Lost among the Lululemon

 

When Michelle Campbell went to a yoga festival hoping for a sense of manaakitanga, she found something else entirely.

 

My friends and I arrive at the Napier War Memorial conference centre on the waterfront and join a throng of women with rubber mats slung over their shoulders. Swaddled in their best yoga leggings, they greet us, the epitome of Lululemon’s target customer base.

The snaking queue of yoga festival participants backs up towards the Pinazarap food truck and first impressions indicate the assortment of Filipino menu items might provide the extent of the cultural diversity today. Longganisang lucban with rice and egg anyone?

Before we can breach the front door, a proficient-looking woman hands us a clipboard and pen — it’s a waiver that frees Creative Empire Pty Ltd from any liability in regard to our “personal injury, death, damage to personal property . . .” The list goes on. I cross out the section that grants the same company “the right, permission and authority” to use my name “and any such photographs” for advertising and marketing. Not being responsible for my death but owning my image in perpetuity seems like a bum deal.

Lives signed away, we are off to our first class. I’ve picked “Dancing with the Shadows” with Rahil Chand, not because I want to work out my childhood trauma at 9am in the basement of a conference centre, but because Rahil is one of the few BIPOC teachers on the festival programme.

Rahil arrives working a mesh crop top that shows off the lithe hard body of someone who probably duck walks their way to the corner dairy just because their young knee joints can. They begin with a confession: “It’s my first class so I’m a little bit nervous!” We clap in support, and they promptly move past any nerves the only way a young queer can, by spending the next hour twerking with us.

Rahil moves with purpose, disappearing and reappearing through the crowd, looking us deeply in the eyes and commanding our participation. It’s less dancing with the shadow self and more dancing with the silly self, until mid-way through when Rahil asks us to hug a stranger. I immediately look towards the door, suddenly desperate to use the bathroom, but a woman makes eye contact with me, and it’s too late.

We give each other a shy smile, and we hug, awkwardly and with little sincerity. As if casting our personal boundaries aside just to hug it out with a complete stranger isn’t weird at all. An uneasiness ripples throughout the room, only settled by feigned laughter.

This level of intimacy isn’t always an issue for me. Whenever I’m at wānanga or marae, I will hug everybody there, even strangers — in fact, especially strangers, who I often approach first because that’s manaakitanga. The care and effort to make others feel welcome and seen is real. The difference there is that I haven’t just signed a waiver that puts my wellbeing into an ether and, in exchange, assumes the right to my body image. Whatever sense of connection Rahil was trying to evoke feels comparatively contrived.

I spend the rest of the class at the back of the room in the safe company of my equally uncomfortable friend Jaimee. We keep side-eyeing each other as if to check in: “Are you okay?” We carve out our own space with a cautious two-step as the beats intensify, laughing out loud at white women gyrating to hip-hop and trying to keep pace with our whippet leader. We finish jovially and far too sweaty for this early in the day.

Moving upstairs to the bigger yoga spaces, I attend a few classes where the overt instruction from teachers starts to grate. Perhaps it’s the endless talking about “healing ourselves”, or the startling overshares (“I’m feeling like I need my vulva on the ground today”).

There is no kōrero on the origins of yoga from teachers who’ve taken Indian names as their own. But I hear a dozen affirmations on self-love and care that sound eerily familiar to a Louise Hay book published in 1992. Interspersed between this cacophony of spiritual chit-chat, there is altogether too much forced sighing. I have a visceral reaction when a teacher says: “You come from a long line of ancestors, witches . . . some who were burned.” With that timely reminder of the misogynistic end for many of my Irish and Scottish ancestors, my body goes rigid, an audible “woah” escapes my mouth, and the woman next to me leaves the room.

Perhaps the teacher misspoke, maybe it was nerves. I’ll never know. While I’m in awe of the yoga teachers putting themselves out there, the irk level only intensifies at the next class when a 20-something-year-old teacher announces: “Maybe the mind just needs to shut up sometimes and we need to feel with our bodies.” Feeling, I was not. The same teacher also plugs her life coaching services and offers me a business card on the way out. I politely decline and take a lunch break.

Walking into Napier’s CBD, I pass my old ancestor, Pania of the Reef, on the waterfront. I stop, as I have many times since my childhood, to try and figure her out. She wears an odd smile that suggests her Italian sculptors spent more time working on her perfectly rounded breasts than on her facial expression.

It’s a perfectly sunny Napier day. The Soundshell gardens are fresh with spring flowers, and further down the road, the Free Palestine protest is setting up. The Palestinian flags are unfurled and placed on bamboo poles. A Māori woman wears a flag around her shoulders. I raise my fist in solidarity, and she whoops, raising her arm in response.

Down at the beach, I stare out to sea, the land of my people, Ngāti Kahungunu. Over the crash of the ocean, I hear the megaphone firing up. I walk back to the yoga festival with the words “Free, Free Palestine” ringing in my ears. The sliding doors shut behind me, the realities of the world seeming prohibited from a festival that promises I can “transcend daily life and activate new beginnings.”

Ditching my hope for intersectionality somewhere between the chakra balancing and angel transmission stalls lining the lobby, I seek solace in a breath-work session with Helle Thomson. I’d experienced a session with Helle at a yoga retreat last year, and she feels familiar. An older woman, skilled in the subtleties of teacher-student relationships, she’s able to convey a sense of safety. Only then am I able to relax.

The session is beautiful, on the shores of Ahuriri, and my ancestors show up to support. We are busy in that wairua realm, weaving magic, when at some point, one of Helle’s assistants places a hand on my shoulder. She receives a swift spiritual whack with a taiaha and moves on, my ancestors sure to give her the blunt end. It is a warning and a reminder: in the right time and the right place, special connections can occur. I’m held by my own and protected.

How this all works, I have no idea, and I leave it to the great mystery. With such beautiful transmissions from my ancestors, I should leave and revel in them for longer. But my determination to participate blurs into an odd mish-mash of classes.

“Come on, we’re all here to heal!” proclaims one teacher as we are mid-breath. “Are we?” I think. I wouldn’t have considered a yoga festival the place to experience healing, but many of the participants nod in unison like they have a job to do. Like their personal healing journey will take place within the next 48 hours, and they’ll be back at work on Monday, renewed. Healing done. Tick.

The expectation of what can be achieved at this festival ranges from mildly amusing to borderline alarming. While there is much talk of teachers being “trauma-informed”, they tend more toward shouting pithy slogans about reclamation and connection.

In the 15 years I’ve been practising yoga, I’ve attended retreats, trainings, and a few of these festivals. I want to enjoy myself, and I want to participate in an ancient practice steeped in yoga philosophy with solid foundations, but I seldom find what I’m looking for. I often leave these events feeling alienated. This time, it will be with a simmering rage.

We finish the day with a “Transformational sound journey”. The space is packed, and we all look towards a woman dwarfed by a gargantuan stage intended for wedding DJs. Her lengthy intro sounds like the synopsis of a James Frey novel: we hear about her near death, her return to life, and her healing found in crystal singing bowls. She skims over the details, all sage smoke and mirrors. When the journey begins, I try to get comfortable but after a day of writhing around at floor level, my spine won’t have it.

Pre-recorded Inuit throat singing floods out of the tinny convention speakers at cinematic volume, and every few minutes, the woman on stage chimes a bell into a microphone. With each chime, my irritation grows. I sit up, I move, I stare out the window. I want to leave but feel trapped by 100 other yoga people lying under blankets blissing out.

Far from feeling “transformed” my mind races. Would they judge me for leaving early? How rude would I look? Can I quietly roll up my mat and get to the door without anyone noticing? I start comparing leaving the yoga space to leaving a whaikōrero mid-sentence. Absolutely not.

Even when little manaakitanga is shown to me from the outset, I can’t escape conveying the value. Unable to compartmentalise myself out of my Māori world and neatly into te ao Pākehā, I cannot leave. I stay rigid, wide-eyed and angry as hell until the music slows, and she gongs us out.

Just when I think it’s over, she leans into the microphone: “I’m gonna play you one more song, listen to the lyrics.” My eyes threaten to pop out of their sockets. It’s a very long song, and each time I think it’s going to end, another verse begins. The teacher’s eyes are closed, hand on her heart with a trite smile on her face. She’s in her own universe and incapable of reading the room.

I realise then that I am mana whenua, but I am invisible. This sound journey, this space, this festival is not about me, it’s about her.

A woman in the corner of the room begins to shift and stir. I and many others in the back row sit up and watch this brave soul roll up her yoga mat and gather her belongings. No fucks given. It’s nearly 6pm, and she probably has kids to feed and life outside these walls. When the song finally comes to a close, I spring up from my mat and make a beeline for the door.

After the festival, I drive north to Wairoa to see my Aunty Ngaire. The road is still messed up from Cyclone Gabrielle, and Wairoa’s battered from the floods. I sit at her table while she feeds me hot chicken and mashed potatoes. We walk around her māra, and she shows me her kākā beak in full bloom and dripping with red tendrils. We check out the damage to her garage from the floods, with the internal walls removed and stripped back to the framing. She takes me driving around town to see the yellow stickered homes and silt from the river on the east end of town, where we bump into Richard Niania from the Kahungunu executive. He’s worried about the young ones moving away because there’s no housing and little opportunity for mahi in a post-disaster region.

At Oslers Bakery, we sit eating boil-up pies and chat with some kaumātua from Nūhaka who remember my dad from Nūhaka Native School. Back at Aunty’s, she busts out the whakapapa files, showing me the who’s who in our whanau, her research a great source of pride.

My aunty’s not perfect. There’s always hapū politics and often arguments about what belongs to who and who should be doing what. I struggle with a sense of tūrangawaewae and how that exists for me. But it all feels real.

If I was seeking a sense of manaakitanga, I have found it. Not in Lululemon leggings, sound journeys or downward-facing dogs. I’m home.

Nō te waka o Tākitimu

Ko taku ihi 

Nō te maunga o Moumoukai

Ko taku wehi

Nō te awa o Nūhaka

Ka rere ki te marae o Tamakahu me Tane-nui-aa-rangi

Te mana o Rakaipaaka tōku hapū

Ko Ngāti Kahungunu ki Wairoa, Ngāti Kahungunu ki Heretaunga, Ngāti Porou, Rongomaiwahine ōku Iwi 

Kei runga e!

I whānau mai Tāmaki Makaurau. I tipu ake Papatoetoe. Kei Ōwhango taku kāinga me taku aroha Jack me taku kuri Clarke. 

Michelle Campbell currently works for the Ministry of Health and studies Kaitiakitanga Pūtaio at Te Wānanga o Raukawa. She has been teaching yoga since 2019. 

E-Tangata, 2024