Ahimsa In Action

It’s been awhile since I posted on my blog. I broke my wrist in March and for about a month it was really challenging to type, so I just managed to do what my work required and nothing else. Then came one of the busiest times of year for me, late March through the end of April and now I’m trying to get back to it.

The national association for my yoga tradition is IYNAUS and we have a national convention every three years. This year – in April 2019 – a group of us worked together to organize a session on yoga and social justice. It was called Ahimsa In Action (non-violence in action). It was super challenging and super exciting. Challenging for all the reasons you can imagine – we had to work together as an all-volunteer committee, align our different visions and perspectives and come up with an agenda that could never be comprehensive enough and would only scratch the surface of what we need to do. We didn’t know who would come and what they were interested in. We planned for 30-50 people and we ended up with over 100, so even managing the group and the activities was more challenging than we anticipated.

But it was so exciting to have so many people take time out of an otherwise jam-packed agenda to spend time talking about social justice. I heard from many people that night and since then how much they appreciated it. My overall impression was that people were so thankful we opened up a space for a conversation they were hankering for, but maybe didn’t know how to start on their own.

I’ve also heard some third-hand rumors that some people didn’t like it, didn’t have a good experience and are very critical of what we did. It’s hard to know where to put that data, given that only one person has expressed concerns to me directly. It can be dangerous to ignore it, but also misguided to try to take it on. Rumors are rumors.

What I have imagined people didn’t like: we talked about racism and white supremacy. These are extremely loaded topics and they tap into deep seated emotions. As Robin DiAngelo points out in her book, White Fragility, white people take discussions of race and racism very personally. They feel attacked, even when the conversation is focused on systems of oppression not individual acts of racism or prejudice. White people want to erase racism because talking about it is so sad. It is so tragic. And it forces us to acknowledge we have benefited at the cost of others. When I do workshops with labor leaders on racism, there are always people who say, “Let’s not focus on what divides us. Let’s focus on how we are the same and how we can be united.” I know this comes from a good place, but erasing the reality of racism doesn’t allow us to be united. It requires people of color to pretend it’s not happening in order to “unite” with white people. Real unity comes from recognizing and acknowledging the harm that comes from racism, and working together, across different experiences and histories, to stop it. You can’t do that if you are not willing to admit it’s happening.

I don’t know if that’s what made some people uncomfortable. But I do know that it’s normal for people to feel upset and unsettled when we talk about racism and white supremacy. You really can’t get into the depths of the topic without ruffling some feathers.

So I’m okay if some people didn’t like it, or felt uncomfortable. I’m not okay with saying we shouldn’t keep talking about it because some people find it uncomfortable. I’m okay with digging in on what white supremacy means – I think that term might trigger people because they think they’re being called klan members, when in fact it refers to the system that puts white people at the center of everything, and creates oppression and vulnerability for people of color. I’m not okay with saying we can’t talk about it at all.

I want to push people to really think about what they didn’t like. Because very often in conversations about race and racism, white people react to things that aren’t being said. The reaction comes from their own fears about what people think about them. People get triggered. That’s normal. What is required in response is a willingness to ask why, to stay in the conversation, to look within and be willing to acknowledge that sometimes we like a system that makes life easier for us. Acknowledging that is hard. It is painful. But it is necessary.

Anyway. For the record, I wanted to outline my opening comments at our session and my intentions for the conversation we wanted to create. If you came to the session and you felt challenged or confused, maybe it helps to see and hear the rationale. If you didn’t come, here’s a recap of my part.

I want to share some perspectives from the social justice movement I work within. We believe that our world is organized by systems of oppression. Those systems determine who gets access to power and resources and who doesn’t. You know systems of oppression are at work when you see patterns – women consistently being paid less than men reveals something about the system of gender inequality. People of color being over policed, living with worse health or in more polluted neighborhoods – that refers to the system of racism and white supremacy.

We were born into these systems. We didn’t choose them anymore than we chose what hair color to have, or what state we were born in. I didn’t choose to be born into racism and I didn’t choose to be born into a world that doesn’t value or appreciate queer people. But here we are. We do have a choice of what to do about it. We can’t opt out of systems of oppression – they are always at work around us. As a white person, I can’t opt out of racism and white supremacy. If I apply for a loan, get stopped by a cop, go grocery shopping, serve on a jury or get a performance review at my job, racism and white supremacy will ensure that I have a different experience than someone just like me who isn’t white. So when we make choices about what to do about systems of oppression we can either reinforce the system or take steps to dismantle it.

Yoga is a practice for the liberation of all beings, but in fact, only a select group have access to it. In the US, if you look around for patterns, you know that most people that go to yoga class are white, middle/upper class, fit/athletic/thin women. So how do we make yoga a tool for liberation for all people?  We have to make our classes and our practice more accessible. And in order to do that, we have to get more clarity and competency about how we make the practice inaccessible without even realizing it. Racism, homophobia, fatphobia, transphobia – these systems of oppression are operating inside yoga. We have to dismantle them inside our yoga communities and outside our yoga studios.

And I believe yoga calls us to do that. In the US, yoga has been thoroughly coopted by the feel-good, self-care movement. It’s like – go to yoga and feel better! But that doesn’t help with collective liberation. And it only helps to a certain extent for the individual liberation of people who are part of groups targeted by systems of oppression. It’s hard to feel better when you go to a studio that isn’t welcoming to people of color and then after class you go back out into a racist world that makes your very existence dangerous.

There are lots of concepts in yoga that point to how important it is that we do this work. One is ahimsa, non-violence. Non-violence is the foundation of yoga. The commitment to practice non-violence is the great, might, universal vow unconditioned by time, place or caste. We tend to think of non-violence as interpersonal – like my commitment is not to hit someone else, or speak or think bad of them. But what about systemic violence? White supremacy is systemic violence against people of color. Our economic system creates systemic violence in the form of poverty. When we are called to practice non-violence, that means we have to dismantle these systems. We can’t just opt out of them.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we actually do  yoga and social justice. It isn’t enough for white people to go into communities of color and say – hey I have this great thing, want some of it? We have to also be partners in the struggle for liberation. That means being engaged in movements to change our society. Yoga is a part of the solution, but it is not the solution. Hong Gwi-Seok raised some beautiful ideas in our session about the difference between outreach and partnership. The difference between charity and reparations. Those distinctions speak to me in principle; I’m still figuring out what they mean in practice. That’s something I’ll be exploring with the work I’m doing at the Benedict Center, and with some of the plans our committee has for next steps. So stay tuned.

Meanwhile, working on race, talking about race, being adept at managing what is happening with racism in America requires practice. Yoga practitioners understand practice. If you came to our session and you didn’t like it, know that our intention was to create a space for a dialogue. It might not have been the right starting point. It was, of necessity, an imperfect beginning. But please be committed to practice. We have to get better at this – systems of oppression don’t only limit the communities they target. They do violence to all of us. I want to make change because I believe liberation of all beings is possible. Yoga taught me that.

With love, gratitude and solidarity forever.