Practicing Yoga and Social Justice

There’s a collective project being undertaken in our movement that is a sk ing how to connect with and understand people who voted for DJT. I’m excited to see this emerging. I have felt very frustrated by the initial urge to brand all DJT-voters as stupid, misguided, uneducated, racist. It feels very diminishing of the real struggles people face out there in the world.  Of course, some Trump voters may be those things and more. But we really don’t know yet what tipped the scale for many people. In my own circles, I have talked to people who just felt they couldn’t vote for Hillary for a variety of reasons (some understandable and some maybe less so). I have talked to people for whom DJT’s messages about the economy really resonated with them – and they should. It is true that our economy has left too many working people behind, has created a handful of winners and millions of losers. We have an economy with greater inequality than at almost any time in our history. Wor...

It's interesting to read the Bhagavad Gita as a narrative instead of as a reference book. When you read as a narrative, you get the story, how the different elements of the story fit together. And what speaks to you may arise from context, or from how the story relates to your own life. When you read it as a reference book, e.g. seeking out specific passages that comment on key themes in yoga philosophy, you miss all that. You may have a tendency only to read the parts that relate to what you already know. I'm really enjoying just reading it as a book. The last week or two, I've been thinking a lot about this verse from the Bhagavad Gita: It is better to do your own dharma (calling) even imperfectly, than someone else's dharma perfectly. Even better to die in your dharma than in another's which brings great fear. (BG 3.35) When I came to this verse in chapter 3 it spoke to me very deeply. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has wondered why some...

If Maha Mudra defined my practice in January, February has been all about Kurmasana. When I was in India in 2015, Prashantji had an extended comment in class one day about Kurmasana and how important to practice it. He started with a simple question - what is the most important asana in yoga? Of course people answered with all the poses I would've suggested - tadasana, adho muka svanasana, even utthita trikonasana  and savasana. But nope. The answer was Kurmasana, because that is the pose that starts to teach you about pratyahara, withdrawal of the senses, learning to go inside. At the beginning of February, I started to be overwhelmed by the news and started to notice feeling toxified by reading too much of it. It seemed like a practice of going inside would help counteract. Honestly, though, Kurmasana is such a challenging pose and neither I nor my students were quite ready for it. I started with a practice of supported forward bends, which helped with the mindset but not...