Weekly Meditation Sessions: or Religious Appropriation in America

The Manhattan neighborhood I live in is called Hamilton Heights, or some refer to it historically as Sugar Hill, and it is about a five to ten block section (145-155^th streets roughly) in Upper West Harlem. I live off Broadway, which is as far west as you can go up here, barring Riverside Drive. As a resident here, and as a part of the greater problem I am about to address, I am supremely aware of the spreading gentrification in this neighborhood. My block in particular is a hotbed of middle-class white people in a historically black neighborhood. I won’t exclude myself from this so I’ll go ahead and say ‘we’ when I say this: we rent out apartments with rapidly rising rent, we drink craft beer and expensive bar food, and we get our morning five dollar lattes from the trendy underground (literally) coffee shop. Majority white people run these businesses and majority white people consume the product. This is the setting for this piece; however, I am not about to address the problem of gentrification, as that is not the focus here.

So, I take us to the local coffee shop specifically. The people who work here are warm and friendly, and the patrons are generally kind. It’s a ‘hip’ bunch and, while majority white, there are absolutely a plethora of nationalities and people that come through to get their caffeinated libations. One of the nice things this shop does at night is host free neighborhood activities, including improv and open mic nights.  They also do weekly meditation sessions. Now I have admittedly not attended one of these meditation sessions myself, but I’m sure it is serene and lovely and following in the usual tradition of most borrowed pseudo-Buddhist now-Americanized meditation sessions. This led me to thinking about what we call ‘American Buddhism’ and the borrowing of Buddhist practices in America.

Yoga and Meditation are traditionally Eastern Asian practices, which are utilized as a pathway to a connection with the divine. Often, in Western culture, we do yoga or meditate to relax or to clear the mind. I do not want to discredit the usefulness of these practices for the purposes of relaxation and cleansing, but there has always been to me a feeling of cultural and religious appropriation somewhere underneath the practice. One article I read on this subject some time ago wondered if part of that feeling comes about because us Westerners can go practice these bits and pieces of another culture and religion, namely Hinduism, without living the full experience and practices of a Hindu. This connects me to Celia’s ‘jug theory’ of religion from Theron Ware, but not in the same way; while Celia generally learned about and understood the religions she was taking from, many Americans, including myself, try practicing meditation without knowing its proper origins. 

Further, after reading Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, I am aware that there is a proper way to adopt an American form of Buddhism that has little to do with a ‘jug theory’ or religious appropriation. There is a stark difference between mountain-men Ray and Japhy, who genuinely attempt to live their entire lives in search of the dharma, and the New York middle-class Protestant/Jew/Atheist (etc.) who goes to a once-weekly meditation session for the purpose of cleansing their mind. This issue is a large one and transcends far beyond meditation and yoga. It extends especially to the appropriation of cultural and religious dress, including non-Hindu people sporting bindis as a trend. While the lines may seem to be more blurred with meditation, which seems like a benign and peaceful practice, I would argue that it is not so different from the bindi example. We say “Namaste” and we say “Om”, but how many of us know what that really means, spiritually? We mix up various different Eastern and Southern Asian religions and their meditative practices and we advertise it at our coffee shop within a gentrified neighborhood and I cannot help but feel wrong about the whole thing.

Again, as I said earlier, I have not actually attended this particular coffee shops meditation session and it may be completely free of uninformed religious ‘borrowing’, but a large part of me doubts that. There is a thin line between cultural and religious exchange, as we may find in The Dharma Bums, and cultural and religious appropriation, which we may find in any ‘hip’ neighborhood in America. If there is a solution to this, I am not sure what it is. I am not even positive that the appropriation of meditation practices calls for a solution. If it is so distant and abstracted from the original practice and becomes an entirely different thing, is it still appropriation? If we are only practicing yoga, for example, as physical exercise at a gym, stripped completely of religious meaning, then are we in the clear? Is it only appropriation when we call out “OM” or other religious chants that we have no business chanting? Does it offend people of Hindu and Buddhist faith living in America and do we have first-hand testimony? I am not sure about any of this, but these are the questions that should enter our consciousness when we enter an American establishment that capitalizes on fragmented versions of other religious and cultural traditions.