If It's Not Political, It's Not Yoga

First, if you want to understand what I’m talking about when I talk about Yoga, read this FIRST.

There are many opinions about the relationship between Yoga and Politics. I’m in many private groups across the country where longtime yogis advocate with vehemence against bringing politics into Yoga Class with reasons such as, “Yoga is the place where we take refuge from the chaos of the world,” or “Yoga is about practicing peace not conflict,” or “Yoga is a place to de-stress not feel stress.” Even one of my own teachers states the need to transcend the political in practice. Well, no surprise, I adamantly disagree. Read on if you want to know why…

I will begin with a question.  If the word Yoga is defined in popular culture as Unity, then what piece of the whole gets to be left out in order to be united?  How can we unify anything by excluding something?  Exclusion results in division.  This, not that, is NOT unifying, it’s exclusion. Is that too etheric? Too philosophical?  Well, let me try to make the idea more concrete.

Yoga, as a principle of unification, is not a practice of dividing, judging, or by-passing. It is a practice of enduring, increasing, maturing, gathering.  If Yoga is being used as a tool, then it’s primary power is the power of inclusion. Inclusion doesn’t just include the parts you want, but also all the rest. 

If you ask most modern Yoga students to define the word Yoga, they will answer with some flavor of the word Unity. Though this seems to be a common agreement (though it is not an incredibly accurate definition, read more here), our Yoga continues to shore up our ideas of division and separation.  So many Yogis come to Yoga to escape the discomfort of their lives, eliminate the difficulty.  They want to check their stress, worry, anxiety, conflict, difficulties at the door, and be led down a path that will end in peace and calm.  That is an interesting and understandable goal, but doesn’t align with the definition of Yoga as unity. When we seek Yoga as a tool to disassociate with the discomfort of the divided world, we cease to do Yoga. 

If politics are uncomfortable because the divisions are growing, intensifying, becoming destructive and divisive, Yoga should be giving us the tools to gather all of these truths into our practice.  Our Yoga, if it is truly unifying, should be supporting our experience of understanding these divisions, knitting them together if you will, into something that feels more whole, more unified. Now, please don’t misunderstand, unification doesn’t equate with agreement, goodness, rightness. Unification doesn’t mean that we all see things the same way, or that we aren’t locking horns about ideals, morals, and ethics.  It does mean that we develop the capacity to contain or hold all of the contradictions at once, without eliminating or excluding anything.  For example, which part of the apple pie do you remove to get a whole apple pie?  The flour, the apples, the butter, the sugar?  Do you take away a slice here, the crust over there?  Of course not, anything you remove will create only a partial or fragmented outcome. The whole includes all parts, and conversely, all the parts are necessary to make the whole.

It is understandable to feel torn apart by disagreements and opposing opinions right now. I am not attempting to deny the incredible distress of the heightening divides. However, I am calling you to reevaluate your understanding of  Yoga as a practice that will help you feel better, safer, and less uncomfortable, and reframe it as a practice designed to create Unity by gathering our differences, which are made up of ALL of the diverse and different parts. We don’t collect these differences into a container of “rightness,” which is what makes it so uncomfortable. Instead, we include diverse opinions, make space for conflict, and grow our capacity to endure disagreement without destroying our opposition.  This is what scholar Douglas Brooks defines as Civilization: The ability to live with our adversaries rather than annihilate them.

So, if we are checking politics at the door, leaving the world outside, dropping worries at the threshold, tuning out of the conflict, then we ARE NOT PRACTICING YOGA. In this instance we are practicing escape, self centralization, and if we are not careful, we might even be contributing to the very issues we are trying to run away from.  It’s a short distance from escaping our discomforts to denial, complacence, righteousness, and division. If we are practicing Yoga to eliminate our problems, we are missing the point. We are using practices to by-pass parts of our experience and separate us from hardship rather than unite. We become complicit in the divisions that we are attempting to escape from when we don’t prioritize our awareness. Our medicine becomes our poison, and we become contributors to the disease.

Instead, we can practice Yoga as a way to enter into the fray. Its capacity as a practice has the ability to teach us how to experience the conflict, the friction of separation, and to stay present with the tension it creates while it is integrated.  If politics feels like nothing but separation, then by the very nature of Yoga, we MUST make our Yoga political. 

Yoga is not only an island of peace and goodness, it is also the universe and all of its diversity and contradictions. Are we practicing Yoga when you keep the political out of it? Are we honoring the totality of experience when we parse out only that which makes us feel good?  If your Yoga is scaffolding or intensifying your separation from conflict, chaos, disagreement, then I would argue that it is not Yoga at all.  Its transcendence, denial, disassociation & fantasy. In other words, it’s Patriarchy, Supremacy, and Whiteness. 

In practice, Yoga invites you into the fullness of the process, it tells you to bring your mess to your mat, to own all parts of the truth, to become aware of the polarizations, the partisanness, the oppositions, the pain, the discomfort and in doing so it invites you to recognize the whole as it expresses in its unique and individual parts.  Please, I beg you, don’t look beyond what is real and right in front of our eyes when you look at the Universe. All of the evidence of the diversity of the whole are right here.  When we feel separate and uncomfortable, we shore up our boundaries of difference, we create divisions of right and wrong, good and bad, moral and immoral. In doing so, we attempt to build a safety and certainty that can (and often does) turn quickly into righteousness, judgement, and discrimination. 

In Unity, you can’t leave anything out.  ANYTHING. In Yoga, you can’t eliminate any part. Just because you don’t like it or because it doesn’t feel good, doesn’t mean it’s NOT a part of the whole. We separate and divide to feel safe in the familiar, even if it only creates an illusion. In turn, fortifying our protections causes us to feel more threatened and alone. This is the way of the world right now, and we are repeating these habits even in our “Yoga” classes, causing us to further divide, judge, disassociate. If we could only remember that we are a WE and not just a me, then we could recognize our pain and suffering in the eyes of others. We could feel at once distinct AND united. We could live Yoga and not just practice it. We all came into this world naked and vulnerable. ALL OF US. Then, we spend the rest of our lives armoring our vulnerability in stories of separation. To what end? We will ALL leave. However it happens, our time will run out. How do we want to leave our mark? Together or Apart? In denial or in accountability?

If Yoga is supporting blindness to the experiences that are happening all around us, teaching us to transcend the discomfort, making us feel safe, right, comfortable, and peaceful within a world that is expressing danger, conflict, discomfort and chaos, then ‘Yoga’ might be the very obstacle that is preventing the experience that is desired. You can’t unify through exclusion, you can only divide.  You cannot deny pain, only repress it. Yoga is the cessation of the movement of the mind, not the elimination of it.  It’s the clarity that comes when we can see all sides of a thing. So, if your Yoga isn’t political, it might not be Yoga at all.

It’s time to bring a more mature understanding to Yoga and to politics.  As mystic Catholic Fransican-turned-priest, Father Richard Rohr, says “politics is the art of relationship and how we structure these relationships.” It is not the absence of argument, disagreement, discomfort or difficulty.  If your Yoga isn’t political, maybe it’s time to uplevel your practice. To bring the world with you to your mat and to your cushion, to refuse to escape or by-pass the difficulty of so many, to gather it all up to become a part of the story, a piece of the whole.