What’s yoga got to do with activism?
What have yoga and activism got to do with each other? On the face of it, yoga seems to be about calm and peace, a spiritual system of improving individual wellbeing. Activism on the other hand is necessarily disruptive, it implies a ‘fight’ - even in the form of peaceful activism.
Both yoga and activism are a practice. This means that they are dynamic, responsive, reflective activities. It also means that they defy their stereotypical representations, because they are alive in the heart, mind and body of the practitioner. They go deep, transform us, and arise back out of us in unexpected ways. And through this very practice, when we look more closely at the intentions and the practical dynamics of both, it’s clear that they are much more related than you might guess at first.
At their heart, the aims of yoga and activism are the same - the wellbeing and liberation of the individual, and the collective - and in terms of their practical approaches and challenges, they need each other.
The liberation of the individual is not possible without the liberation of the collective. (and vice versa)
We all come to yoga to feel better - whether it’s a question of back pain or anxiety or anything else, and yoga provides relief. What yoga also does is give you the ability to see wider, to understand cause and effect, and to see reality as it is, rather than how you’d like it to be.
You can come to yoga class to help your back, and it will improve, but if the movement patterns or life routines that caused the pain in your back are still there, your pain will return.
Our yoga practice makes us feel more balanced, but if we are still living in the world with relationships and jobs and some participation in society, we are going to experience the effects of interacting with the world, and something is inevitably going to knock us out of that equilibrium.
What do we do? Shut our eyes off to the world, turn up the volume on our crystal bowls, block it out and focus on our internal peace? What is non-attachment? and does it mean not caring about what is going on out there?
Even if you do dive inside and block out the outer world, the world has already laid itself down in you. All the impressions (saṁskāra) of everything you’ve ever seen and done are in you, karma is stored up inside - the world is in you, you are in the world.
No matter how much you want to block it all out, as long as you are alive, you can’t help but be in relationship with the world.
na hi kaścit kṣaṇamapi jātu tiṣṭhatyakarmakṛt |
kāryate hyavaśaḥ karma sarvaḥ prakṛtijairguṇaiḥ ||
Indeed, no one can exist, even for a moment, without performing action.
Everyone is forced to do work, even against their will, by the guṇas born of prakṛti. Bhagavad Gītā III.5.
niyataṁ kuru karma tvaṁ karma jyāyo hyakarmaṇaḥ |
śarīrayātrāpi ca te na prasidhyedakarmaṇaḥ ||
Do then the necessary action! Action is truly better than inaction.
Even the maintaining of your body cannot be done without action. Bhagavad Gītā III.8.
The teaching of karma is one of interconnectedness. Everything you do has an impact, on yourself and those around you, and everything you experience in the world has an impact on you, too. This has nice truths in it like the fact that yes, going to yoga class is going to make you a calmer and hopefully more responsive human, which is going to affect your interactions and relationships, at least a little bit. But it also means that you can never fully leave your life behind when you step on the mat - you will always be practising with it.
So if there is disorder in your life, there will always be some of it coming with you into your lovely peaceful yoga space.
This is not a bad thing - in my experience, coming face to face with the messiness of your life during practice inevitably leads to change both in the inner world and the outer reality of your life circumstances.
Maybe even, facing up to reality in your yoga practice makes you want to contribute to dismantling some of the systems that create injustice and suffering out in the world, too..
Let all beings be happy and free, and may the words, deeds, and actions of my own life contribute in some way to that happiness and to that freedom for all.
The liberation of the collective depends on our personal efforts towards liberation, too. Because if we are still acting in the same manner as the status quo which is built on patterns of domination and oppression, aggression and competition, othering and cruelty, we’re not going to get anywhere. The ‘master’s tools’ are not only in our outward approaches, they are in our very ways of thinking.
yogaś-citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ
Yoga is the checking of the movements of the mind - Yoga Sūtra 1.2
This is why yoga is invaluable to the activist - because it is deeply concerned with looking specifically at mindset change. The sutra quoted above does not mean, as some interpret it, to stop thinking (this is impossible as long as you are in a human body) - instead it means being aware of what you’re thinking, noticing if the thought patterns are helpful (kliṣṭa) or unhelpful (akliṣṭa) (YS. 1.5)
Here are some thought patterns:
Is it helpful to meet aggression with aggression?
Are we organising and building community in a way that perpetuates othering and oppression?
Are we asking others to change without addressing how we ourselves are contributing to the oppression of others, and of ourselves?
The work of yoga consists in observing our thought patterns with a little distance and a lot of compassion. The softening this creates makes a harmony in us that inevitably ripples out into our interpersonal relationships, and perhaps even into the work and social structures we occupy.
But we must also address the system - even if you liberate yourself from our internalised oppression, if you’re still living in an oppressive system, it will be unlivable.
What about non-attachment?
One of the biggest teachings that yoga offers us emphasises the importance of not getting entangled in things, not grasping onto things or concepts. Tyāga (renunciation), vairagya (dispassion), aparigraha (non-grasping) are all central ideas in yogic practice. So, does that mean throwing our hands up in the air, giving up the fight against injustice, saying it doesn’t matter anyway?
Like all of yoga’s teachings, non-attachment must not be interpreted in a black and white manner. We learn nothing by throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But when we try out balancing and reconciling seemingly contradictory ideas, we understand much about the nature of our action, our motivations, and how we might more skilfully understand our emotional entanglements.
What happens when we try to do both of the following: do the thing that needs to be done, but also avoid being attached to how it turns out - yet, without slipping into passivity and apathy?
karmaṇyevādhikāraste mā phaleṣu kadācana |
mā karmaphalahetur bhūr mā te saṅgo ‘stvakarmaṇi ||
You have a right to action alone and never at any time to its fruits. The fruits of action should never be your motive. And never let there be any attachment to inaction. Bhagavad Gītā II.47.
brahmaṇyādhāya karmāṇi saṅgaṁ tyaktvā karoti yaḥ |
lipyate na sa pāpena padmapattram ivāmbhasā ||
One who places (their) actions into Brahman, releasing all attachments, is not defiled by wickedness or misdeeds any more than a lotus leaf by water. Bhagavad Gītā V.10
There’s a deep insight here about the meaning of human action, how cause and effect and personal motivation plays into what we do. For the activist - one who takes action - when we are mindful about how our work affects us, we gain insight about how to regulate energy and effort, as well as our emotional engagement.
On Sustaining the work - care, inspiration, perspective
Pouring yourself into something entirely is beautiful, but can be a recipe for exhaustion and burnout. Yoga advocates and supports a state of balance necessary for wellbeing, health, understanding, and self knowledge. This is where we can remember the popular perception of yoga as a wellness practice for chilling out and feeling better.
If you are working (for peace, or anything else), you also have to rest. And where did we get this idea that taking time out to rest means you aren’t serious or dedicated to whatever you’re doing? (spoiler alert, the thought patterns we pick up from living within systems of capitalism have a lot to do with it..)
In a system that aims to create equilibrium, activity must be balanced by rest. Physical yoga practice can do this for you. Have a lie down, quiet your mind, soothe your body with gentle movement and conscious breath. Bringing your attention to rest on one thing, and bringing your nervous system into a state of balance and safety is deeply restorative, and deeply needed.
The spiritual heart of the activist
Yoga can offer nourishment not only to the body of the activist but also to their heart, their will, and their hope and vision for a better world.
Yoga offers us a shift in perspective - from the small view of ourselves and our actions, we can zoom out to understand the interrelatedness of all things, and also the big-picture consequences of our moment-by-moment reactions to things.
“We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. “
–Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” Speech given at the National Cathedral, March 31, 1968.
The Bhagavad Gītā is a spiritual text, relating the voice of the Divine speaking directly to the human, personified as the warrior prince, Arjuna. Faced with a seemingly impossible dilemma, the heart-wrenching battle in front of him, where he must fight against his own teachers and kinsmen, Arjuna falls to his knees, unable to hold the enormity of what he must do. Krishna, his friend, but also the personification of God, reassures and encourages him, and shifts his perspective outwards - he must do his dharma and fight, because being eternal and omniscient, he sees the big picture and how Arjuna’s actions fit into the long game - which is ultimately one of fighting for what is right. Krishna knows that, as Martin Luther King Jr declared, the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice - which the yoga tradition refers to as dharma.
nehābhikramanāśo ‘sti pratyavāyo na vidyate |
svalpamapyasya dharmasya trāyate mahato bhayāt ||
Here no work is lost nor is there any reversal of progress. Even a small amount of this practice (dharma) protects from great fear. Bhagavad Gītā II.40.
Even the smallest action has an impact - that is the teaching of karma. And, being individual humans, we can’t always see the immediate effect of our work, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t having its ripple effect out into the world.
Just as Arjuna must face the most impossible fight, if we are engaged in work to make the world a better place, we will have to come up against forces that feel impossible to dismantle. But just as Krishna tells us in the verse above, our every action creates change - first and foremost in ourselves. If the world is made up of all of us humans, if each of us works all the time to become more conscious, more compassionate, more courageous to meet the moment with presence and the whole of ourselves, then our individual efforts can’t help but combine to create a profoundly powerful force for change.
Can we show up then, authentically, with compassion to ourselves, and to the world around us, to do what needs to be done? Moment to moment we might not see how our individual efforts change the world, but the perspectives of yoga might remind us of how deeply interconnected we are - our whole-hearted contribution can’t help but make a difference and forge a better world.
