combined images of the Buddha and Shiva; Ganesha sat next to the Virgin Mary. They were often erected in beatific natural spaces, such as at the bases of trees and at the top of hills, and included feathers, pine cones, crystals, and sage. Rituals included not only Buddhist and Hindu religious practices but also South American crystal skulls, labyrinth-walking meditations, shaman-led visualizations, Maori storytelling, medicine wheel creation, and Native American drumming, singing, and prayers. This religious behavior extends beyond the boundaries of benevolent Orientalism24 to encapsulate a form of religious exoticism, one that employed a pragmatic approach by valorizing religious forms and practices that were viewed as both exotic and effective spiritual tools.
Wanderlust festivals celebrate a form of enchanted secularism that involves sublime experiences engaging with nature, personal introspection through yoga, and spiritual fulfillment in contact with community. In contrast, Bhakti and Shakti Fests cultivate explicitly religious experiences by drawing on the teachings of various Hindu-derived gurus, devotional yoga (bhakti), devotional music and chanting (kīrtan), mantra recitation, Vedic rituals, and postural yoga. They also include the most significant population of white practitioners who identify as Hindu bhaktas (devotees). Many of the core facilitators of this community are serious devotees and do not represent the “noncommittal”25 and superficial, “aesthetic” choices of the New Age,26 as is often described by scholarly critics. Rather, many were born into the Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) or the Hare Krishnas (ISKCON), or born into families that were deeply committed to a particular form of Indic spirituality. For example, when I asked Jesse, a young male attendee, when he got involved in the guru-yoga scene, he told me that his grandmother had been on the board of the SRF in the 1940s.27 When I asked Gopal, a prominent kīrtan musician, when he became a Krishna bhakta, he told me that he and his bandmates were born into ISKCON families.28 Some have lived for decades in guru-led communities in the United States or in India, while others make annual pilgrimages to the subcontinent or otherwise divide their lives between East and West. Although these participants are mostly whites who adopt Indic cultural forms, including dress and bodily comportment, they complicate the stereotyped critique of noncommittal and aesthetically based spiritual tourism. Many of the core facilitators of this community are converts in all but name.
In opposition, Burning Man and LIB emphasize spiritual expression and exploration through the creation of transtraditional spiritual assemblages, or bricolage, rather than religious devotion to any one tradition or teacher. LIB hosts multiple learning environments wherein participants are exposed to workshops focused on everything from conscious business and entrepreneurial skills to permaculture and essential oils. There are opportunities to engage in chanting Hindu mantras, meditating with Tibetan singing bowls, and singing with members of the Native American Church (Peyote Religion). In 2016, the LIB Temple of Consciousness, which ran programming every hour for the entirety of the festival, focused explicitly on Indigenous knowledge; there were over forty different lectures and workshops related to Indigenous traditions and arts. In 2017, LIB festival organizers established a permanent space dedicated to learning about and supporting the spirituality and political activism of Native peoples.29
Wanderlust festivals in Great Lake Taupo, New Zealand, in Sunshine Coast, Australia, and in Oahu, Hawaii, opened and closed with ceremonies conducted by Maori, Australian aboriginals, and Hawaiians, respectively. Throughout each Wanderlust festival week, there were special lectures, guided walking tours, meditations, and rituals focused on Indigenous knowledge. These inclusions were the festivals’ attempts to raise consciousness of the fact that they occur on settler colonial lands with a fraught history of oppression of Indigenous people. For the initial welcome ceremony of Wanderlust in Great Lake Taupo, the festival’s organizers invited a large group of Maori leaders and performers to conduct a Pohiri ritual dramatizing the encounter between different tribes. To do so is a political recognition of the Maori history of New Zealand; indeed, to open a Wanderlust festival in New Zealand without a Maori-led Pohiri ceremony would be a public affront to the history and land rights of the Maori people. Similarly, the 2014 LIB festival began with a collaborative ceremony between multiple Chumash tribal leaders and LIB organizers prior to the formal opening of the festival. Bhakti and Shakti Fests also acknowledged the Serrano, Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, and Mohave, for whom Joshua Tree, California, is ancestral land. However, organizers addressed this issue by having their own (white) performers lead Pan-Native prayers and invocation of the blessings of the sky, earth, and four directions to begin the festival.30
But the importance of Indigenous religions extends beyond public recognition of the Indigenous lands upon which these festivals are conducted through ceremony. My 2014 survey of attendees at a wide variety of yoga festivals asked, “Which traditions have some of the deepest resources for spiritual growth on our planet?” The top five traditions respondents cited were: yoga (86 percent), nature (83 percent), Buddhism (72 percent), Native American traditions (56 percent), and Hinduism (53 percent).31 In fact, American yoga practitioners valued Native American traditions as containing deeper “resources for spiritual growth” than Hinduism! Certainly, the Hindu American Foundation’s Take Back Yoga campaign proffered a subjective (and motivated) interpretation of yoga by claiming it as a Hindu practice,32 but the practice certainly developed in India, influenced by Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religions.33 Hindus in India created modern forms of postural yoga from a foundation in Sāṃkhya-Yoga philosophical ideals, body building, esoteric dance, gymnastics, and Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religious texts. In the early twentieth century, the founders of modern postural yoga—Shivananda, T. M. Krishnamacharya, and Krishnamacharya’s students B. K. S. Iyengar, K. Patthabi Jois, and T. K. V. Desikachar—universalized a system of physical practices and readied them for international export.34 These modern innovators lived within a religious worldview wherein the term yoga referred to a religious path, or more specifically, yoking or binding oneself to Absolute Truth, as in the various yogas (karma yoga [the path of action], bhakti yoga [the path of devotion], and jñāna yoga [the path of knowledge]) in Hindu scriptures, such as the Bhagavad Gītā. They also centralized the Yoga Sūtras, a Sanskrit text that integrates Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religious ideas.35 While these first-generation proselytizing yogis universalized yoga as a new scientific method for health and wellness, they also rooted the tradition with Hindu and Indic texts and India’s religious systems.36 So then why would today’s American yogis claiming alliance with these lineages rank Native American traditions as a deeper “resource for spiritual growth” than Hinduism?
In response to this surprising data, I began to look for evidence of Native American traditions in the field. I found yoga teachers invoking the ritual systems of Native American ceremony, calling for a return to ancient Indigenous lifeways, demanding a return to respect for Mother Earth, encouraging their students to find and follow their spirit, and developing alternative epistemologies and ways of inhabiting the body through the philosophical lessons and practical methodologies by combining Indigenous and yogic knowledge. The broader context of these transformational festivals provided attendees with Indigenous-derived experiences, like singing with South American crystal skulls,37 lectures on Indigenous methods for attaining mystical experiences (including peyote, ayahuasca, and DMT), fire ceremonies, ecological messages, Chakra Village healing sanctuaries (established in teepees), teepees erected in communal spaces, Native American Church sacred singing workshops, and workshop and lecture themes focused on learning from Indigenous knowledge systems.
Several prominent yoga teachers hybridized Indigenous and Indic worldviews in their teaching. For example, Ana Forrest, a revered global yoga teacher who often teaches at Wanderlust festivals,38 extracts practical spiritual tools from both Indic and Indigenous sources. In her autobiographical book, Fierce Medicine, she writes:
I have no loyalty to concepts that aren’t true for me. Although I studied Yoga with B. K. S. Iyengar himself, the most important lesson I learned from him was to disobey the dictator if you don’t find a man’s character congruent with his teachings. . . . I discarded what didn’t work from both ancient and modern wisdom traditions and braided in the wisdom from my years as a horse whisperer to create the unique approach I call Forrest
