How Yoga Helps Reconnect Us to What Was Taken

Lost Lineages and the Longing for Sacred Connection

I remember the first time I sat on a yoga mat in silence. It felt foreign yet familiar. I wasn’t drawn to yoga because it was trendy or exotic. I was drawn to it because something in me was aching. At the time, I couldn’t articulate why. I only knew that moving and breathing in this ancient practice awakened a sense of homecoming in my body. It was as if a part of me was remembering something lost – something my own lineage had misplaced long ago.

Longing for What Was Lost

In conversations about cultural appropriation of yoga, we often overlook a key point: many white people aren’t just seeking novelty or fitness. We are searching for belonging and connection to something sacred that we can no longer find in our own heritage. Sociologist Shreena Gandhi observes that people “are grasping for something to belong and connect to” beyond shallow materialism, “without even understanding why there is a void in the first place.” And tellingly, “few white people make the connection between their attraction to yoga and the cultural loss their ancestors… experienced” when they assimilated into dominant (Christian, colonizing) culture. In other words, many of us feel an unnamed hunger – a spiritual emptiness – because our ancestral traditions were severed. Yoga, with its emphasis on body, breath, and presence, fills a void left by centuries of cultural bereftness.

It offers what our own past no longer can.

I see it every day in my yoga studio. Students come in stressed or numb, and something as simple as chanting “Om” or lying in stillness brings tears to their eyes. They often can’t say why. But I sense it: a longing for the sacred – for a sense of wholeness that our modern Western culture, and even our inherited religions, have failed to provide. I felt it too. Growing up, I attended a church where the spirit was taught at us but never felt within us. We had doctrine and dogma, but no felt sense of wonder. No dancing in prayer, no reverence for the cycles of nature, no embodied ritual that made my soul sing. So I, like many others, wandered elsewhere in search of that missing piece.

Old Europe’s Sacred Ways

It wasn’t always missing. If we go back far enough in European history – before churches and colonizers, before the top-down doctrines – we find rich, earth-centered traditions in our own ancestral lands. Pre-Christian and pre-colonial European cultures had spiritual practices that were deeply embodied and cyclical, often honoring a divine feminine alongside the masculine. Spirituality was not confined to a Sunday service or a scripture; it was woven into daily life. Ancient Europeans worshipped under open skies and in sacred groves, beside lakes and on hilltops. Nature was their cathedral. Every element of life was imbued with spirit – from planting and harvest to birth and death. They attuned to the rhythms of the seasons and the moon, celebrating the eternal cycle of return. Time itself was viewed as circular, an unbroken song of renewal, rather than a one-way march from Genesis to Judgement.

Crucially, these ancestors of ours were polytheistic. They honored many gods and goddesses, including powerful mother figures and earth deities. The divine feminine was a living presence – in goddesses of hearth and harvest, in the fertility of the soil, in the very bodies we inhabit. The body wasn’t seen as something shameful; it was a vessel of the sacred, part of nature’s holy web. To dance, to sing, to engage in ritual with others under the open sky was to participate in divinity. And no one told them they were born in sin for doing so.

When I first learned about these old European ways, something in me lit up. I imagined my own distant ancestors – perhaps pagan Slavs lighting ritual fires at midsummer, or Celtic villagers honoring the Goddess Brigid at Imbolc with song and well-wishes. I pictured communal feasts on solstices, ecstatic dances around bonfires, and wise women brewing healing herbs. It felt both enchanting and deeply familiar, like a story I’d always known but never heard. It also made me profoundly sad. Because I realized how thoroughly those ways had been forgotten or erased. The lineage of embodied, nature-rooted spirituality in Europe was severed – not gently let go, but ripped away.

From Goddess to God: The Fall into Fear

What happened? In a word: colonization – cultural and spiritual colonization. Long before Europeans colonized other peoples, we were colonized ourselves in the realm of spirit. Beginning in late antiquity and through the Middle Ages, patriarchal, institutional religions (most notably Christianity as it spread across Europe) systematically replaced the old indigenous traditions. This was not a peaceful, organic conversion; it was often imposed with astonishing violence and coercion. The divine feminine was banished, declared heretical or demonic. The earth and its cycles were no longer sacred; only the distant, masculine sky-god of the conquerors was. A once diverse tapestry of tribal myths and goddesses was torn down and overlaid with a single, rigid narrative: one God, one true faith, one “right” way.

Instead of decentralized, experiential spirituality, Europe got an authoritarian Church hierarchy. Instead of rituals celebrating our natural rhythms, we got rules and penance to suppress them. Contrast the two paradigms:

• Old ways: sacred dance, communal festival, reverence for earth and body, many gods and goddesses, cyclic time.

• New orthodoxy: rigid sermons, centralized authority, suspicion of nature and the body, one jealous God, linear time from Eden to Doomsday.

Under the new order, fear and shame became primary tools of spiritual control. The Church taught that every person was stained from birth with Original Sin – a concept entirely alien to most indigenous traditions. We were told that just by being born human, by embodying this flesh, we had already fallen short. It’s hard to overstate how traumatic this shift was: Imagine a people who for millennia believed in the inherent sacredness of life suddenly being told that they are inherently wicked, that the body is a source of temptation, that pleasure is suspect and pain is holy. Joyous pagan festivals were condemned as devilry. Natural sexuality, especially women’s, was vilified – Eve’s daughters deserved subjugation for the “sin” of curiosity. The cycles of nature that once guided our lives were recast as something to conquer or ignore, since salvation lay not in this world but in an afterlife controlled by the Church.

It was a profound reprogramming of the European psyche through fear. One commentator describes how the medieval Church essentially set up a spiritual protection racket: “Congratulations, you’re born – and already bound for Hell!... They invented the sin, declared you guilty, and sold you salvation.” The threat of eternal damnation, of hellfire and judgement, was relentlessly marketed from the pulpit. Under this new theology, even an innocent baby required urgent baptism lest it slip into limbo or worse. A religion that had begun with teachings of love and grace (the message of Jesus) had, in institutional hands, morphed into a machinery of guilt and control. The result was generations of Europeans internalizing a deep sense of unworthiness and fear. We learned to police our own bodies and desires, to feel shame simply for being human. Obedience replaced authenticity; conformity replaced celebration.

Europe’s First Colonization

When I use the word colonization for what happened in Europe, I don’t use it lightly. We often think of colonization as something Europeans did to others – and that is true, and brutal. But Europeans themselves were among the first victims of the colonizing systems they later exported. The Roman Empire, and later the Christian churches allied with kings and emperors, colonized the minds, lands, and spirits of European peoples tribe by tribe, village by village. Pagan Europe did not go quietly into the new religious order – history books and church documents are full of violence and resistance.

Sacred groves were cut down; temples and shrines were smashed or built over. Missionaries like St. Patrick in Ireland and St. Boniface in Germany destroyed holy sites and idols, replacing them with churches. Over centuries, the old ceremonies went into hiding. Some survived in disguised forms – folk customs, seasonal celebrations like May Day, or local legends about fairies and spirits that echoed the old gods. But many practices died out, remembered only as “superstitions” to be ridiculed. By the late Middle Ages, Christianity was so entrenched that Europe simply called itself “Christendom.” And yet, pockets of the old ways did endure at the margins. The Church knew this, and so came the Inquisition and witch hunts – later waves of persecution aimed at stamping out any remaining indigenous beliefs. The Spanish Inquisition, for instance, and the witch hunts of the 16th–18th centuries were essentially attempts to extinguish the remnants of pre-Christian religion in Western Europe. Tens of thousands (if not millions) of women – often herbalists, midwives, or simply independent-minded villagers – were tortured and burned as witches. Why? Because they represented an older, Earth-centered knowledge and power outside of Church control. The witch-hunts were not random hysteria; they were a genocide of culture, coinciding with the rise of capitalism and the enclosure of common lands. By eliminating wise women and outlawing folk ritual, the authorities destroyed the community’s self-sufficiency and spiritual backbone. (As one historian noted, Protestant preachers in that era deliberately attacked village feasts, sports, and “idleness” – the joyous communal culture – to break people’s spirits and mold them into obedient workers.)

Europeans were being groomed to become colonizers and factory laborers, but first they had to be severed from their old identities. They had to forget that “the Earth is our mother” – and learn that “man shall have dominion.”

This painful history is not often named as colonization, perhaps because it happened before the Age of Empire and was done in the name of religion within Europe’s own peoples. But it was. Europeans – from the Irish to the Prussians, from the Lapps (Sami) of Scandinavia to the pagans of Lithuania – were conquered and assimilated, their languages and rituals suppressed. In some cases, even their children were taken, sent to monasteries or schools to be raised as good Christians far from their “heathen” parents. (This echoes what would later happen on a massive scale to Indigenous children in Canada, the US, Australia, and elsewhere.) Ceremonies were outlawed; languages were banned; children were stolen. The pattern was set close to home, then later repeated in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Oceania. One haunting example: during the colonization of the Americas, almost entire populations were forcibly turned from their traditional faiths to Christianity, with missionaries acting as “religious arms” of imperial power. In North America, government and church-run boarding schools in the 19th and 20th centuries banned Indigenous languages and spiritual practices, punishing children for speaking their mother tongue or observing any native ceremony. From 1885 to 1951, the famous Potlatch ceremony of the Pacific Northwest was illegal in Canada. The Sun Dance was banned in the U.S. Both at home and abroad, the colonizers used the same tactics: destroy the language, ban the ceremonies, break the lineage.

It’s a bitter irony: white Europeans, who later benefited from colonial privilege, were also early victims of cultural/spiritual colonization by their own elites. There’s a historical wound there that’s less visible than the wounds of colonized peoples of color – but it is still influencing us today. We inherited both the privilege and the pain. We carry the legacy of being the enforcers of a system that robbed others, and the legacy of having been robbed ourselves of our own indigenous soul.

White Privilege and White Poverty

We hear much about white privilege, and it’s real – I won’t deny that for a moment. But there’s a contradiction we don’t talk about as often: an aspect of “white poverty”. Not material poverty, but a poverty of spirit and culture. By this I mean the loss of our sacred traditions, the inheritance of fear-based religion, and the awkward, unrooted way so many of us now seek meaning. It can feel tone-deaf or even offensive to speak of white people having any kind of loss – after all, didn’t white colonizers choose to give up their old ways and adopt Christianity, then go on to oppress others? But many did not choose; their ancestors were coerced generations ago, and the choices made in the name of survival (converting to the dominant religion, assimilating for safety or advantage) had lasting costs.

What does this “spiritual poverty” look like? I see it in the emptiness of our modern rituals – or the lack of rituals altogether. I see it in how disconnected many of us feel from our ancestors beyond a couple of generations. We can tell you the brands we consume and the celebrities we follow, but not the blessings our great-grandmothers said or the songs our people sang around the fire. A striking passage I read described it this way: “The majority of white people have no traditions, and the ones we have are rooted in consumption and a superficial application of organized religion, both of which are steeped in histories of violence.” It’s harsh, but it rang true. Our holidays have largely been reduced to shopping events.

Our community gatherings often revolve around sports or entertainment rather than seasonal gratitude or spiritual reflection. We inherited a culture that teaches us to conquer and consume, not to listen and tend. In that sense, many of us white folks walk around with a hidden grief. We have privilege in the worldly sense, yes. But we also feel poor in meaning. Our souls are undernourished.

This is a sensitive topic. Recognizing this loss in ourselves is not meant to elicit pity or to excuse anyone from the ongoing work of racial justice. Rather, I bring it up because it helps explain why so many well-meaning white folks flock awkwardly to other people’s traditions – sometimes in insensitive or appropriative ways. We are starved for connection. Starved for color, for ritual, for a feeling of communion with the divine that isn’t mediated by guilt or a fear of hell. So when we encounter yoga, or Native sweat lodges, or ayahuasca ceremonies, or any spiritually rich practice, we rush toward that warmth like cold hands to a fire. We may not even realize what ancient hunger is driving us. But the hunger is there.

Seeking Reconnection (Body, Breath, Belonging)

Many yoga practitioners today – especially those of us from the dominant white Western culture – are unconsciously (and sometimes consciously) seeking reconnection. Reconnection to our bodies, which our inherited religions taught us to distrust. Reconnection to our breath and inner stillness, in a culture that taught us only to recite prayers but not to sit in real silence. Reconnection to something sacred that includes rather than excludes – a sense of the divine that is expansive, welcoming, and woven into the world, not a jealous deity on a throne.

When I guide a class through sun salutations or a heart-opening pose, I often sense an emotional release in the room. It’s as if the very act of moving with the breath, of honoring the sun (a very ancient impulse!), touches a place deep inside. Yoga, for many, becomes a bridge – a way back to what was lost. It’s ironic and beautiful: a practice that originated in India is helping descendants of Europe remember how to inhabit the sacred in their own skin. There’s a reason yoga feels good to us beyond the physical stretch. As one white yoga teacher confessed, “Practicing yoga brought me a strong body, a stable mind, and a spirit that felt connected to something larger.” It gave meaning, community, and a taste of the sacred that Western life wasn’t giving her. In my studio, I’ve had students share that yoga is the first time they learned to feel rather than suppress, to trust their body rather than feel ashamed of it. They come alive in a way that standard gym classes or church sermons never evoked.

However, this seeking can be fraught. We must acknowledge that yoga and other Eastern or Indigenous practices don’t exist just to fill our void. They are living traditions of other cultures, not trendy accessories for us to sample. The goal isn’t to appropriate or escape into someone else’s heritage, but to use these experiences to awaken something in ourselves. I sometimes remind my students: Yoga is not a replacement for what we lost. It’s a pointer, a midwife helping birth a remembrance. If we approach with humility, yoga can teach us how to re-inhabit our own bodies and perhaps even inspire us to learn about our own ancestors’ ways (however distant or fragmented).

I think of it like this: Yoga opens the door of the house, airs it out, and says, “See, the sacred was here all along.” It invites us to be present and listen. In that listening, some have found themselves drawn to explore European paganism or folk traditions in addition to yoga – not out of rejection of yoga, but because yoga showed them the possibility of a spiritually connected life. For others, yoga simply provides a non-dogmatic space to pray with their whole being.

People are yearning for a spirituality that feels inclusive and embodied, not hierarchical and shaming.

Yoga as a Bridge Home

I write this not as a condemnation of Christianity or any religion per se – there are many Christians today reclaiming the mystical, loving core of their faith, and that is beautiful. Rather, I write to name the historical truths and the emotional realities that underlie this modern phenomenon of “so many white people in yoga classes.” It’s easy to dismiss it as appropriation or fad. But underneath, there is a story of loss and longing – of white privilege built on the ruins of our own indigenous past, and of white poverty in the soul. A story of how a dominator culture was born in Europe, spread through the world, and now leaves even its inheritors spiritually adrift.

By understanding this, we can approach our yoga (and any cross-cultural spiritual practice) with more awareness and respect. We can critique the violent imposition of religion – how it was “not offered generously but forced with swords and schools,” how children were taken, languages banned, ceremonies outlawed in the name of saving souls – and we can hold that alongside compassion for the descendants of both the colonized and the colonizer. We are all trying to heal from that legacy.

For me, as a yoga studio owner, this journey has been humbling. I used to feel a twinge of defensiveness when accusations of cultural appropriation arose. Now I see an opportunity for a deeper conversation. I often silently thank the Indian sages and practitioners who kept yoga alive and generously shared it with the world. Their gift became my lifeline. And I also quietly mourn what my own ancestors lost – the particular songs and dances that I will never know. Both truths coexist.

In the end, yoga is not a replacement for those lost European traditions – but it is a bridge. A bridge back to the body, which is where all spirit lives. A bridge toward wholeness, where we no longer split matter from spirit or carry shame for our humanity. Yoga does not belong to us white folks, but it has welcomed us in, and for that I am grateful. It has taught me to stand on my own two feet and feel the earth as sacred again. It has shown me how to bow (in namaste or child’s pose) with genuine reverence – something my stiff upper-lip culture had long forgotten.

On my mat, I have felt moments of connection that transcend geography or lineage – moments that feel like coming home. And perhaps that is the gentle truth I want to offer: home was never really gone. The sacred lives quietly in each of us, waiting for us to remember. We may travel far, to India or beyond, to find the key – but when we insert it and turn, the door that opens is our own. Yoga has been my key, my gentle teacher. It helped me discover that the wholeness I sought was here all along, patiently awaiting my return.

So, no, yoga is not a new trend or a stolen toy for me; it is a patient guide leading me back to something old and holy. Not a replacement, but a bridge. A way back to the body. A way forward to something more whole, where perhaps one day we can all, of every color and creed, meet in the middle – healed, grounded, and truly home.