Yoga Work and Climate Chaos: a Note

I obviously think it’s really important to illuminate abuse in spiritual communities. It’s as important as advocacy work for any survivor group. Abuse survivors hold up the mirror.

And yet in the shadow of climate chaos, is it visible? Is it efficient? Is the scope broad enough, and scalable? Are venal spiritual communities worth the attention while entire nations operate as cults, and are pushing others into the sea?

What does it mean when you’re doing good work — the work you’ve made, trained for, the best work of your life, perhaps — in a culture based in economic and privilege excesses that both accelerate and will be wiped out by climate chaos?

Most projects of substance, whether undertaken alone or in groups, take five years. A graduate degree, a book, a training curriculum. Reviewing and reforming standards at Yoga Alliance. Five years is also one predicted window for seeing the first ice-free Arctic summer, which may provoke a methane tipping point, and then an exponential temperature rise.

Even if you had the personal, family, and community resources to switch paths and apply your intellectual and moral capital to climate mitigation, at this point you would run out the clock training yourself into competence. For most of us, it would seem, that path is not feasible.

Must we be satisfied with going to marches, when political activism has proven almost entirely ineffectual?

“The market tends to see short-term gains and discount long-term effects until the political structure has been modified by that success.” — Brett Weinstein, quoted by Catherine Ingram in this stunning essay.

How many of us have heard of or can even conceive of engaging in Decisive Ecological Warfare? People have been talking about it for 15 years, and it hasn’t happened to any scale. Why? I for one am just too compliant or privileged to put on a mask and sabotage industrial sites. If a literal gun was pointed at me, I would do it. But I’d have to be convinced I wasn’t alone, or that there were more on board than whoever showed up at the local anarchist meeting. I would have to see above-ground support for underground warfare. Of course, waiting and seeing is the problem.

But this morning I felt a window open. I’m not sure if I’m simply trying and succeeding at making myself feel better. But here it is.

A climate chaos landscape will be a literal assembly line for cults. It’s one reason why I didn’t jump in to hardline environmentalism in 2008 or so, when I first started reading Deep Green Resistance. I went to a few meetings, but they had that edge I was trying to heal from. I could see that the scene was extremely vulnerable to charismatic alarmism. I’d been there before. I walked away, because I wanted a normal life. Well, the joke’s on me.

But now it’s come around again, undeniable. With children to remind me of it with every plan for the future, every request for a toy or a trip I want to give them, and then grit my teeth as I do, caught between loving them and feeling their world burn. (Dear Lego company: please don’t try to fool us by producing your bricks from plant-based materials. Production itself is the problem.) At moments I can feel an authoritarian grip rise in my throat: I want to scare them with everything they don’t understand so that I can feel like something is in control, even if it’s only my own hypocrisy. So there it is, right in my kitchen: the foreshadowing of shitty leadership.

What happens when the bias towards apocalyptic cultism meets the apocalypse? We’re going to need massive stores of community health to not make die-off roll quicker than the climate coerces. Yes, we’re going to need resilience in infrastructure, and skills of self-sufficiency. And these can all be easily destroyed by toxic group dynamics.

Given that the horse of my career has left the barn, it seems like the task is to re-orient not its content but its scope and purpose. As in: looking at yoga culture reform as a training ground for more general anti-cult education. Maybe if you run a teacher training, this is a useful reframing suggestion: maybe you’re not minting yoga teachers so much as facilitating learning and adaptation in a community primarily dedicated to not destroying itself. In a 2011 essay, I proposed that yoga studios could become true community hubs if they hosted social services. Perhaps holding space for collapse awareness group meetings is part of this. What is restorative yoga actually for, in the big picture?

Some of what I’m saying here is as much about self-soothing as it is about altruism. Writers often write out what they struggle to do in the smaller and unseen moments of life. When it comes down to it, it’s the unseen that will count. The only preparation for chaos that’s feasible for most of us may have nothing to do with our formal careers. Let the oligarchs monetize the apocalypse.

So how do you say “the ultimate infrastructure is love” without this becoming another useless meme or starting a superficial social movement? But it’s true. The one feasible practice may be simply to foster secure relationships, to know what it feels like to love but also have boundaries, to care for our traumas and the traumatized, to be inspired by integrity before charisma, to develop trust and forbearance so that if and when we go hungry our worst impulses are somewhat mitigated.

You have to hide the Easter eggs for the children, even when you don’t know if there will be Easter eggs next year.