How are you? How are you? How are you?
I always start like this. I am always aware that people come to yoga with a mass of unresolved things: things happening in their lives, questions in their hearts. They have children, and jobs; they live with bodies that sometimes fall sick and are always getting older.
But it’s different now. The grief. The anxiety. The anger.
People look stunned, ghosty, blank. It’s not just zoom fatigue; it’s that we’re gathering for meetings-school-and-social life while people continue to die, are abused by the state, are told the kids are alright and won’t be affected by the virus when they aren’t alright. Not all the kids.
It’s been suggested that yoga should avoid politics. (There has also been a rash of QAnon propaganda in the yoga and wellness worlds. Don’t buy it and don’t tolerate it.) But yoga - mine or yours - should never squash conversation about human rights. Or social dissolution. Or a hurting, burning, flooding planet.
On Monday, my husband trigger warned me about the forced sterilization of women in ICE detention centers. We tend to tag team our social outrage; one of us can break down while the other takes care of meals and walks the dog. One of us will be getting the usual - now highly unusual - career work done while the other mourns. Then we switch roles. But it isn’t often he warns me of what I’ll see when I look at my phone. I don’t think he’s ever done that before.
I didn’t look Monday night. I didn’t have to. It was not really news. Sterilization has happened to Black and brown women before, and it’s not like ICE detention centers are places of regard for rule of law.
It wasn’t news. I knew it was true without needing to read anything. But it was heartbreaking.
“Most of us were encouraged to think of self reflection in terms of aspirations and goals, vision boards and four hour work day schemes. We were never really taught to think of self-awareness in anything but the most comfortable of terms.”
I vomited. Then I spent much of Wednesday in bed, exhausted but unable to sleep. Unable to read. Unable to work.
The new cohort began Monday. I felt a release and crash after months of buildup. Tuesdays the Gita class is trying to discuss engaged action. We’re so lucky to have such a conversation already established, like a weekly support group. And it’s exhausting; by Wednesday I was shot.
I turned onto my side and buried my head in the duvet. I tossed again and threw the thing off. It occurred to me in my unable to sleep, unable to eat, unable to work state that Wednesdays may need to be blank for the next several months. Maybe Wednesdays and Thursdays too, I thought, poking a fork at food I could not eat. Maybe I’m going to have to get good at showing up heartbroken.
And then Justice Ginsberg died. My husband’s face did something like water: movement on the surface, movement under the surface. He retreated. I grabbed a can of tomatoes and started chopping onions. He’s grieving. I’ll make lasagna.
**
Maybe the answer to heartbreak is to ask a better question: not how to fix or sooth your heart in times of world sorrow, but how to really let it break. I mean really really. Like let it crack open and then show up with your dirty clothes and your blotchy face and your bitten nails. Then how are you? how are you? how are you? Look for the relationships, I tell people.
The answer is almost always to ask a better question, I realize, sliding garlic into olive oil. What happens next - next week, next election, next stage of history - is in part out of our hands. And - this is important - what happens next is in part dependent on what we do now. This is where questions should be. What part are you dealing with?
Everyone is feeling both an awful lot of responsibility and helpless. Hands seem inadequate and confusing.
Either you turn away from the question, knowing in a clumsy way that this choice will contribute to fifty years or more - a generation plus - of a judiciary concerned less with the rule of law then with white male power, a society that will murder some while coddling others, and preference a story that will lie to you about where you sit when it comes to safety and dreams. Or you acknowledge how hard the process of change is going to be.
This will also be clumsy, but in a different way. It will be enormously inconvenient. It will piss people off. It will change your life.
Look at who you are. You’re faced with a choice.
“तपःस्वाध्यायेश्वरप्रणिधानानि क्रियायोगः॥१॥
Effective yoga is a balance of effort, study of the self, and letting go.
”
***
Do you want to hear about yoga?
Here is a Sanskrit word: Svādhyāya. Svādhyāya is generally translated to self study. Most of us were taught svādhyāya to mean self-reflection and/or personalized study of traditional texts. More literally, svā + dhyāya means meditating on the nature of the self. Generally speaking, most of us were encouraged to think of self reflection aspirationally, as vision boards and entrepreneurial schemes, better worlds for our children. We were taught to think this way as if it were not only realistic but something we are absolutely entitled to.
We were never taught self-awareness in anything but the most comfortable of terms.
But we know now the oppressive nature of that thinking. Self interest closes itself off from reality, from others, and from truth.
I think svādhyāya is the thing that happens when repressed truths surface. We’re familiar with this at the personal level: the way you know the lies you tell yourself and you go on both knowing and lying. We already know that transformation invokes the very things you’ve been avoiding. Not the things you want: the things you’ve been avoiding. What if svādhyāya means not-news-but-heartbreak?
It’s one thing to lie to yourself. It’s another to lie to yourself in ways that keep other human beings vulnerable.
I think this word, vulnerability, is an important one to look at right now. I want to take it seriously.
People know the word. The fear you will be hurt. A fear related to dying. Some of us experience it as nausea while others experience it as trembling. Sweat, faintness. A failing trail of words and a stupid mouth. Perhaps a recoil. Perhaps a desire to comply, make the moment pass. I feel a bracing in the chest and down the arms, a curl into fists, the entire muscular body preparing to revolt. I feel my eyes narrow. This may be imagined, but I feel my thoughts condense away from nuance and into hate. Prior hate. No matter hate. To the whole as unacceptable hate.
But here is where it gets serious: many of us feel viscerally vulnerable when examining our privilege or social positioning. Or we do whatever we can possibly do to avoid feeling it. We see an honest and integral conversation about social inequity is a direct and personal threat. We feel attacked. We get defensive. We reject. We argue something, but the subtext of the argument is that other people’s lives are not as important as our feelings.
Svādhyāya is understanding that self interest alone is socially harmful, and therefore we must get better at vulnerabilities.
***
Svādhāya is not an isolated thing. It has a context. It’s part of the triune definition of Yoga given by Patañjali in the second book of the Sutras: tapas, svādhyāya, īśvarapraṇidhāna (effort, self study, and surrender).
That is, svādhyāya mitigates the space between what we do and what we don’t, what we can and what we cannot.
Perhaps it’s even more critical to the equation: perhaps svādhāya is the very thing that helps us discern which is which and what is what. Svādhāya tells us exactly what to do with our hands.
***
I had a poetry teacher decades ago who scared the shit out of me.
She started the semester saying ‘I expect you to be working all the time, you know’. She had interrupted her own sentence to say it and left it hanging there for much longer than was comfortable. We were reading modern poets, including Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez and Joy Harjo. And while I loved their words, I myself wasn’t ready. To work constantly would have been too demanding. I was scared of what would happen if I were actually to take my work seriously.
english isn’t a good language/to expression through/mostly i imagine because people/try to speak English instead/of trying to speak through it said Nikki and I couldn’t speak through anything. I knew what she meant. But I didn’t answer.
Perhaps the world ends here, Joy said and then kept going and going. I found all such irreverences soothing.
Picture this woman/ saying no to the constant/ yes of slavery sang Sonia and I did, I pictured it and it broke my heart, but I was still too goddamned quiet.
Decades ago. At the time, I took myself too seriously and my work not seriously enough. This was not a happy arrangement. I was - I made myself - miserable. I made other people miserable too. It would take me a long while to sober up, grow up, get responsible and in getting responsible to realize that I had taken myself seriously in the wrong way.
Just as vulnerability can either mean I’m scared I’m going to die or I’m uncomfortable in this conversation, seriousness can either mean a stupefying arrogance or an open and willing humility.
What if svādhyāya - all of this yogic stuff, all of these words, any words, Jewish ones or Jesus ones, Allah or Please or American, I don’t care so long as you speak through it- really meant a qualitatively different kind of seriousness? A kind of vulnerability we don’t yet know? A serious vulnerability? Vulnerable seriousness?
Can we take what is precious and in danger seriously?
What could we not be then? and is that not the only thing that could possibly make this better? Isn’t it time? Invert the questions and all the languages you’ve known this far. Ask better.
Look at yourself. Looking at yourself is the only way you’ll know what to do with your useless hands. If you are okay, help somehow. If you aren’t, ask for help. I’m not really talking about poetry, but teaching, democracy, friendship, love. I expect you to be working constantly. I will not let you go.