Week 298: Community Building Tool, Cultural Digestion of Yoga, Aesthetic!

8/30/2025 - Modern Hindu Content

Welcome to Eternal Path! This week we feature: A community building tool, the cultural digestion of yoga, and an aesthetic!

Resource Highlight: Community Canvas

Communities for Hindus, especially in the diaspora, are often rooted around temples or ethnoreligious groups, but lessons in community building can even be at the scale of a weekly get-together within one’s own family or group of families. Its important for us as Hindus to build community with other Hindus and help each other on our spiritual paths. That leads to the question: how do we intentionally develop stronger communities?

Enter The Community Canvas; “a framework that helps people and organizations build stronger communities. It provides a template for anyone who brings people together.” Available at https://community-canvas.org/ - they provide workbooks for having clear and difficult conversations about the goals of a community.

Some are most relevant to temples and leadership in large community organizations, but there are themes that everyone can think critically about for building a stronger Hindu community around them.

Their Worksheet Summary is a good place to start: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1kx8C2lsfHld6pqABzkEfLFBzvJidqfeMlrzdYaC732I/edit?usp=sharing

We also recommend the “Minimum Viable Community” discussion starter: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/communitycanvas/documents/master/CommunityCanvas-MinimumViableCommunity.pdf

Why is this relevant? Because diaspora temples are bleeding second and third generation members, and the future of diaspora Hinduism in the west lies in temples and community organizations having multigenerational congregations. Intentional communities create a sense of belonging for everyone involved, allowing members to enjoy the benefits of community and having a squad to engage in their own personal spiritual development.

Hinduphobia Alert: Cultural Digestion of Yoga

Yoga is one of the key places in which a Hindu tradition is stripped of its essence, its origins are flat out denied, and then Hindus claiming ownership or even attribution for the tradition are gaslighted and insulted. The screenshots below show just a small direct example of cultural digestion, where Yoga (and Bharatnatyam) are stripped of their Hindu essence, secularized, and then used by religions that want to destroy Hinduism.

Aesthetic: Tamil Nadu Hindu Temple