It Might Be Useful for the Privileged to Tune into Shame and Disgust For a Moment

So on FB I endorsed the fantastic new podcast Yoga is Dead:

https://www.facebook.com/matthew.remski/posts/10162058938305602

To follow up here, I want to track something a little more complicated (and messy/vulnerable), tied to a previous exploration of the aspirational self. I’ll take it step by step:

1.White/male fragility flows from deep insecurity.

2. That insecurity can’t be separated from the anxiety of entitlement, which the heart, somewhere, knows is unearned and based on nothing.

3. In the yoga world, part of the work demanded of the aspirational self is that it must mask the entitled self. It is meant to perform goodness, equanimity, and, for some, wokeness.

4. When it fails to do this work, we are ashamed.

5. It’s easier, however, to feel disgust: the externalization of shame.

6. We can relieve disgust in a masturbatory way, by ganging up on Instagram yoga people or goat yoga people, or beer yoga people. If we’re especially pious, we’ll drag people who focus on yoga as therapy or functional movement instead of spirituality. We can even express disgust through feminist or woketivist language.

7. It feels relieving to drag those whose aspirational selves are obviously failing to hide their entitled selves.

8. We’re saying: How dare they tip our hand, spill our secret?

9. What makes episode #1 of Yoga is Dead so jagged is that Tejal and Jesal blow right through the aspirational self. They zero in on the entitled self with their title: “White Women Killed Yoga.”

10. As they predicted, this title provoked a lot of reactivity. It ranged from defensiveness to schadenfreude.

11. The schadenfreude is disgust, thinly veiled. Under a thicker veil, it might contain self-loathing.

12. But the title is actually simple. An unpacked version might be: “You Can’t Do Yoga Without Confronting Entitlement, And Since Entitled People Run the Mainstream Industry, Yoga Isn’t Happening There.”

13. Tejal and Jesal make it clear that for them, there’s no aspirational self that can hide the privilege that generates it.

14. It makes total sense that they look right through it, as if it wasn’t even there. It hasn’t worked. It hasn’t fooled them.

15. In fact, the aspirational self has done worse than not-working. It has tried to substitute for work. It prevents the yoga of interrogating entitlement from getting off the ground. The yoga of interrogating entitlement is fierce, and the aspirational self will not tolerate it.

16. When Tejal’s trainer sits there and says Tejal is wrong about the relationship between hatha yoga and raja yoga, she’s speaking from the anxiety of the aspirational self: the self that wants to be knowledgeable, historically valid, authentic — all things that the entitled self knows, somewhere, it is not.

17. The stakes are high for the trainer. The personal intention is to not let the aspirational self crumble. But the public impact remarginalizes in a passive-aggressive way. This is how a psychological mess projects outward into material harm.

 

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I’m not a white woman, but imagining the podcast title as “White Men Killed Yoga” does the trick. It allows me to feel into what the podcasters are catalyzing.

I feel the shame and guilt and I want to push these things away with all the reasons. I use disgust to pin those feelings on other white men I know. It’s gotta be them, not me.

But if I do what the actual yoga often instructs me to do (whether this is ancient or not) — to abide with the feelings until they soften or pass or depersonalize or integrate — something else emerges.

It emerges because I allow the defense of the aspirational self to let down a bit. I let it down because it’s too late. It can’t protect me. It was a misdirected effort, and suddenly exhausting to maintain.

And beneath the aspirational self I see it: the entitled self. Cue shame and guilt again.

Yet, if I pause again, it passes again.

Shame and guilt and disgust are probably unavoidable when feeling the crack of the aspirational and entitled selves.

But they can be doorways to transparency and transformation.

For that to happen requires intimacy with the feelings. A deer-in-the-headlights moment in which you can’t escape what you’re seeing, what you’re participating in.

Here’s a recent personal example — seemingly unrelated:

I was in a window seat in plane flying west to LAX. I looked down through the hazy turquoise and saw the bone-dry ripples of the Sierra Nevada. I could see the exhaust from the engine ripple its heat in a swath below. It was instantly clear that State will soon be covered in fire, and the plane blowing hot air into it.

The the attendant comes by and offers water in a disposable cup. She’s uniformed in a way that is meant to signify attractiveness and compliance. My aspirational self says no to the cup. And then it crumbles because I know it’s not enough.

I become aware of my entitled self watching the plane it is in scorch the earth, and in that instant I can no longer dissociate into the beauty of flying. I can no longer pretend that it is normal and good to be here.

And that’s not about me or my psychology or moral character. It’s about my continued participation.

Watching the heat spew down from my metal tube is shameful, guilty, disgusting.

But am I doing it? Yes, I’m participating.

But is this who I am? Is malignant consumption my nature, my character? It has brought me here, unconsciously. But no, I could imagine another way of being in the world.

So I wonder what it would take for these particular instances of shame/disgust to be more widely known as a doorway to a different kind of freedom.

A freedom from aspiration. A freedom to give away entitlement.