<\/p>\n
Last week my friend Roseanne Harvey over at\u00a0It\u2019s All Yoga Baby<\/a>\u00a0emailed me in preparation for the\u00a0excellent survey<\/a>\u00a0she just published:<\/p>\n 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?<\/em><\/p>\n 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\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n 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?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Yeah, I remember, Roseanne. And like my Anybody But Romney position in 2012, I\u2019m pursuing\u00a0an Anybody But Conservative\u00a0strategy this time around, in the desperate interest\u00a0of harm-reduction.<\/p>\n For the unfamiliar: the\u00a0Conservative 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\u00a0an ashen alchemy of apathy and aggression, droning with the assurance of someone who couldn\u2019t change course if he wanted to, because the learning part of him is dead.<\/p>\n His\u00a0lowest trick so far — if these\u00a070 abuses of power<\/a>\u00a0aren’t enough — is to promise his paranoid constituency a dedicated\u00a0police hotline for snitching on Muslims. But\u00a0wait — it gets worse. Now we learn that his office interfered in the processing of Syrian refugee claims to block Sunni and Shia families\u00a0in favour of Christians. Within minutes of pressing publish on this thing,\u00a0another sickening revelation will surface. Sometimes I don’t know if I’m watching the news or a livestream of metastatic cancer.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve got an orange sign in the front yard. (For readers beyond Canada: it\u2019s for the once-leftish-now-depressingly-cutting-to-centre-right NDP, who I grew up supporting in a staunchly pro-labour household.) But the\u00a0Conservative candidate has no chance here, and if the Liberal candidate appears to surge, my nuance may\u00a0be 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\u00a0sick, poor, queer, female, First Nations and other non-white people overboard.<\/p>\n Back to Roseanne’s larger question:<\/p>\n So far I\u2019ve 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\u2019m toiling over a book and travelling a lot for work. I\u2019m only teaching at two studios in town at this point, which means I don’t have as much in-person\u00a0contact as I once did. Yoga Community Toronto has been little\u00a0but 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.<\/p>\n I\u2019m also a new parent, so\u00a0a 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\u00a0\u201cWhat’s the most important thing to do?\u201d and I hear\u00a0some liminal answer I rarely\u00a0remember. This much is sure: I’d have more time to door-knock\u00a0for the Greens than I\u2019d have to argue for why yoga people should vote progressive, or for why yoga should make people more progressive. I tied myself in knots\u00a0arguing\u00a0both of those positions in 2012<\/a>\u00a0in a daze of hope and confusion.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Back then, a bunch of us thought it would be the yoga thing to stop\u00a0coyly hiding our progressive aspirations behind \u201cgetting out the vote\u201d 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.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t 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: \u201cOf course! Great idea! Rally the yoga vote for the good guys!\u201d However, it also spotlighted that slice of the yoga sector\u00a0infected by\u00a0self-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.<\/p>\n Third \u2013 it drew protests about boundaries. Many compared their yoga mat to Rumi\u2019s field \u2013 beyond good and evil \u2013 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.<\/p>\n I\u2019m ashamed of my response to this one. I brushed it off as a cop-out, which\u00a0was a\u00a0real 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\u2019t negotiating them simultaneously devitalize each?<\/p>\n I also didn\u2019t give much thought to the impact my writing\u00a0activism 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\u00a0the maturity\u00a0shown by Regina\u2019s Colin Hall in\u00a0this elegant post<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n But it was the fourth impact of our\u00a0endorsement campaign that surprised a lot of us. Our appeal\u00a0uncovered deep currents of unexamined and unabashed white and gender privilege in Yogaland, as well as an unexpected amount of\u00a0fiscal conservatism and libertarianism that are allergic to collectivist goals.<\/p>\n Overall, I can\u2019t imagine that our endorsements influenced\u00a0a single voter.\u00a0But that fourth revelation has turned out to be a good kick in the old zafu. You see, I believe some of us were operating\u00a0under 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\u00a0ideals of progressivism and pragmatic strategy. How could it not be, some of us wondered, that the tender realizations of movement and breath available\u00a0on the\u00a0mat wouldn’t\u00a0spontaneously turn everyone\u00a0into champions of community and social welfare? What do these oneness sensations\u00a0do<\/em>, if they don’t manifest\u00a0oneness? It\u2019s a tricky belief: innocent in its wishfulness, maybe a little smug in its projections, and possibly\u00a0regressive in its effects.<\/p>\n 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\u2019re 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The efforts of\u00a0Be Scofield<\/a>\u00a0have been pivotal in relieving me of the OM. In piles of articles and threads over the past several years, she has tirelessly deconstructed the \u201cof\u00a0course<\/em>\u00a0yoga practice leads to moral action\u201d bromide with which so many seem to comfort or excuse themselves.<\/p>\n If you haven’t heard it yet, the core\u00a0of her argument is that there is no such thing as\u00a0a 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\u00a0some deep contemplative equipoise.<\/p>\n If Patanjali provided a clear\u00a0morality that didn’t need to be interpreted through the political values of his readers, practitioners who hold the\u00a0Sutras<\/em>\u00a0as biblical wouldn\u2019t be divided on vegetarianism or the reality of white privilege, but they are.\u00a0Gandhi took\u00a0the\u00a0Bhagavad Gita<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>as his source of inspiration for political action.\u00a0So did his assassin, Nathuram Godse.<\/p>\n If you hold the on-the-ground\u00a0gifts of asana or meditation to be contingent upon an interpretation of ancient Buddhist or yoga ethics\u00a0that just happens to align with your Euro-American progressivism, you may be\u00a0simply sacralizing ideas you already hold dear and learned elsewhere. You may be veneering\u00a0them onto the same orientalized vagueness\u00a0that people you can’t stand\u00a0will interpret to\u00a0support their own ideas, which you’ll find obnoxious.* You can say that\u00a0those<\/em>\u00a0people 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\u00a0waste 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\u00a0the shifting sands of spiritual sentiment — where oneness, empathy, and salvation mean different things to different people — are stable enough to support political movements.<\/p>\n What is this drive to\u00a0use the Buddha to validate your politics, when you can cite Noam Chomsky or bell hooks, who actually taught them to you, whether\u00a0directly or via osmosis? The cynic might say it\u2019s marketing, but it could also be something more benign:\u00a0the delight and love of meditative oneness states is easy to project into the fantasy of a larger resolution. Peak moments provoke the\u00a0OM, which says\u00a0Oh, it all makes sense, it\u2019s all been worked out, we’re all in this together.<\/em>\u00a0But then you have to go out and do stuff and it\u2019s not so easy.\u00a0That\u2019s why we keep practicing,<\/em>\u00a0says the teacher who fails to distinguish the private oneness experience from the OM.<\/p>\n The gathering realization that our moments of internal harmony teach us neither where we are blind to our neighbours nor actual strategies for\u00a0how 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\u2019s be honest: most of them gained the\u00a0skills we laud them for\u00a0by assiduously\u00a0ignoring 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\u00a0Marxist-inspired\u00a0Progressive Utilization Theory<\/a>\u00a0to be integral to his\u00a0spiritual synthesis of Vedic and Tantric streams. He would\u00a0have endorsed our endorsement scheme, but nobody beyond our circle would have cared. Ananda Marga has had very little impact upon the modern postural movement.<\/p>\n Introspective experience can\u00a0feel individually liberating, and this definitely\u00a0fills an aching void. But it’s\u00a0only ultimately important if the individual is placed at the top of the\u00a0value-chain. The Scofield Insight\u00a0shows 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\u2019t all of that lovingkindness meditation we did prove to us that we\u2019re 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\u00a0Diana Alstad<\/a>\u00a0said, only a little flippantly, over dinner one night: \u201cWhy should I be interested in Patanjali? Wasn\u2019t he writing before feminism?\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Suggesting that the oneness or empathy-enhancing experiences of yoga and meditation naturally lead to\u00a0progressive activism, as I used to, leads to the Scofield Dead End. Oneness is a private therapeutic that the OM presents as strategy.<\/p>\n But I think there’s a deeper problem: the sentimentality of the OM, when blended with\u00a0the fetish of personal evolution,\u00a0is also integral to neoliberal propaganda.<\/p>\n It’s hard to define neoliberalism, but for here we can say it’s the\u00a0loose religion that gives\u00a0capitalism a unitary and moralistic veneer. It\u00a0situates 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\u2019re all equal and everything\u2019s all right.<\/p>\n Beyond the world of theory, we\u00a0can call it\u00a0the Lulu Effect. It’s everywhere, from the Body Shop to Whole Foods to the\u00a0Eat, Pray, Spend<\/em>\u00a0genre of\u00a0priv-lit<\/a>. Through self-help products and narratives, the Lulu Effect provokes and packages\u00a0emotions of oneness and connectivity\u00a0as instrumental\u00a0to a virtuous citizenship, in which feeling good and\u00a0doing good are yoked through the buying of products that are conceived of as moral because the consumer\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Post-Sixties\u00a0non-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\u00a0broader 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\u00a0credit, allowing a few\u00a0people to fly to exotic locales\u00a0to consume\u00a0self-development. The entrepreneurs sit in business class, inventing\u00a0alternative\u00a0products to sell to those\u00a0who long for continual personality upgrading.\u00a0Mats 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 \u2013 which unlike \u201cbeing equal\u201d, is something we are assured we\u2019re entitled to \u2013 can cast a deep\u00a0shadow of\u00a0hidden costs.<\/p>\n The\u00a0elision of yoga and meditation-derived oneness feelings\u00a0with visions\u00a0of\u00a0world unity resonates with\u00a0the unconscious mandate of the neoliberal self, who is taught to believe that private transcendence\u00a0is crucial for validating the market freedom that will liberate everyone and solve every problem.\u00a0Yoga 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\u2019s your excuse? Follow your bliss. Practice and all is coming. Lean in.<\/em>\u00a0It all seems to swirl together in a\u00a0taijitu<\/em>\u00a0of 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.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n If I haven\u2019t 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\u00a0by hopeful and stretchy progressives, unreflexive yogapreneurs, and neoliberal marketers about\u00a0how our work on the mat translates into social good. The Scofield Insight makes it generally clear that such claims are deeply flawed. I\u2019ve gone on to show that the claims are further diluted by their overlap with neoliberalism. I\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n When its private experiences are bootstrapped into the pubic sphere, Euro-American yoga expresses itself within\u00a0alternative culture,<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>not oppositional<\/em>\u00a0culture.** In alternative culture, individuals invest in personal learning to cut unique\u00a0pathways towards the satisfaction of personal destinies. In oppositional culture, people are willing to die in group actions towards shared\u00a0material goals like abolition, voting rights, and labour or environmental justice.\u00a0By contrast, alternative culture\u00a0emphasizes\u00a0inner development, the performance of emotional authenticity, and the belief that psychological change is either more desirable than\u00a0political change, or that it makes political change irrelevant. Additionally, the journey of alternative personal growth is\u00a0consumerist: value\u00a0accumulates\u00a0through the manufacture and purchasing\u00a0of a series of ascendingly virtuous choices, from organic food to teacher trainings to spiritual\u00a0makeovers, each successively\u00a0priced almost out of reach.<\/p>\n In its global consumerist and alternative iteration, yoga culture has always been\u00a0more 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\u00a0both structurally and philosophically allergic\u00a0to strategies\u00a0of 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\u00a0getting out the vote is the perfect example\u00a0of how\u00a0the culture\u00a0is\u00a0allowed 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.<\/p>\n Several brave people and organizations have been\u00a0able to transparently mobilize yoga resources in self-reflexive, justice-oriented\u00a0ways. Scofield\u2019s\u00a0Decolonizing Yoga<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0YBIC<\/a>\u00a0do great work towards making yoga culture more just. Off the Mat has taken mature\u00a0strides towards developing\u00a0social justice curricula<\/a>\u00a0for teachers and trainers. Among outreach efforts, the\u00a0Yoga Services Council<\/a>\u00a0works tirelessly to make the therapeutics of yoga and mindfulness accessible beyond the borders of Yogaland,\u00a0especially schools<\/a>. I\u2019d presume to say that all of these activists know that they\u2019re doing far more than offering alternatives, even if they have to couch their initiatives in the language of \u201calternative\u201d to let them breathe. They are forwarding visions that oppose dominant paradigms.<\/p>\n I’ll continue to admire and support these friends vigorously, and I’ll always love working with my colleagues who marshal yoga\u00a0infrastructure\u00a0towards justice. But I’m aware\u00a0that they constitute a statistically tiny\u00a0slice of the broader culture, where pro-social initiatives are usually\u00a0limited to charitable efforts that indulge white saviour narratives or voluntourism, or inspirational gestures\u00a0like Swami Vishnudevananda flying his Piper Apache over the Berlin Wall, or group actions like malas of sun salutations for world peace or mass\u00a0meditations 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\u00a0spectacles of alternatives, they can barter\u00a0strategy for\u00a0the optics of an above-the-battleground dream. The messaging is often\u00a0generalized to a content-poor “can’t we all get along?” theme, and it’s always dutifully self-reflective: “change begins within.”<\/p>\n Are we always so sure it does?\u00a0One thing seems clear: world leaders and\u00a0those who throw bricks at their motorcades\u00a0are too busy to notice your inner changes or care about\u00a0how well you\u2019re holding space for everybody’s\u00a0process. They’re at war. Stephen Harper, Tony Abbot, and David Cameron are quite happy that\u00a0at least a few of you have the good sense to sit\u00a0there quietly, in the perfect\u00a0form of peaceful\u00a0protest. They know you’ll be fine, because\u00a0who exactly has the time and money\u00a0to sit quietly? Sitting in half-lotus\u00a0at the periphery of chaos performs\u00a0an\u00a0alternative<\/em>\u00a0rooted in the same privilege the brick-throwers are\u00a0opposing<\/em>. It is a choice, and the majority of choices like this are possible through the\u00a0support 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\u00a0some people to have choices because others are coerced.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tantra! Tantra! Everybody wants to be all Tantric-y. With days to go in this\u00a0horrible 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\u00a0against spiritual bypassing and consumasceticism. I promote the\u00a0folding of spirituality into everyday life. I present\u00a0Ayurveda 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,\u00a0compost diapers, make\u00a0Ayurvedic wine to drink\u00a0with roast chicken, and I gobble\u00a0kitcheri while watching the undercard before\u00a0Ronda Rousey kicks ass.<\/p>\n But\u00a0the OM is something I can see clearly now, and I’m not buying it. I’m suspicious of any theme\u00a0that wants to convert my capacity for self-regulation and wonderment into the premise\u00a0that everything will turn out all right because it was always already perfect, or never really substantial. The OM encourages people\u00a0to 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\u00a0wary\u00a0of consolation. The entire culture wants to console me, even as it baits and oppresses others. “Your nature is divine” can have psychological\u00a0value for a time, but it loses edge\u00a0with each repetition, eventually begging the question, \u201cSo what?\u201d<\/p>\n When I practice, I\u00a0go 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\u00a0explore 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.<\/p>\n As\u00a0the 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\u00a0because my government\u00a0is allowing flood waters to rise in places like Calcutta, where yoga is an ethnic heritage. This is a\u00a0paradox I refuse to\u00a0console with\u00a0the OM, or allow to paralyze me with flip side of the OM, which is shame. It is a paradox that enhances my\u00a0engagement with the oppositional.<\/p>\n I once\u00a0used practice to help mend internal splits and soothe existential paradox. Now I seem to use it to inflame them.<\/p>\n Practice\u00a0is what I\u00a0do to restore myself\u00a0from conflict, and to prepare myself for more conflict. It’s not an\u00a0alternative<\/em>\u00a0to conflict, but a pause in conflict. It might help me have less stressful\u00a0conflicts, 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\u00a0Harper, Abbott and Cameron\u00a0might do yoga together to bring the power of the OM to each aggressive\u00a0summit they hold, I know practice in itself holds no essential\u00a0virtue\u00a0to claim or\u00a0brag about.<\/p>\n My practice is therapy against the stress of opposition, which is a moral constant. That’s all. I do not speculate\u00a0that the sensations of asana or meditation reveal\u00a0an eternal\u00a0self or non-self inseparable from a perfected universe in which Bernie Sanders\u00a0and Scott Walker\u00a0blend\u00a0into the\u00a0smoothie 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.<\/p>\n I\u2019m a practitioner. I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n Before yoga, one of the many lines from Leonard Cohen that shook my bones\u00a0was: “One hand on my suicide and one hand on the rose.” For years, practice\u00a0helped to mend that internal bipolar\u00a0opposition 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\u2019m Tantric-y after all.<\/p>\n Don’t let your right hand know what your\u00a0left hand is doing\u00a0—<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>another reported Jesus saying. The commentaries suggest\u00a0he was warning against ostentation and hypocrisy. Public displays of yoga virtue that project premature oneness and\u00a0obscure moral struggle are vulnerable to both.<\/p>\n But\u00a0Jesus may\u00a0also be\u00a0describing a\u00a0classic\u00a0strategy in guerrilla warfare. No clandestine cell of an oppositional force should\u00a0know\u00a0much about what the other cells are doing. This is crucial\u00a0for 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n _____<\/p>\n * David Chapman has a<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>good overview<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>of how modern liberal-left ideas get palimpsested onto a reconstruction of “ancient Buddhism.”<\/em><\/p>\nSeeking the Illusory Yoga Vote<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The Scofield\u00a0Insight: Spirituality Provides No Clear Political Guidance<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Neoliberalism and the OM<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Yoga Belongs to Alternative, Not\u00a0Oppositional, Culture<\/strong><\/h3>\n
A Grab-Bag Bullet-Summary So Far<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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Left Hands, Right Hands: Secret Dialectic<\/strong><\/h3>\n