaching experience. She is also a Level 2 Ashtanga yoga teacher.
Her teachings draw from Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras, Vedic chanting, the Upaniṣads, Āyurveda and the broader teachings of the Krishnamacharya tradition. She offers courses, teacher education and mentorship for dedicated students and teachers of yoga, alongside Dr Vigneshwar Bhat, a Vedic priest and scholar, and Dr Rob Lamport, a Gonstead chiropractor.
Her work is rooted in the study, practice and responsible transmission of traditional Indic knowledge within a living lineage.
Explore upcoming mentorships, courses and programs at Tara Mitra Yoga.
