Reclaiming our selves

If you are interested in spirituality, you must have heard of terms like “personal growth”, “personal development” and “wellness”. You might even wish for these, your aspirations guided by a multi-billion dollar industry that spans the globe. Once a strictly Western phenomenon, supposedly fuelled by materialistic fatigue, personal growth is now much wanted in India too, once considered the fount of authentic spiritual practice, now a wannabe in the “want-take-have” consumerist rat race.

I have nothing personal against personal growth. Rather, it is a good sign when people begin spending on courses, books, CDs, and such paraphernalia that they believe would calm their minds, make them happy, lower their blood pressure, make their children and pets behave, etc. Rather that than another pair of Christian Louboutins, right

What I question, and I am not the first to do so, is the reductionism at the heart of the personal growth industry. What it does is reduce spiritual values and practices to a bunch of items or services that can be easily packaged and marketed. That is what consumerism does. It commodifies everything — experiences, people, cultures and literatures — into something it can stick a price on and make available on the global marketplace.

Take yoga. Or mindfulness — the personal growth industry’s flavour of the decade. These are derivatives that have been neatly isolated from philosophical systems that are a few thousand years old, and which have spawned complex ways of living and being and spiritual seeking. In their current avatars, they stand stripped of their contexts, reduced to a bunch of physical exercises and breathing techniques that will, of course, “work” at the superficial levels they are expected to. Any kind of exercise will help you lose weight and calming yourself will bring down your stress levels, and so on, some of which will also, lo and behold, be measurable on the brain function MRIs of an equally reductionist science, much to the delight of the personal growth industry.

Only it feels a bit like burning down a complex rainforest ecosystem because you want to use the land it stands on for industrial farming.

We in India are faced with a double colonisation — the richness of our philosophies and their integrity destroyed and fragmented by a consumerist culture hungry for inner peace, even as it shatters our inner peace and replaces it with materialistic dreams that will further lead us into restless and ruthless grasping and wanting. We gave up our systems of learning, forgot our dualistic and non-dualistic philosophies, and began dreaming in tongues other than our mothers’. We exchanged Banarasi woven in Banaras for Banarasi made in China. We forgot who we were, are, or might possibly be, so much so that we began to believe bigoted, fanatical, monocultural voices that purported to show us their own interpretations of our roots, our selfhood and our collective consciousness.

It is time to resist both these forms of colonisation and reclaim autonomy over our spiritual space. It is time for a revolution of the spirit.

Swati Chopra writes on spirituality and mindfulness. Blog: swatichopra.com