Practicing Yoga and Social Justice

Two weeks ago I went to a bystander intervention training put on by SURJ-Milwaukee (Showing Up for Racial Justice). The point is to prepare us well-meaning-white-people (WMWP) to stop being bystanders, and get ready to intervene and disrupt harassment when it's happening around us. ( SURJ is a great organization of white people organizing together to dismantle white supremacy; they avowedly work in partnership with people-of-color led organizations and if you have a chapter in your community, find it and join it!). It was pretty great to see 60+ mostly white people from a well-off nearby suburb – in the neighborhood surrounding the yoga studio where I teach – gather to start figuring out how we do better. It really spoke to me about how great is the need for community right now and how the attack on people of color and on civil rights, and the related upsurge of hostility and hatred is calling together the people who disagree with that. The messages of the trai...

I have struggled with depression most of my adult life. I don’t talk about it very much, though I’m trying to do that more now, in part out of resistance to the commodified image of yoga teachers that prevails out there. I don’t want to be complicit in this narrative that if you just do yoga all your concerns melt away and you dwell in carefree bliss. That’s not consistent what it’s about for me and I don’t want to be part of a lie. At the same time, I also have to be honest that my experience of the current politics runs through the prism of my personal struggle. I know people who are managing to survive this time with a lot more carefree joy than I have and I appreciate knowing that it is possible to see how bad things are, to engage with it, to be committed to trying to change it, but not let it touch you inside. I want that, but I don’t have it. (There’s a lovely metaphor in the Bhagavad Gita about this – that the lotus flower is in the water, but it doesn’t ...