Category: Buddhism
Maybe It Wasn’t the “Shambhala Teachings” That Changed Your Life: A Brief Note on False Attribution
“But the Shambhala TEACHINGS are precious. They changed our lives. We CAN’T let them go. We HAVE to separate them from the organization and its leadership.”
This is the active-ingredient argument you may be hearing from some of your fellow community members. It’s based on the premise that beneath all of the human imperfections and “conventional realities” of Shambhala International, there was something essentially good and true communicated by Trungpa and his followers, and that that essence was what changed lives.
A further premise is that that essence can and should be isolated and mobilized.
Those who talk about the “essence” of the teachings are those who are still in one way or another within the learning community or high-demand group. They might believe that the essential teachings were universally clear; they could test this belief by asking those who left the group what they believed the teachings were.
They would be also be the ones who would be least likely to consider the placebo effect of the teaching content. Continue reading “Maybe It Wasn’t the “Shambhala Teachings” That Changed Your Life: A Brief Note on False Attribution”
Susan Piver’s “On Shambhala”: An Abuse Crisis Letter, Annotated
Just yesterday, I published a list of the rote defences commonly mobilized by leaders of yoga and Buddhist organizations in which institutional abuse has come to light. I feel it’s important to see these defences clearly as they unfold in real time. I have four reasons for this:
- Analysis — especially from the outside — can be an important reality-check for group members who are emotionally vulnerable through a crisis that casts doubt on whether leaders who they believe care for them actually do care for them, or have the tools to care for them.
- The defences are sophisticated. Crisis statements often conflate acknowledging organizational abuse with the encouragement for members to re-commit to the organization. They conflate transparency with damage control and rebranding. They present the unfolding of institutional betrayal in real time. Abuse with organizational roots has already manipulated the time, labour, and emotions of members. It’s not the time to ask them to give more.
- The defences are sophisticated, part 2. The basic teaching content of modern global yoga and Buddhism is easy to weaponize against those who were evangelized by it. People are often attracted to this content because it provides cognitive relief by focusing on the somatic present through techniques like breathwork or bodyscanning. At first, people can really benefit from the encouragement to question judgment, to disconnect feeling from thought, to take an ironic stance towards thought altogether, to change or pause thought rhythms with mantras or silencing meditations, to chase emptiness and silence, to adopt a metaview beyond all positions, and to imagine themselves or more often their leaders as always already perfect. But in crisis situations, an organization can ask members to use every one of these methods as forms self-abuse: to undermine critical thinking, cover up power differentials, minimize perceptions of harm, and silence victims.
- Reading these defences for their impact (and against their intention) reveals important aspects of the nature of the group and its teaching content. If you want to know what a group really teaches, listen carefully to what it says in crisis-mode.
I also wrote that “I’ve taken a lot of criticism for pointing out stuff like this. Usually I’m told that it’s not good to shame people who are trying to make accountability statements. I get that, which is why I try to identify trends instead of naming names.”
But within minutes of hitting “Publish”, a reader sent me this post by Susan Piver. Piver is a prominent figure in the global Shambhala community, although she carefully qualifies her relationship to Shambhala International, suggesting she is independent of the brand and its network. That network is now grappling with accusations that the son and heir of Shambhala innovator Chogyam Trungpa, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, is, like his father, a heavy-drinking womanizer who regularly abuses his power as a spiritual leader. The accusations have been painstakingly compiled by Andrea Winn, a life-long Shambhala member with her own personal story of sexual abuse with the community. The Sakyong has issued a qualified apology.
I’m not offering the following analysis of Piver’s community letter to shame her personally, nor because it employs many of the defences I described yesterday, even while it makes strong statements of support for Shambhala victims. I’m analyzing it because it offers nine points of advice to her followers that I believe are poorly resourced, information-controlled, and victim-silencing. Piver suggests her letter is prompted by online reactions she names as “dangerous”. I would argue that what she offers her followers falls short of emotional safety. Continue reading “Susan Piver’s “On Shambhala”: An Abuse Crisis Letter, Annotated”
Accountability Or Apologia? Reading Between the Lines When Yoga and Buddhism Leaders Issue Crisis Statements
Many of today’s leaders in yoga and Buddhism built themselves through online marketing. This means that when abuse in their communities is revealed, they must be prepared to make online responses. It’s good to be able to see where the responses are continuous with the marketing: this may give clues as to how earnest, considered and educated those responses are.
The speed at which it all happens is both terrible and revealing. Terrible insofar as it suppresses sober second thought. Revealing because it lays bare microdynamics of cultic control that in the pre-digital age were invisible outside of the group. Today we can watch cults get penetrated by reporting and instantly try to circle the wagons. It’s easy to see the crude damage control of the attempt to discredit victims or reporters. What’s harder to see is how the reporting can be deflected by selective acknowledgement or yes-but statements. Whatever the responses are, they play out in the open field, like some kind of cult-exit obstacle course reality show.
We have to learn the difference between structural change and rebranding. Especially as people are getting better at co-opting and monetizing discourses around trauma-awareness and justice. There’s a lot of leaders in the Shambhala org right now who will be ramping up the trauma awareness language and dusting off their Naropa psychology chops. But if they don’t simultaneously call for the Sakyong to be removed and the org to be investigated independently, they are abusing that language and those tools. This may not at all be their fault. They may be under the illusion that those values actually came from the Trungpa legacy, instead of having been co-opted by it. Continue reading “Accountability Or Apologia? Reading Between the Lines When Yoga and Buddhism Leaders Issue Crisis Statements”
Grief and Masculine Armour: A Brief Note
Death is a singularity, but not all deaths are the same.
This summer marked the second time a friend of mine has died, suddenly and unnaturally.
This time it was a man, my age, with whom I shared so much that I walked around for weeks wondering whether I had suddenly died, or whether I was at the edge of it.
There was unfinished business, but not the type you’d have with a father or a son. Not the type that had built up over decades of microactions. It was the unfinished business of feeling that a part of yourself was now amputated, and couldn’t do its work. That first friend was hit and killed by a truck. But that’s not what happened this summer. There was no ultimate outside force involved. It was a godless death. Continue reading “Grief and Masculine Armour: A Brief Note”
Sudden Harvest: An Elegy for Michael Stone
Please support Michael’s partner Carina and children through this fund.
Photo courtesy of Ian MacKenzie.
Content warning: description of organ harvest.
1.
I started writing this the day my friend Michael Stone died. On that day, the surgeons carefully cut into the body associated with him, to take the parts that used to be him and give them to others in need.
I wasn’t there, but I picture the following:
Their scalpels slide under the skin that was him, and was scanned a hundred thousand times in vipassana meditation.
They poke through the webbing of fascia that was him, and was stretched and twisted through a hundred thousand yoga postures.
Their blue-gloved hands, splashed with blood, pluck out two kidneys like sleeping fish.
They saw through the ribcage, softened by a decade of exhaling visualized light in the Tibetan style. They lift out the still-pulsing lungs, and watch them shudder to stillness on the ice pack. As though Michael were still practicing to lengthen and smooth his breath into that single point of silence he craved.
The transplant team demonstrates an ancient proof in Buddhist logic:
If you look for the person among the parts, you will not find him. “Michael” and “my friend” and “Buddhist teacher” are designations applied to a collection of skin, blood, voice, eyes, behaviors, images, and mysteries. All of which are ultimately ownerless.
One of the mantras Michael sought comfort from was: There is no “me” or “mine.” It’s an assertion of emptiness, but it hides a multiplicity: Michael, like any person, was many.
There was Carina’s Michael: doting and vulnerable. The Michael who stood large beside his brother Jayme and sister Sunny. The Michael of his parents, his teenage friends, his first partner. His friends from many walks of life. Those who didn’t care about Buddhism or yoga.
The Michaels of his children: Arlyn, and the two boys he had with Carina. The thirteen year-old, the four year-old, and the toddler knew different fathers. Baby-to-be heard a resonant voice to be remembered in dreams.
In rings circling outwards, more Michaels appear, each one a little less knowable: therapist, sometimes-monk, public speaker, heartthrob, author, entrepreneur. And of course, Michael the dharma teacher, sitting at the front of the room, by turns radiant, startled, or wooden.
Which Michael did his Buddhist teachers see? His therapists? His psychotherapy supervisor? What about his doctors?
Who was Michael to the man who sold him that little white pill?
The surgeons murmur over the body, and it sounds like prayers.
2.
If you knew and loved Michael through his work, you beat the surgeons to that harvest.
You harvested the voice of his writing and podcasts, marked by the rhythm of the practices he loved and depended on. His penchant for boiling the broadest themes down to taut aphorisms. And for finding the Buddha everywhere he wanted to find him: novels, obscure Canadian poetry, cool apps, superior espresso, pop music, therapy, laundry, mountains, streetcars, his motorcycle, and hospitals.
If you were a student who went to his retreats, you harvested other things. Like how so many mirrored his exquisite posture with equal parts earnestness and piety. You absorbed a dynamic silence – at times anxious, haunted, or womblike. The talks he gave were metronomic, as though he needed the entire world to slow down and listen at the exact pace that soothed him. Then, his quirky yoga instructions tangled you up on your mat, made you teeter and laugh.
Perhaps you had a meeting with him about your meditation or yoga practice and he dispensed advice that connected, perhaps miraculously. Was he intuitive, or lucky? You can’t honestly say. Or maybe the meeting made no sense at all, and you felt odd about that – maybe even apologetic, like you were letting him down. Or: he outright frustrated you with those blue eyes that could seem to know you, love you, judge you, or be lost, all in quick succession.
You collected the countless steps of walking meditation, and the group chants Michael loved. They may have stirred you deeply. Or you may have found that in the English translations from Sanskrit or Japanese he collected and tweaked, they sounded angular and explicit to the point of embarrassment:
Don’t squander your life!
Does anyone really squander their life?
3.
2013. We were walking through Mile End in Montreal, looking for the perfect cortado. Michael was telling me he’d backed off on the rigidity of practice in recent years, as we tend to do.
“I’m leaving just enough discipline to hold the shape of something,” he said, on the step of Café Névé. He gestured in the cold air with his hands.
That something was always meticulous, artistic, and intense. It felt like his longing for ritual order emerged, as much religion does, as an artistic response to internal and external chaos.
I remember when he rented my old space in Cabbagetown for several month-long retreats in 2006. One was in February. He’d ride his Danish bicycle over from Parkdale, and come in with snow in his beard that melted into the cup of coffee I handed him. Through the day, I sat at the desk outside the room, working to the rhythm of his somnambulant baritone, lulled by the vowels.
The students were Gen X, Y, and millennials, countercultural. Three-quarters women. When they trickled out to the bathroom they moved quietly and kept their heads down. It seemed like they were under a thrall they couldn’t risk breaking. When the studio door was left open, I could see the cohort encircle him. Some sat very close, absorbed in him.
I was impressed, and uneasy. What was going on? How did he manage to make all of that attention directed at him seem natural?
The fragments of his talks I overheard rung with a single note. It wasn’t from Buddhism or yoga. The texts were delivery devices for a sense of collective certainty, expressed through the first person plural.
“When we feel… we often find… and then we get caught up in… and so we practice because… and we fail… our hearts are like… our armour falls away… we are open to… we can be receptive to… we touch intimacy… we continue on with our work, not knowing.”
Michael’s register of wisdom could make people feel merged with each other, and with him. It created a feeling of group confession that generalized and depersonalized towards an unboundaried warmth. It seemed to hold nothing in private.
When the group left at dusk, the building vibrated. I’d sweep the room and then pause for a while by the altar they’d made by the window. I took note not only of the personal artifacts people had brought, but also the pristine and eccentric aesthetic Michael inspired. Japanese paper, quirky calligraphy, microbrew beer coasters folded into squat origami turtles.
The style was hipster zen, years before it was a thing. But instead of irony, it was imbued with what his brother Jayme described over the phone as Michael’s sense of the “ceremonious”. That same sense, Jayme said, that made the scene of Michael’s death so uncharacteristic of him.
4.
I was never Michael’s student. I was his peer, colleague, co-author, and eventually, his friend.
I was that friend – I’m sure there were others – who made fun of him for having students. I would say:
Look at the mess you’re in now. People expect you to give them spiritual advice!
He smiled and shrugged, a little bashful. Sometimes he laughed. It was like he didn’t know how it all happened, even if he knew how to nudge it along. He didn’t stop it, because it seemed to be working. The glowing feedback he got burned everything else away. It’s hard to imagine anyone around him being large enough to persuade him to slow down.
But he asked everyone else to slow down, and look within. I wonder if he needed those around him to find the answers he couldn’t.
5.
Friends harvested more hidden things:
His bouts of social unease, his obsession with dorky trivia and dark humour. You saw him long for guidance from senior teachers, like a prodigal son. He would connect with them, misfire with them.
You saw him draw conflict, get defensive, take a breath, take inventory, try to make amends. He would drift away from these people over here, become infatuated with others over there. You saw the acrimony from his divorce spill out and polarize a community. You understood that his prescription to always practice intimacy and forgiveness was the one he had written for himself.
You saw his effect on women, of all ages. They adored him and confessed to him. They poured their labour into his projects. Some became angry when they realized the imbalances. When they ghosted away, others came to replace them.
In such seemingly progressive spaces, it can be hard to call out hierarchy. The spirituality industry wants to make Iron Age yoga and medieval Zen look like they aren’t patriarchal in theme, form, and division of labour.
If you were a close friend, you saw how Michael’s doubts about his direction and competence were punctuated by flourishes of manic creativity. You saw how easy it was for his vision to outpace his introversion, and his appetite to outpace his digestion.
When he was flying high, his intellect became very porous, consuming and repackaging every idea he loved with dizzying speed. He was a DJ of ambient Buddhism, mixing freely from whatever tracks he could find.
6.
If you were close to him, you collected his surges of warmth. These became more poignant when you realized that he often had to climb up out of a dark well to let them flow. You collected things that were hidden by his stylishness, his supermodel looks, and by the gold paint that people sprayed on him in their minds and online.
Maybe you were close enough to soak up what he was like with his family in its various constellations. How he loved and baffled them, how he thrilled but could also disappoint. How relatives orbited his sun in seasons of estrangement and reconciliation.
When he touched Carina’s hand or when his sons clung to his arms, or when he listened to Jayme play the banjo, or when he watched his sister Sunny whip up her cooking magic, you could feel his love come out in a flood of bewildered tenderness.
He ended our book together with a distillation of such moments:
Everything was in its right place and everything was heading in the same direction. In my body I felt something new about life: not my own life, but about the whole parade of humans moving through the world, of which my family was only one small part, but the largest part of the world I could ever know.
If you worked with him, like I did on his talk about struggling with the danger of his own charisma, you harvested the giddiness of his concentration. You understood that he survived in part by taking risks.
After their first son was born, Carina asked him to sell the motorcycle a psychic had told him he should buy. He did as she asked. But he kept driving too fast in his mind.
When we worked he would pause, waiting for the words to come. I could feel him teeter on the edge of something. One March day, I prodded him a little harder. I could hear his tapping keys over the phone as he murmured:
“I came to understand the shadow of charisma — of my charisma — was dependency.”
There was that feeling I often had around him. A lightning bolt of clarity, and then something fuzzy and frenetic rushing back in.
He was impatient with whatever couldn’t be finished with the speed of a zen brush painting. I would offer a paragraph of commentary; he parried with a sentence. I built things up, and he hacked them away. He loved the koans that could be answered in a single word. He was acutely aware of the shortness of time, and he’d learned that art must be made from the simplicity of panic.
I can hear him saying now: “This elegy is too damned long. And you always go too far!”
I yell into my silent phone:
Dude, I’m just getting started. And you’re the one who went too far. Gone, gone beyond, and all that, right?
I wait for his laugh.
7.
During a snowstorm three years ago, Michael and I met for lunch to finish work on our book. At one point he stopped and leaned over to ask me something that wasn’t really a question.
“Hey – do you generally feel even-keeled?”
I shrugged.
“I guess. Can you say more?”
“I mean – do you feel in control of your emotions?”
After I fumbled through an answer, he told me he was struggling with his mental health. That it had been going on for as long as he could remember. Suddenly many things made sense.
We got very still and gazed at each other. After a moment, I realized he was gapping out. I’d seen this before, but now it was clear that he had to struggle to come back to the table.
It occurred to me that this oscillation between intense focus and vacancy was part of what drew people to him. Like he could see you, and that felt so intoxicating, but then you’d have to chase after him to feel that again. Like he was profoundly okay in one moment, but you wanted to save him in the next. Or maybe you thought he was regularly falling into a meditative trance.
Things became more transparent between us, but never fully. I loved him more, even as – or because – I felt more uncertain about where he was going. I knew I’d been drawn to him without understanding a crucial thing. I was in his sphere because he’d cast a spell over me. Part of me resented that, but now I could love him closer to where he was.
We deepened things by trading war stories about our health. On the phone he’d tell me about crushing insomnia. About having to fly places and teach meditation on autopilot because he was exhausted and agitated. I told him about my heart palpitations in the middle of the night. He’d had that too. Once, I picked him up from the hospital when he went for knee surgery to fix the damage from that stupid lotus pose. Or was it skateboarding?
I developed a pulmonary embolism a few months after our book was published. I could easily have died. He was the first person outside of my family I called. I knew he would say something luminous and comforting. But there was also the feeling that I wanted him to know I was joining him at the edge of something.
We talked a lot about self-regulation. He told me that he’d stopped meditating everyday as an experiment to see if meditation was actually making his swings worse. He suspected it was. This was around the time he taped an interview with the world’s leading researcher in the neuroscience of negative meditation experiences. I’ll bet the turns of his research interests map perfectly onto his internal labyrinth.
I had to take warfarin to thin out my blood clots. He told me that lithium seemed to help even out his moods. We joked about it: after years of studying Ayurvedic diet and self-care, here I was, kept alive on rat poison. And for him — after scouring the library of scriptures, he’d found the answer in the periodic table. A single molecule, labeled “3”.
I said it was the chemical version of the triple jewel of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. He laughed his broad broken laugh.
8.
Over the next few years I saw Michael increasingly exhausted by a race against the pressures of his persona, the tightening claustrophobia of his brain, his search for better medications, and the possibility that disclosing it all would help, or at least give him the next thing to work with. I thought about the growing distance between what he saw in the mirror and the headshots staring out at him from the screen.
His public life went viral, even as he seemed to become more isolated. He kept preaching the necessity of practice, even as I knew practice was less accessible to him. His sermons were about place and connection and sustainability. But he composed them on airplanes. He preached about community from the remote island he moved to after leaving the community he had founded.
When he was getting ready to move out west with Carina and their first child, he called me to say that he wanted to give me a bunch of his books on psychoanalysis. Two titles stood out: Being a Character, by Christopher Bollas, and Terrors and Experts, by Adam Phillips, who Michael and I had recently gone to see lecture.
Bollas describes the devastating results of living in the prison of other peoples’ idealizations. Phillips opens his book by quoting Iris Murdoch on how philosophers show you what they fear through what they become experts in.
We thumbed through his books, stacked in the front hallway. “I really think psychoanalysis,” he said, “gave us the most beautiful literature we have.”
He sounded wistful. I don’t know whether he was giving me a message, telling me about what had helped him find peace for a while, or parting with things that hadn’t worked. He handed over the books with a generous smile, and his body pulsed with warmth when we hugged. But as I drove away I felt like a thief.
As time wore on, Michael became an ever stronger advocate of the thing he struggled to do. Show each other your face, he would say.
I wondered whether his ideas got larger as his internal space and room to breathe narrowed. Not only did he constantly push himself to break new ground in Buddhist thought, he wanted to carve out a leadership role in the movement to renovate yoga postures. There was talk of building a new centre in the western mountains, and landing a university fellowship. He told me about one of his next books, in which he was going to be more transparent about his mental health. He was searching for the right hook. Something that could go mainstream.
If he was going to own his mental illness, he was going to learn and write and teach his way through it. It’s what he had always done.
It is perhaps what the Buddha himself had done.
A main difference being: Siddhartha Gautama wasn’t preceded in the world by the images of his own enlightenment. He didn’t need to feed the insatiable hunger of wellness culture. He did not have to live up to – nor compete with – the branding of spirituality.
9.
The poet John Ashbury just died at the ripe old age of ninety. He once wrote:
Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibility that they are founded on nothing.
10.
Don’t squander your life!
Sometimes the group whispered it. At the memorial, one of his students shouted it at the top of his lungs. Who was he shouting it at?
Those who harbour anger at Michael right now – and feel so guilty because of it – might feel sucker-punched by that line. Doesn’t it open a cut of hypocrisy? Did he really recite it a hundred thousand times? Who was he talking to?
The stigma Michael faced is real. But the broader story must include the fact that thousands of us paid him for the creative side of his mania, which was hard to separate from his talent. A portion of our money poured directly into a small industry of marketing and publicity that reflected our desires back to us. It paid for gorgeous photography and design, for occasional ghostwriting, and for partnerships that gave structure and anchoring to his flow states.
The yoga and meditation economy embraced him with open arms. And enabled him. He was working on four different books, all in different subject areas, when he died.
He may not have wanted to disclose. But if anyone could have turned stigma into stigmata, it was him. The spirituality industry, however, would suffer for it.
A disclosure like Michael’s would continue to erode the arbitrary distinctions between sane and insane spiritual leaders. It would be that much harder to read Pema Chodron or Alan Watts without wondering how much of Buddhism amongst postmodern converts is an elaborate way of covering over a hidden story.
If Michael had disclosed, we would look at our shelves full of Shambhala titles and wonder how many trees were felled to print them. We’d remember that the press that launched him was itself launched by the mercurial genius of Chogyam Trungpa: alcoholic, womanizing, surely undiagnosed. We would not be talking about the fall of a single hero, but the clay feet of a culture. We might sense the deep feelings of shame and inadequacy that drive so many men to the front of the room to prove themselves. We think they are vibrating, when really they are trembling.
After that line about squandering your life, Michael’s assistant would strike the gong while holding the rim, so it couldn’t ring to its natural end.
11.
I was always a crappy Buddhist. Over that surreal weekend of his coma, I felt so identified with Michael’s body that I felt some shadow part of myself on that ventilator, forcing me to breathe, waiting for it to be switched off. A more solid part of me was here, not believing that he couldn’t taste this coffee, couldn’t stand in this garden, couldn’t smile at his wife, couldn’t hold his toddler.
Even two weeks later, his death still seemed a spectacle to me, I expected him to step out from behind a tree, or send a text from the edge of Algonquin Park, where he disappeared to when he was twenty. As though he’d just been out of cell phone range, and had no clue there was such a fuss.
It only really hit home as I sat with my family on a driftwood log on a Pender Island beach with a hundred others at the memorial. The children waited patiently through the chanting, holding the paper lanterns they would release after the last bell.
Jayme stood behind the altar with his partner Laura and cracked open the Zen liturgy with his banjo and a southern spiritual. His voice, braided with hers, carried light and ash. Their three year-old son pulled at Laura’s dress, asking to be picked up.
12.
If you’re a Canadian Gen Xer like Michael and me, you’ll probably remember a little Québécois film from 1989 by Denys Arcand called “Jesus of Montreal”. I went to the Carleton Cinema over and over again to soak it in. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if Michael was sitting there during one of those screenings. I was eighteen; he would have been fifteen.
The movie tells a simple, predictable story. A wandering actor returns to his hometown and is hired to direct and star in a revamp of the Cathedral’s chintzy Passion play. He’s silent, magnetic, dreamboaty. Also a little wonky. He electrifies an unlikely cohort of disciples and leads them in pulling their art and their lives out of banality.
At the peak of his influence, while performing Jesus, and not really knowing what he was doing, the actor accidentally dies.
The concluding montage leaves the main characters behind. It cuts from one hospital room to the next, showing patient after patient waking up after their surgery to receive an organ, donated by the actor who played Jesus.
An old man wakes up with a new heart. A middle-aged woman has the bandages removed so that she can blink at her daughter with new eyes, and call out her name.
This is my body, which will be given up for you, as they say in the church to which I once belonged.
I cried harder during that scene than almost ever before or since, and couldn’t move from my seat until the janitor tapped me on the arm at closing time.
13.
Whenever I crest over this present edge of numbness and am finally able to cry about Michael, I think the tears will join the river that started in that theatre. They’ll flow from the material realizations of love:
I’ll feel how one body becomes other bodies.
I’ll feel that this is all there ever was or needs to be: a recycling of flesh into new joys and troubles. This is the way biology grants forgiveness. The process itself is the only soul we need to speculate about.
I’ll feel that in death, as in life, a person is both visible and invisible. Charisma magnifies this split.
Visible or invisible, Michael couldn’t be found or boxed in. I was foolish to think he could be. So it goes for those burdened with charisma. They are who they are because they seem so much larger and more permanent than you, even when they desperately want to be equal, normal, not-special; even when they want to disappear.
I know this tune: I’ve spent years deconstructing the light and shadow of spiritual teachers. On the surface my crusade has been related to healing from being in two cults. But the deeper drives that both attracted me to those men and led me to loathe them flow from my own need to be special, to heal attachment wounds, to be seen and praised — and then the shame of recognizing these things.
Pegging Michael as charismatic, and feeling smug about it, let me off the hook for years. I could only truly love him when I began to understand that he was living an amplified version of my own needs.
Part of why I wanted to be his friend was that I wanted to see myself more clearly. Knowing he did many of the things I work against, I tried to forgive him because he was ill and couldn’t seem to do otherwise. Perhaps he was my dharma teacher after all, teaching me about love in that sideways land of the unconscious.
My eventual tears will tally all I harvested in every moment I knew him – over years, and not just suddenly. The organs are just the last parts to be offered.
I’ll understand that those who speak most about community and ethics and family and forgiveness and intimacy are those who most long for such things.
I’ll sense that the pain of watching a person you love shattering into emptiness can be soothed by the feeling that he’s already inside you, transplanted, flaws and all. He lends you the heart, for the brief time we have, to take care of others.
That Time When I Was in a Cult and Got an Incredible Letter from a Friend
One of the hardest questions I get asked by friends or family of people in cults is about how to talk with them about their experience. How do you have a conversation with someone who you think is being deceived, who has become dependent on a power structure you suspect is harming them? What if they say they’ve never been happier, and you can’t shake the gut feeling that there’s something off? There’s never an easy answer.
So much seems to depend upon the trust you share with the person, how well you make them feel heard, the state of their basic life-resources. In all of the stories I’ve heard about people extricating themselves from cults, there never seems to be any single decisive factor that pried them loose. But often, people will say that a key exchange with someone helped them change course.
I once had an exchange like that.
In 1999, a good friend of mine wrote to me about my immersion in the cult of Michael Roach. I recently found his typewritten letter during a closet clean-out, and read it again. And again. I’m retyping it out here with minor edits to protect anonymity.
Though I didn’t fully absorb them then, these words haunted me for the entire year between receiving it and leaving Roach. Today I can’t believe how lucky I was to have such a friend who could write them to me.
I hope you enjoy my friend’s kindness and subtlety, how he unfolds his argument slowly, with wit and pathos. How he takes me seriously, and tries to imagine and validate my inner life, even as he feels alienated from it. How he avoids the question of cultism and possible abuse for just long enough to have space in the end to back away from it with cheerful melancholy.
I hope you enjoy his self-awareness, humility, uncertainty, and bravery. Beyond his many salient points, perhaps it was his modelling of these virtues that made the deepest impression upon me.
(The opening reference is to an audio tape of Robert Thurman, probably teaching elementary Tibetan Buddhism. I’d sent it to this friend as a way of explaining what I was into. Or justifying it: Thurman was a lot more mainstream-able than Roach.)
____
April 16/99
Dear M,
Thanks for the tape, I’ve listened to it and found it both fascinating and puzzling. Thurman seems to fluctuate between academic instruction and personal inspiration. It’s all new to me.
I have to admit I find your increasingly devoted, if not feverish, attachment to Buddhism somewhat frightening to me. It makes me feel simultaneously apart from your experience and intrigued.
What does it feel like to actually believe in something? Really believe? I admit I have never truly believed in anything — all religions make me feel like an outsider, someone looking in on a transcendent experience, never one of the blessed (?) the inducted (?) the knowing (?).
So, when I hear of you growing more and more a part of something that appears to loom so large in your minds and hearts, I figure, well, there he goes — in a couple of years, or shorter, he’ll be off to some austere place (mental or geographical) where only the fellow enlightened can reach him. Essentially, it feels like you’ve already begun to pack for a figurative (or real) Tibet. I will miss you greatly.
By now you’re probably reading the above as et another instance of my relentless negativity, my self absorption — but, as true as that may be, I do still feel what I fell, which is that you are disappearing, or, to be more precise, changing shape.
That in itself is, of course, good and should be accepted by anyone who loves you, except that the catalyst for this change appears to me to be an all-encompassing, and excluding religious practice. I celebrate your new found happiness and clarity, but will the vehicle for this change ultimately make me and others that love you but who do not follow the same practices irrelevant?
Will you begin to see non-Buddhists as unenlightened, backward, and no longer necessary for your happiness?
Finally, and this is perhaps the most contentious of my concerns, I just fundamentally distrust and worry about people, especially people I love, who see their redemption (? wrong term, I’m sure) as coming through a single person, a “teacher”. I have always been suspicious of anyone who would set him/herself up as a teacher of intangibles, of ultimately unknowable things.
I fear the possibility of cultish servility — although I hardly think of such an ancient and resonant religion as a cult. But that does not mean that there are not charismatic people within Buddhism who are seeking followers to dominate.
I guess it all boils down to personal psychology — as a recent victim of a massive abuse of authority and trust, I’m afraid to see my friends potentially falling under the sway of another persuasive personality.
Call it projection (accurately), call it melodrama (possibly) — but I ask you to please keep a small part of yourself open to questions and the tiny voices of disquiet all intelligent people carry inside them as protection against fraud.
Know that I love you, and that this little diatribe has been brewing in me for awhile, and is not easy to write.
I admit I’m always confused, but sometimes I’m also very perceptive.
Am I losing you? Is the world? Please accept my love,
X
Meditation and a Basket of Phones
My kind host for a meditation weekend in Coeur d’Alene emailed ahead to ask about protocol for the weekend. One question was about mobile devices. The logistics part is simple, but the question also brings up a lot about what meditation might mean and engage with moving forward in our evolutionary storm.
Etiquette first: ringers and vibrate functions are best turned off for a weekend like this. Going further to block cell data would seem to be reasonable if you want to really internalize.
On the other hand, access to texting can put the mind of an anxious caregiver – for children or the elderly – at ease. And nobody would ask the on-call surgeon to turn their pager off.
For those willing to experiment, it’s interesting to see what limiting device usage on off hours contributes as well. Many people sense a serene envelope open up in time when they fast from data. Perhaps they remember the feeling of knowing something instead of being told something. Continue reading “Meditation and a Basket of Phones”
The Meditation-as-Conversation Sutras
It was impossible to get a conversation going. Everybody was talking too much.
– Yogi Berra
A while back I posted this article about meditation. It suggested that if we think of meditation as an internal conversation, we can stop wondering about the best techniques or the true self or ultimate states, and start asking about what kinds of conversations are useful, and what good conversations feel like. I argued that the tension between our private practice and our social reality might be softened if we model our internal dialogues upon what we desire from our relationships.
But the article was terribly long, and terribly long articles can feel like one-sided conversations. So I thought this shorter and (I hope) more conversational version might help. It’s still in beta mode.
____
Yoga and Social Justice: a Prickly Dualism
Last week my friend Roseanne Harvey over at It’s All Yoga Baby emailed me in preparation for the excellent survey she just published:
remember when we were all fired up about yoga and politics, and in 2012 you and i both endorsed barack obama and encouraged yoga practitioners to vote in the US election?
and now it’s 2015, a canadian election looms, just as urgent, and none of us are rallying the canadian yoga public to get out there and vote, nor are we endorsing anybody…
anyway, i’ve been thinking about this and have started working on a story. are canadian practitioners even more apolitical than american, or are we too quiet, or does nobody care about the tenuous connection between yoga and politics anymore?
Yeah, I remember, Roseanne. And like my Anybody But Romney position in 2012, I’m pursuing an Anybody But Conservative strategy this time around, in the desperate interest of harm-reduction.
For the unfamiliar: the Conservative government of Stephen Harper is an oil-guzzling WASPy mafia of racist, misogynistic, mean-spirited, venal, narcissistic, fear-mongering, anti-intellectual, self-certain gluttons. His agenda is an ashen alchemy of apathy and aggression, droning with the assurance of someone who couldn’t change course if he wanted to, because the learning part of him is dead.
His lowest trick so far — if these 70 abuses of power aren’t enough — is to promise his paranoid constituency a dedicated police hotline for snitching on Muslims. But wait — it gets worse. Now we learn that his office interfered in the processing of Syrian refugee claims to block Sunni and Shia families in favour of Christians. Within minutes of pressing publish on this thing, another sickening revelation will surface. Sometimes I don’t know if I’m watching the news or a livestream of metastatic cancer.
I’ve got an orange sign in the front yard. (For readers beyond Canada: it’s for the once-leftish-now-depressingly-cutting-to-centre-right NDP, who I grew up supporting in a staunchly pro-labour household.) But the Conservative candidate has no chance here, and if the Liberal candidate appears to surge, my nuance may be to vote Green to help them keep a hand in the mix. For me, environmental sanity is the most efficient framework for supporting social justice, because in the end it will demand the dismantling of capitalism. Everything else is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. For a decade, Harper has been skipping the chairs and simply throwing the sick, poor, queer, female, First Nations and other non-white people overboard.
Back to Roseanne’s larger question:
So far I’ve been ambivalent about using my yoga platform to talk about electoral politics. Time and interpersonal constraints play a role. I have a limit for playing appease-a-troll on comment threads. I’m toiling over a book and travelling a lot for work. I’m only teaching at two studios in town at this point, which means I don’t have as much in-person contact as I once did. Yoga Community Toronto has been little but a spam-magnet Facebook page since our friend Jenna died, and since the competitive pace of yoga-gentrification diffused the yearning for or perhaps even possibility for community beyond the studio level.
I’m also a new parent, so a lot of politics happens in the kitchen, or on the street, or with the Lorax, or in the few minutes before falling into sleep when I murmur “What’s the most important thing to do?” and I hear some liminal answer I rarely remember. This much is sure: I’d have more time to door-knock for the Greens than I’d have to argue for why yoga people should vote progressive, or for why yoga should make people more progressive. I tied myself in knots arguing both of those positions in 2012 in a daze of hope and confusion.
Seeking the Illusory Yoga Vote
Back then, a bunch of us thought it would be the yoga thing to stop coyly hiding our progressive aspirations behind “getting out the vote” efforts. We wanted to provoke through endorsement. We argued on the basis of ethics derived from practice that it was an absolute no-brainer to vote for Obama over Romney, who believes the planet is his disposable space station en route to Kolob.
I don’t regret it. But now I think it was mostly noise. First, it bolstered the confirmation bias of our self-selected online choir. There was some validating back-slapping: “Of course! Great idea! Rally the yoga vote for the good guys!” However, it also spotlighted that slice of the yoga sector infected by self-immolating leftist idealism, hell-bent on pitching a false equivalency between the two candidates and insisting that the zero-sum pious choice was Green or non-dualistic abstention.
Third – it drew protests about boundaries. Many compared their yoga mat to Rumi’s field – beyond good and evil – and said that practice was effective for them precisely because it gave respite from a world of conflict. They were mostly fine with being encouraged to vote, but not with the notion of engaging with policy issues.
I’m ashamed of my response to this one. I brushed it off as a cop-out, which was a real empathy fail for someone working as a yoga therapist. Was I really willing to push an oppositional agenda into the world of yoga education? Practice and ethics and policy are inseparable to me, but doesn’t negotiating them simultaneously devitalize each?
I also didn’t give much thought to the impact my writing activism might have on my classroom or consultation environment. Who might feel excluded or intimidated, and who might feel drawn in by an even thicker transference than usual? I was definitely short on the maturity shown by Regina’s Colin Hall in this elegant post. It helps to get out of the way when you’re serving people, and I’m still learning how to do that. Maybe I should have been a socialist from the Prairies.
But it was the fourth impact of our endorsement campaign that surprised a lot of us. Our appeal uncovered deep currents of unexamined and unabashed white and gender privilege in Yogaland, as well as an unexpected amount of fiscal conservatism and libertarianism that are allergic to collectivist goals.
Overall, I can’t imagine that our endorsements influenced a single voter. But that fourth revelation has turned out to be a good kick in the old zafu. You see, I believe some of us were operating under a seemingly benign illusion that can only serve to distract or exhaust those who hold it. This would be the belief that yoga or meditation should naturally lead towards particular ideals of progressivism and pragmatic strategy. How could it not be, some of us wondered, that the tender realizations of movement and breath available on the mat wouldn’t spontaneously turn everyone into champions of community and social welfare? What do these oneness sensations do, if they don’t manifest oneness? It’s a tricky belief: innocent in its wishfulness, maybe a little smug in its projections, and possibly regressive in its effects.
For now I’ll call this belief the Oneness Mode, or OM for short. It derives from the single biggest category mistake in Yogaland I know of: the confusion of internal practices and states with external methods and realities. It provides the language of pop-Tantra. Oneness experiences on the cushion are thought to imply or invoke or encourage oneness realities in the world. People under the spell of OM imagine that their personal epiphanies on the mat have universal value or meaning. If they’re charismatic to begin with, they may be drawn to evangelize their discoveries into new brands or lineages, like John Friend magnifying and marketing the particular delights of his own body into a scheme of Universal Principles. If they are progressive to begin with, they may feel they’ve found a common, psychosomatic ground for ethics and behaviour rooted in justice. Not only is this untrue, it is a sentiment that is far too easily diluted through commodification to be of use.
The Scofield Insight: Spirituality Provides No Clear Political Guidance
The efforts of Be Scofield have been pivotal in relieving me of the OM. In piles of articles and threads over the past several years, she has tirelessly deconstructed the “of course yoga practice leads to moral action” bromide with which so many seem to comfort or excuse themselves.
If you haven’t heard it yet, the core of her argument is that there is no such thing as a spiritual or religious practice that grants realizations that lead to predictable policy objectives. She lays out the evidence plainly. Zen monks and asana yogis alike can meditate and stretch their way into fascist fervors. MBSR teachers can very compassionately help Amazon executives become more serenely rapacious. With meditation, vets recover from PTSD, and Navy Seals improve their shooting. We shouldn’t be surprised if the Volkswagon plan to hack diesel emissions testing was hatched in some deep contemplative equipoise.
If Patanjali provided a clear morality that didn’t need to be interpreted through the political values of his readers, practitioners who hold the Sutras as biblical wouldn’t be divided on vegetarianism or the reality of white privilege, but they are. Gandhi took the Bhagavad Gita as his source of inspiration for political action. So did his assassin, Nathuram Godse.
If you hold the on-the-ground gifts of asana or meditation to be contingent upon an interpretation of ancient Buddhist or yoga ethics that just happens to align with your Euro-American progressivism, you may be simply sacralizing ideas you already hold dear and learned elsewhere. You may be veneering them onto the same orientalized vagueness that people you can’t stand will interpret to support their own ideas, which you’ll find obnoxious.* You can say that those people don’t understand true Buddhism or yoga, but then they’ll say the same thing about you. It doesn’t really matter who’s right. What matters is that progressives can easily waste time on two canards: 1) the unlikelihood that Iron Age or medieval South Asian ethics harmonize in any way with modern left-coast politics, and 2) that the shifting sands of spiritual sentiment — where oneness, empathy, and salvation mean different things to different people — are stable enough to support political movements.
What is this drive to use the Buddha to validate your politics, when you can cite Noam Chomsky or bell hooks, who actually taught them to you, whether directly or via osmosis? The cynic might say it’s marketing, but it could also be something more benign: the delight and love of meditative oneness states is easy to project into the fantasy of a larger resolution. Peak moments provoke the OM, which says Oh, it all makes sense, it’s all been worked out, we’re all in this together. But then you have to go out and do stuff and it’s not so easy. That’s why we keep practicing, says the teacher who fails to distinguish the private oneness experience from the OM.
The gathering realization that our moments of internal harmony teach us neither where we are blind to our neighbours nor actual strategies for how to act justly can be hard to bear. And the idea that our gurus hold specialized knowledge of internal worlds to the exclusion of the interpersonal worlds where most our stuff actually happens can come as a shock. But let’s be honest: most of them gained the skills we laud them for by assiduously ignoring the world around them. We pursue them into their radiant solitude, because we crave our own. Anandamurti seems a notable exception to the apolitical rule. He considered his Marxist-inspired Progressive Utilization Theory to be integral to his spiritual synthesis of Vedic and Tantric streams. He would have endorsed our endorsement scheme, but nobody beyond our circle would have cared. Ananda Marga has had very little impact upon the modern postural movement.
Introspective experience can feel individually liberating, and this definitely fills an aching void. But it’s only ultimately important if the individual is placed at the top of the value-chain. The Scofield Insight shows that evangelizing a private experience must always be mediated by the dominant politics it is embedded within and blindered to, what with all those eyes focused on all those tips of noses. This is why, for example, mainly-white yoga and meditation communities can be surprised when they’re told that they are not only mainly-white, but may in fact be perpetuating white privilege. Didn’t all of that lovingkindness meditation we did prove to us that we’re all equal? Sure: amongst ourselves and in our own heads. The OM is powerful. But it takes actual political training to articulate an actual political stance. As one of America’s original yogi-feminists Diana Alstad said, only a little flippantly, over dinner one night: “Why should I be interested in Patanjali? Wasn’t he writing before feminism?”
Neoliberalism and the OM
Suggesting that the oneness or empathy-enhancing experiences of yoga and meditation naturally lead to progressive activism, as I used to, leads to the Scofield Dead End. Oneness is a private therapeutic that the OM presents as strategy.
But I think there’s a deeper problem: the sentimentality of the OM, when blended with the fetish of personal evolution, is also integral to neoliberal propaganda.
It’s hard to define neoliberalism, but for here we can say it’s the loose religion that gives capitalism a unitary and moralistic veneer. It situates the individual at the centre of reality-generation, responsibility, and fulfillment. It is practiced through self-surveillance and self-improvement rituals that become compulsory for dignity if not survival, as consumerist alienation rises and notions of social welfare wither away. It commodifies and markets the OM through the assurance that we’re all equal and everything’s all right.
Beyond the world of theory, we can call it the Lulu Effect. It’s everywhere, from the Body Shop to Whole Foods to the Eat, Pray, Spend genre of priv-lit. Through self-help products and narratives, the Lulu Effect provokes and packages emotions of oneness and connectivity as instrumental to a virtuous citizenship, in which feeling good and doing good are yoked through the buying of products that are conceived of as moral because the consumer’s intention has been elevated. None of this is hidden. It is as open and obvious as people doing asana and meditating in stores that sell clothes sewn together in sweatshops.
Post-Sixties non-traditional spirituality in Euro-America, characterized by the OM and adept at making non-dogmatic freedom its primary dogma, has always been married to and extended by the broader thrust of free-market capitalist globalization. Euro-American yoga culture has been swept along for the ride. The inequality of the system doles out cash or credit, allowing a few people to fly to exotic locales to consume self-development. The entrepreneurs sit in business class, inventing alternative products to sell to those who long for continual personality upgrading. Mats are unrolled, drums are circled, massage oils are heated, breakthroughs are memoired, and people are transformed into their next versions of authenticity. All of it happens in tandem with the erosion of the commons, a steady climb of global wealth disparity, and a rising tide of environmental terror. Feeling good – which unlike “being equal”, is something we are assured we’re entitled to – can cast a deep shadow of hidden costs.
The elision of yoga and meditation-derived oneness feelings with visions of world unity resonates with the unconscious mandate of the neoliberal self, who is taught to believe that private transcendence is crucial for validating the market freedom that will liberate everyone and solve every problem. Yoga is stilling the fluctuations of the mind. The body is my temple; asanas are my prayers. Just do it. Be the change you want to see. Yoga is skill in action. What’s your excuse? Follow your bliss. Practice and all is coming. Lean in. It all seems to swirl together in a taijitu of triumphalism and anxiety. The extreme athlete in the running shoe commercial expressing her individuation from mediocrity by summiting a lonely mesa at dawn is interchangeable with the mountaintop meditator. Both wear luon, and both express passions, but neither can tell us anything about equality or justice, except that it comes to those who can pay for it.
Yoga Belongs to Alternative, Not Oppositional, Culture
If I haven’t made it clear, none of my analysis here is meant to devalue the personal work on the mat that we know is occurring all over the place. My aim is to trouble the explicit and implicit claims made by hopeful and stretchy progressives, unreflexive yogapreneurs, and neoliberal marketers about how our work on the mat translates into social good. The Scofield Insight makes it generally clear that such claims are deeply flawed. I’ve gone on to show that the claims are further diluted by their overlap with neoliberalism. I’ll conclude the analysis for now by describing why Euro-American yoga, even if the OM were dispelled, is not a grounded platform for concrete political activism.
When its private experiences are bootstrapped into the pubic sphere, Euro-American yoga expresses itself within alternative culture, not oppositional culture.** In alternative culture, individuals invest in personal learning to cut unique pathways towards the satisfaction of personal destinies. In oppositional culture, people are willing to die in group actions towards shared material goals like abolition, voting rights, and labour or environmental justice. By contrast, alternative culture emphasizes inner development, the performance of emotional authenticity, and the belief that psychological change is either more desirable than political change, or that it makes political change irrelevant. Additionally, the journey of alternative personal growth is consumerist: value accumulates through the manufacture and purchasing of a series of ascendingly virtuous choices, from organic food to teacher trainings to spiritual makeovers, each successively priced almost out of reach.
In its global consumerist and alternative iteration, yoga culture has always been more about trying something else than about refusing to play the game. Evolved to be loose, receptive, non-judgmental, innovative, and extended through mechanisms of personal choice, Euro-American yoga culture seems both structurally and philosophically allergic to strategies of opposition. This stands in stark contrast to its Indian roots, in which asana practice provided, in part, a body-politic ritual of anti-colonial resurrection. In Euro-America, the fact that yoga activism around election time must limit itself to getting out the vote is the perfect example of how the culture is allowed to value the process of choosing, but cannot risk passing judgment on the value of particular choices. Doing so would compromise the integrity of the personal journey.
Several brave people and organizations have been able to transparently mobilize yoga resources in self-reflexive, justice-oriented ways. Scofield’s Decolonizing Yoga and the YBIC do great work towards making yoga culture more just. Off the Mat has taken mature strides towards developing social justice curricula for teachers and trainers. Among outreach efforts, the Yoga Services Council works tirelessly to make the therapeutics of yoga and mindfulness accessible beyond the borders of Yogaland, especially schools. I’d presume to say that all of these activists know that they’re doing far more than offering alternatives, even if they have to couch their initiatives in the language of “alternative” to let them breathe. They are forwarding visions that oppose dominant paradigms.
I’ll continue to admire and support these friends vigorously, and I’ll always love working with my colleagues who marshal yoga infrastructure towards justice. But I’m aware that they constitute a statistically tiny slice of the broader culture, where pro-social initiatives are usually limited to charitable efforts that indulge white saviour narratives or voluntourism, or inspirational gestures like Swami Vishnudevananda flying his Piper Apache over the Berlin Wall, or group actions like malas of sun salutations for world peace or mass meditations at the barricades of G20 riots. Themed group practices can be profoundly moving for participants, and they carve out an interesting space between introspection and public discourse. But as spectacles of alternatives, they can barter strategy for the optics of an above-the-battleground dream. The messaging is often generalized to a content-poor “can’t we all get along?” theme, and it’s always dutifully self-reflective: “change begins within.”
Are we always so sure it does? One thing seems clear: world leaders and those who throw bricks at their motorcades are too busy to notice your inner changes or care about how well you’re holding space for everybody’s process. They’re at war. Stephen Harper, Tony Abbot, and David Cameron are quite happy that at least a few of you have the good sense to sit there quietly, in the perfect form of peaceful protest. They know you’ll be fine, because who exactly has the time and money to sit quietly? Sitting in half-lotus at the periphery of chaos performs an alternative rooted in the same privilege the brick-throwers are opposing. It is a choice, and the majority of choices like this are possible through the support of time and money. The powerful can interpret the ability to choose meditation over brick-throwing as proof that consumers of self-help can make virtuous choices that do not disrupt the machine. Oppositional culture is about changing the power dynamics that allow some people to have choices because others are coerced.
A Grab-Bag Bullet-Summary So Far
- Communists, fascists, neoliberals, racists, hedonists, radical environmentalists, hipsters, Tea Partiers, organic farmers, and religious fundamentalists can all enjoy the realizations of yoga and meditation, and claim those realizations support their politics, or aversion to politics. Ergo, there is no coherent yoga vote to be mobilized.
- Question: would you participate in “Get out the yoga vote” campaigns if it were clear that the general yoga demographic is no more progressive (or perhaps less progressive) than any other?
- Often, arguing over what “yoga really is” is a good way to conceal political agendas. Debaters want their politics to sound more noble through frameworks of ultimate truth.
- The phrase “yoga community” often sounds like it’s pointing at a collectivist ideal. But if that ideal remains undefined, what becomes of all the emotional capital it churns up?
- Believing that yoga practice necessarily leads to progressivism is naïve.
- Wanting people in your classes or circles to be as progressive as you are is a juicy countertransference that may not make for inclusive space, despite every stated aspiration to be “inclusive.”
- Euro-American yoga culture is inextricable from alternative culture. Alternative culture is both innovative and inextricable from consumerism. Consumerism is the id-function of capitalism. Neoliberalism is the religion that sacralizes capitalism with visions of individualistic transcendence. It’s easy for modern yoga culture to get tangled up in this pretty badly.
- Steve Jobs’ favourite book was Autobiography of a Yogi.
- Alternative culture is different from oppositional culture. It is apathetic to or even hostile towards concrete political action.
- Oppositional culture has no time for the Oneness Mode.
- One enduring legacy of the Sixties is that the public performance of alternative culture is dead easy to commodify.
- For all of these reasons and more, it’s may be more efficient — not to mention honest — to let the connections between yoga and activism be personally therapeutic, and largely hidden, instead of elevating them to new identitarian ideals, and just leave it at that. Whether Jesus said it or not, Matthew 6:5 records a cool idea: “When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. When you pray, go into your inner room.”
- BTW: Quoting Jesus gives no more substantive weight to any political argument than quoting Patanjali or Adi Shankaracharya does.
Left Hands, Right Hands: Secret Dialectic
Tantra! Tantra! Everybody wants to be all Tantric-y. With days to go in this horrible election campaign, I’m realizing that if it’s all tied up with the OM, I’ll take a pass on pop-Tantra. Sure, I’m a householder, and I write books that rail against spiritual bypassing and consumasceticism. I promote the folding of spirituality into everyday life. I present Ayurveda as a political practice as much as a self-care practice. Yes, the joy and trouble of this life is all one big messy thing. I meditate on laundry piles, compost diapers, make Ayurvedic wine to drink with roast chicken, and I gobble kitcheri while watching the undercard before Ronda Rousey kicks ass.
But the OM is something I can see clearly now, and I’m not buying it. I’m suspicious of any theme that wants to convert my capacity for self-regulation and wonderment into the premise that everything will turn out all right because it was always already perfect, or never really substantial. The OM encourages people to smile just a little too much, to be a little too invasive with their eye-contact, to infer a little too much camaraderie in spaces in which discussing race and class are taboo. I’m also wary of consolation. The entire culture wants to console me, even as it baits and oppresses others. “Your nature is divine” can have psychological value for a time, but it loses edge with each repetition, eventually begging the question, “So what?”
When I practice, I go into my inner room, move through postures, sit and breath, and experience capacities I too often forget: to feel my alone state distinct from my together state, to be free of language, to mine memories and sometimes heal them, to explore hatred and love, to relax the forward pulse of agency, to be so astounded that there’s a beating heart in here that it sometimes feels like it stops.
As the Canadian winter approaches, I know I have an inner room and can do all of this in a house with heating. I know I have the heating I have because my government is allowing flood waters to rise in places like Calcutta, where yoga is an ethnic heritage. This is a paradox I refuse to console with the OM, or allow to paralyze me with flip side of the OM, which is shame. It is a paradox that enhances my engagement with the oppositional.
I once used practice to help mend internal splits and soothe existential paradox. Now I seem to use it to inflame them.
Practice is what I do to restore myself from conflict, and to prepare myself for more conflict. It’s not an alternative to conflict, but a pause in conflict. It might help me have less stressful conflicts, but there are no guarantees. It might extend my life and maintain my mental health, but there are no guarantees. And because for all I know Harper, Abbott and Cameron might do yoga together to bring the power of the OM to each aggressive summit they hold, I know practice in itself holds no essential virtue to claim or brag about.
My practice is therapy against the stress of opposition, which is a moral constant. That’s all. I do not speculate that the sensations of asana or meditation reveal an eternal self or non-self inseparable from a perfected universe in which Bernie Sanders and Scott Walker blend into the smoothie of the absolute. Practice just helps me love more and be less reactive when it’s inefficient to be reactive. It shows me that privilege can be used to access regions of resolution and joy in life that I want everyone to have. But its more important gift is that it gives sustainability to my opposition to those who would steal resolution and joy.
I’m a practitioner. I’m an activist. These roles get along within me if they each keep their focus. They can give each other tips and critiques across the threshold of my inner room. The practitioner lights candles. The activist lights fires. The match is passed from the right to the left hand.
Before yoga, one of the many lines from Leonard Cohen that shook my bones was: “One hand on my suicide and one hand on the rose.” For years, practice helped to mend that internal bipolar opposition that swung between abject depression and overwhelming joy. Now that my inner life feels meh-to-good-enough, my hands can express an extroverted opposition. One hand holds a mudra, and the other holds a weapon. So maybe I’m Tantric-y after all.
Don’t let your right hand know what your left hand is doing — another reported Jesus saying. The commentaries suggest he was warning against ostentation and hypocrisy. Public displays of yoga virtue that project premature oneness and obscure moral struggle are vulnerable to both.
But Jesus may also be describing a classic strategy in guerrilla warfare. No clandestine cell of an oppositional force should know much about what the other cells are doing. This is crucial for security, in case a cell is captured. But it also enhances the focus of each. My practitioner self needn’t be concerned with what my activist self is doing. Each shadowed to the other, they thrive on mutual inspiration. Perhaps they even compete. The farther inward one of them goes to explore and restore, the farther outward the other must venture, to risk and resist. If they keep their alliance secret, it cannot be commodified.
_____
* David Chapman has a good overview of how modern liberal-left ideas get palimpsested onto a reconstruction of “ancient Buddhism.”
** A concise presentation of the alternative/oppositional distinction is laid out by Lierre Keith of Deep Green Resistance. I think Keith and DGR are tragically wrong both morally and tactically about their radical feminist position that excludes trans women, but Keith’s analysis of this issue is insightful nonetheless.
Spiritualized Narcissism as Trauma Response: A Review of – and Meditation on – A Death on Diamond Mountain by Scott Carney
(This article first appeared in Yoga International.)
It begins with your family
but soon it comes ‘round to your soul
— Leonard Cohen
____
On April 22nd, 2012, Ian Thorson died in a cave in the Arizona desert.
The Cochise Country coroner ruled the cause of death as dysentery-induced dehydration. But members of the cult that effectively chased Thorson into the wilderness without the psychiatric help he needed still search for his cause of death in the garbled neo-Buddhist jargon of their leader, Michael Roach.
Due out tomorrow, journalist Scott Carney’s tangled probe into the tragedy points in a different direction: towards the dangers of spiritual striving. He begins A Death on Diamond Mountain with the question, “How much should someone strive to know their own soul?”
Full disclosure: I broke the news of Thorson’s death to the global media on May 4th with the first of three hasty, mostly accurate, and highly emotional polemics against the cult of Roach. I worked from local news reports, Roach’s deflective justification for the terrible decisions that drove Thorson to his cave, and my own vivid memories of the three years I spent in Roach’s community. So for me, reading through Carney’s book is like seeing old photos from novel angles in an album that I didn’t assemble, reading captions that stray from my own narrative just enough to make me doubt my recollections and illuminate the agendas that form them. This I know for sure: I’m too close to the story and too embroiled in how it has unfolded to have cleanly approached what Carney has succeeded with here. Continue reading “Spiritualized Narcissism as Trauma Response: A Review of – and Meditation on – A Death on Diamond Mountain by Scott Carney”
