(RNS) — Before 23-year-old Etai Atula shared everyday yogic wisdom with his 525,000 followers on Instagram, he was an anxious, nerdy teenager from Brooklyn, New York. The former drummer of the indie rock band LAUNDRY DAY, like many his age, Atula was chronically online. But everything changed when he found yoga.
Now, Atula’s “karmic assignment,” he said, is to tell his story to a largely non-religious but spiritually curious generation in their own language. His new book, “Old Path New Prints: A Gen-Z Yogi’s Solo Pilgrimage Across Asia,” released Jan. 7, pulls entries from his diary along his journey through 10 countries over the past two years teaching and practicing yoga. During it, he often learned more, he said, from the “ordinary people and lay practitioners” than the “gatekeepers of knowledge.”
“It’s not just the story of how yoga changed my life,” Atula told RNS in a Zoom interview on Saturday (Jan. 24), “but it’s a bit of a treasure map on how it can change anybody’s life.”
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What can yoga do for Americans in Generation Z?
This is the question of my life, to be honest with you. As generations go on, this thing which we call yoga, spirituality or the Vedic knowledge, it gets less and less cool. And because of the influence of the internet and globalization, there is so much shiny allure in materialism. I’m not trying to knock materialism because a balance is required. There’s no reason to shun and distance yourself from it, because this is the world we were born into. We were incarnated in these bodies so that we can enjoy sensuality and so that we can experience what it means …