WHAT IS HIP HOP YOGA ?
If you're like UNDAKOVA, you may have witnessed first hand the social and cultural toll the extremes of global-capitalism and the “American Dream” have taken on communities, particularly urban black families. Part of the inspiration of our work as Hip Hop Yogis is calling a hault to the madness of overconsumption, alienation and lack. While in his youth UNDAKOVA saw his teenage posse poised to rise to fame as the next “it” boys, for over a decade the artist went ghost as he indulged in self-realization work, eventually, emerging as a pioneering leader of the fusion of Hip Hop and Yoga with his now partner, Or Nah. Influenced personally by Vipassana meditation, the Bagua map of Daoist cosmology and Zen Baoding balls, today a major part of the UNDAKOVA Hip Hop yoga mission and his service as an artist involves “remedying a world in which many have lost touch with their true nature and ability to practice self-authority and authentic self-expression.”
By the same token, yoga here in the West has been squeezed to serve the needs and drives of our capitalist marketplace. If you’ve been to Or Nah's class, you may have noticed she rarely leads a typical sun salutations intro. "As a woman, my practice has evolved over nearly 20 years to include more sufi grinding, primal pelvic maneuvers, serpentine swirls and all those rounded lines that make my body sing," says Or Nah. *Orthodox* schools of yoga evolved during a period when women were banned from it. It was an elite art relegated to Brahmin & Warriors of the highest caste in a prejudiced system based on skin color originating when Aryans invaded India. British colonizers would lace yoga with an even more masculine and militaristic vibe as the Hindus and many religious folks of India created distance between the solidifying world religions and the folk cultures that still offered many variants of Mother Worship that would have innervated the White Hegemonizers.
Some scholars say it was menstruating women who created yoga. In matrifocal prehistory it was passed down through embodied wisdom and oral tradition. It might have been closer to dance, perhaps blended with the gifts of Ethiopians coming into India long ago carrying the Lotus flower as a symbol sacred to the Queen Mothers of Africa. As yoga continues to gain force here in the West and becomes muddled with the drives of capitalism, Let’s keep the dialogue open and decolonize our bodies, hearts and minds on a deeper level. As Hip Hop Yogis, let's root our experiential practice in a spiritual medicine without beginning and without end - an evolving dance of spirit and matter conjuring shamanic, precolonial, and primal.
 
Written by High Prieztezz 0r_Nah of
ULTRACULTURAL OTHERS
Urban Mystery Skool | 
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