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Joy Is An Act Of Resistance


Resistance is beautiful. If you’ve gone to any of the protests this week or ever before you know this is true. Resistance involves beautiful art, creative word play, music, community. It involves people coming together to articulate shared values and vision for how our society could be. It usually involves people taking huge risks to share their hopes and dreams for the future – people who risk more than most of us could imagine just to speak it aloud. And when they face their fears and take those risks, they inspire all of us to grow beyond the limited scope of fear and stand up for ourselves and those around us.

I forgot how much I love resistance. 

You know there is joy in resistance, but something I realized this week: joy is an act of resistance.

If you’re reading my blog you know the last few months have been hard. I have been in a fog of grief and fear. I have let the spectre of what could be dominate my experience of what is. I realized this week that I can’t continue doing that.

I will not let Donald Trump and his cronies take my happiness away. They might take our rights, they might assault our values, they may even take some of the people we love. But we can’t let him take our joy – that is the most personal, private, beautiful thing we have and we can’t surrender it. Even more, we can’t surrender it in advance, before the fascist impulses even take shape in real action.

I learned this from yoga. Yoga is to help us learn to inhabit our full selves and then grow beyond that to connect with something divine. You hardly hear my guru, BKS Iyengar, talking about yoga without reference to fully inhabiting the body. You can see yoga have this impact constantly. From the very first pose in class, when people stand up straight and open their chests, you can see the impact of breathing fully, experiencing the fullness of self. Mr. Iyengar often spoke about yoga as a process of bringing light to darkness. Though that phrase seems apt for this moment, he didn’t apply the political lens we might like to. He meant that yoga helps us find the places in the body that are dense, where we lack awareness, where we fail to fully inhabit, and gives us a strategy for building awareness there. Yoga helps us live in every cell, and through that - diminish pain, cope with discomfort and find our path to the divine.

Joy is an inherent part of who we are as humans – we have to inhabit our joy just as much and just as fully as we inhabit all the other emotions. There' s no way to live the path of yoga without committing ourselves to joy even in the strangest and most uncertain times.

Yoga offers us a very compelling set of principles for making change. Pratipaksha bhavanam  means that when we want to change something, we have to bring to the opposite into play. Want to heal your back pain caused by hyperflexibility in the lumbar? Meet that flexibility with resistance to create stability. Want to change anger? Meet it with love or peace. Want to change your own response to life’s irritations? Find something to love and enjoy about the moments that tend to irritate you. Want to stop having conflict with the same person over and over? Find a way to love and value and honor something about that person's approach to life.

Want to change the culture of hatred, fear and dourness that has already crept into the Trump era? Meet it with joy.

I went to two protests this weekend and they reminded me of that joy. I saw old friends and made new ones. I got to participate in the theater of protest – the creative ways we can showcase and call out injustice. I got to feel connected to people in my community.

If you aren’t protesting yet, get going. If you are feeling down, tend to that feeling. But start cultivating joy. It is one of our most powerful acts of resistance.

With love, solidarity and gratitude.

Comments

  1. Anne-Marie SchultzJanuary 18, 2017 at 6:30 PM

    I have been thinking a lot about this too. The Stoics say we always have the ability to assent and deny and no one can take that away. Not quite joy but I think the possibility of it. We are free in our thoughts regardless of the situation.

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  2. Kathleen MulliganJanuary 19, 2017 at 4:29 AM

    Thanks for sharing that - I don't know much about the stoics. But I do think a lot right now about the Dalai Lama and how peaceful and happy he always appears meanwhile the Chinese government literally trying to eradicate his people. We don't get to choose what happens around us. We do get to choose how we meet it.

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