Race, Racism, Friendliness

I’ve been caught up in all kinds of human connectedness for the past month and lacking the time for solitude, the space for introspection. This is the busiest time for my job, and alongside the normal hectic pace we are also dealing with major internal changes – layoffs, reorganizing, new leaders in key roles. It’s all stuff that would probably be happening with or without the DJT era, but the general sense of constant unrelenting attack makes it that more challenging.

And yet. While I miss the solitude and introspection, I’ve been really deeply moved by the connections. And reflecting now on how they underlie any struggle for justice, and how do they fit into the yogic life.

A couple of weeks ago I co-facilitated a day-long session to help a group of union leaders talk about how race and racism affect their organization and their work. It was powerful. We had a group of about 50, mostly white men, mostly older than me. A colleague and I put together an agenda and we both felt simultaneously excited for the day, and deeply terrified.

But we just went forward with it. And the courage to start, to put this topic on the table was met with serious and deep engagement. It was one of the most gratifying things I’ve been part of. A big chunk of the day was organized around giving people a structured way to tell their own stories in relation to racism and anti-immigrant behavior. One man told a painful story of a relative in his past who had to join the KKK in order to keep his job. The family still had the medallion that symbolized his membership. The man in our training was embarrassed and ashamed of that history. Then an African American man – the president of the union – told the story of his family’s migration to California, and the discrimination they met when seeking work. The two stories, told back to back and following others, opened up a huge well of sorrow and shame and compassion in the room.

I was struck by the fact that we all carry shame with us around race and racism. Surely many of us have family that were complicit at some point – who were slave owners, belonged to the KKK, or treated African-Americans badly in whatever smaller spheres of power they may have had. Even now, today, we ourselves, we white people, have been complicit. We may not recognize it, or may feel our complicity is at too low a level to matter that much (not true). Our shame is about feeling powerless, acting powerless or even wielding power to serve injustice.

And anyone who has been a victim of oppression knows that there is shame there too – even when we know the oppression is unjust, that we/they don’t deserve this treatment, that it is about the oppressor and not the oppressed person, there is still shame. There is a deep feeling of being unworthy of something better. It is why the phrase Black Lives Matter is so important – because for so long black people in this country have been made to feel their lives don’t matter. And claiming that they do – the simple statement – is about rejecting that reality in the most assertive, declarative way possible.

After the training, I spoke with one of the participants about how he experienced the day. We both agreed that something inside of us had broken open. In a good way. The walls, defensiveness, fear, the things that keep us from allowing true human connection because we fear we’ll be rejected or we fear our old scars and hurts will be reinjured. Some of that broke away.

It would take much more than one day to change it all, but something changed. And it reminded me that the most important thing for doing this kind of work right now is having the courage to start. To be humble about it – we knew our agenda might not be perfect, some of it might not exactly work. But my colleagues and I had the courage to say – okay we’ll just start and then we’ll work with whatever comes from that.

There’s been lots of other human connection too – working with what happens when it works and what happens when it doesn’t. A huge problem with one of my projects, interviews to figure out why, seeing lack of trust, suspiciousness, how hard it is to make progress when the underlying connections are broken. Or improperly formed. And then going to the funeral for dear friends’ father – seeing old friends, the beauty in family, the simple joy of being there for friends in their sadness.

Since DJT got elected I have been saying the most important thing is the strength of the community we create, the bonds we forge. Both for surviving him – for knowing that people around you have your back when things get bad – but also for having a vision of a better world that we keep alive until we have the chance to bring it into being again. I am seeing it happen every day and it is the thing that is most helping me survive.

I had started to reflect on how much of yoga is about improving yourself, not improving your community. Yes, there the yamas and niyamas which tell us how to behave well in society. And there’s the direction to meet others with friendliness, loving kindness, compassion and – there it is – detachment. What about the importance of being connected? Of not detaching? This gets to a subtlety in the teachings about what it really means to be detached. But nowhere is there a teaching that says – prize and prioritize connection.

This is important to me because I see myself sometimes as a loner, as someone who disconnects too easily. In my work relationships I prioritize effectiveness and productivity, sometimes to the detriment of paying attention to how the people around me are doing and what they really need. Sometimes I think our particular community of yoga creates an odd kind of distance – we aren’t always loving to our students. There is sometimes an underlying sense that nothing any of us do is good enough. That seems to fit with my personality, but feel a deep need to unlearn that.

Yoga has already helped me unlearn some of that – if only because I’ve had groups of students for over 10 years now, and I know them in a deep way. We are deeply connected. It is one of the things that grounds me in yoga the most – feeling accountable to my students, to the trust they place in me, wanting to learn more in order to live up to them.

And meanwhile, there’s the Bhagavad Gita, always full of the lessons the moment requires. I’m on chapter 6, now, where Krishna spends a lot of time explaining how to meditate and the benefits of meditation. There are some very practical segments alongside some beautiful and esoteric descriptions of how meditation can help.

But what struck me the most was the long reflection on the deeper, divine self inside of all of us. The need to recognize that in others. The importance of conditioning the mind to see what is there – the mind can see enemies everywhere or friends. If you see friends, you will have friends. If you see the divine in everyone, you can look past the flaws of behavior, the flaws of this moment. You know they don’t define the person even if you know they have made choices that hurt themselves and others.

I know this sense of friendliness is what makes conversations about race possible – people have to think you won’t judge them for making a mistake or for having views or impulses that haven’t been fully aired out. They have to know that they are allowed to be growing, changing, learning or they won’t even participate. Because we all know that our experience of race is tainted, painful, unrefined, and none of us has had enough opportunity to process it and understand what it means.

For now, I’m just going to practice trying to see friends everywhere. Friends in the circles where hard conversations need to happen. Friends at work, even when I have to be the boss. Friends among the people I see in the supermarket, the post office, and the yoga studio. Friends with the people on airplanes who drive me crazy.

With gratitude for all of you, my friends.