Here goes.<\/p>\n
If the 9-12 thousand<\/em>((Estimate from Andrew Tanner of YA.))\u00a0yoga studios that dot the U.S. were better networked, they could potentially provide organizational support via meeting spaces and marketing infrastructure to the political aspirations of a population larger than the Green Party membership, UAW, and MoveOn.org put together. This population would largely intersect with the same population that has dissociatively underserved the common good in relation to its resources and privilege: middle-to-high income white people.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Ipsos tells<\/a> us there are 36 million practitioners who have attended a yoga class over the last six months. Forty-five percent of them report practicing in one of the thousands of yoga studios in the U.S. That\u2019s 16.2 million people: about 13% of the Nov. 8th voting turnout.<\/p>\n How does this demographic shake out, politically? We’ve been around the block enough to know\u00a0that practicing yoga is not a reliable predictor of political sentiment or affiliation. People come from across the political spectrum to practice.\u00a0Moreover, modern global yoga culture has historically positioned itself through the pretence of political neutrality\u00a0in order to serve\u00a0a politically diverse clientele, while projecting a spirituality that transcends politics.<\/p>\n That said, the\u00a0harrowing\u00a0electoral college map:<\/p>\n …reminded me of this map from earlier this year:<\/p>\n From Ispos, Yoga in America 2016, p. 22.<\/p><\/div>\n If we transpose\u00a0the electoral results\u00a0onto the studio-practicing population, at the very least half of that 16.2 million opposed the President-elect. But\u00a0it must be way more than that. The typical yoga class in an urban centre or mid-size town (where more of them are taking place) isn\u2019t split evenly between red and blue voters. A higher percentage of yoga practitioners are college-educated than not, and there are more studios in urban than rural areas: these are both correlated with stronger blue leanings.<\/p>\n So we can definitely say that somewhere\u00a0between 8.1 and the full 16.2 million studio practitioners currently oppose the President-elect. If we\u00a0split the difference and called it 12 million Trump opponents, we’re talking about a block almost as large as the AFL-CIO. My gut tells me two things: that\u2019s a conservative estimate, and it\u2019s also a whole lot of sleeping infrastructure power that can be mobilized from the coasts inwards.<\/p>\n Questions:<\/p>\n Would those 12 million progressive practitioners be supported in their social values and deepen their levels of activism if their studios were signatories in\u00a0a national political network? How many of those 12 million want that kind of support? Do they have brick-and-mortar, flesh-and-blood outlets for political engagement elsewhere, along with the time to invest in them? (I ask this because I know too many practitioners who say they would like to be more involved in political justice work\u00a0before and after election days, but never\u00a0have as much time as they\u2019d like.)<\/p>\n Would those 12 million\u00a0appreciate a space that offered the self-care of yoga and meditation in the front rooms, and community organizing in the back rooms? Would they mind that the advertising for each overlapped? Or do they specifically come to yoga spaces to get away from their socio-political exhaustion? And would an explicitly stated political stance alienate enough of a percentage of non-progressives in a given studio (in purple states and cities, for instance) to undo any positive gains? If this is a possibility, could the stance be modulated as needed?<\/p>\n These are questions that only\u00a0each studio\u00a0owner\u00a0can hope to answer.<\/p>\n Owners\u00a0who have jumped in headfirst have\u00a0overtly\u00a0politicized their spaces by hosting social justice events, fundraisers, and accessibility initiatives. A few\u00a0have developed entire political economies, like my friend Christi-an Slomka who ran\u00a0her former studio in Toronto with her colleague Jamilah Malika on a model that acknowledged its occupation of First Nations territory, fostered safer space, trained teachers in anti-oppression work, helped\u00a0marginalized and racialized groups foster dedicated classes, and had a robust work exchange system. Her work is on pause for now, but her colleagues Leena Miller Cressman and Emma Dines continue it in Kitchener, Ontario<\/a>. Laura Humpf of Rainier Beach Yoga in Seattle and POC Yoga, withstood withering attacks from the Right and Alt-right for offering yoga classes for people of color. She’s continuing the work nonetheless.<\/a>. Lisa\u00a0Wells has been hosting discussions on Racial Justice and Food Justice and hosted readings by Queer Poets of Color at her studio<\/a> in Corvallis, Oregon. She’s now collecting gear and raising funds \u00a0and subbing out her classes so she can stand with the Water Protectors at Standing Rock before the month is through.<\/p>\n This organic layer of yoga-demographic radical activism is\u00a0natural to college towns and diverse urban centres. But these yoga activists are usually on their own with their efforts in Yogaland. There can be\u00a0deep costs to this isolation, in terms of physical and emotional exhaustion, and financial sacrifice. While many might want to follow in these leaders’\u00a0paths, the\u00a0levels of\u00a0commitment these leaders\u00a0represent might be too demanding.<\/p>\n Slomka, Miller-Cressman, Dines, Humpf and Wells (is it any wonder that women are leading here?) might personally inspire graduates of their training programmes to emulate their activism, but if one of them wanted to open a progressively-oriented studio in Reno or Fort McMurray, wouldn\u2019t it be nice if they were supported by something beyond personal mentorship, which is always limited by time and energy? What if she had instant access to a national network of ideas custom-selected for yoga demographics? What if the intellectual and emotional resources of that leadership were captured so that the leaders didn’t have to share\u00a0them over hundreds of individual phone or Skype calls.<\/p>\n The progressive studio owners I know are all run off their feet. They always want to do more community and social service than they have time for. What if they belonged to a network that fed them monthly ideas for service and best practices?<\/p>\n Can we imagine an organization that can support the\u00a0progressive work of any studio owner or teacher who wishes to mobilize their network to a commitment level appropriate to their community? Can we imagine a meeting-place for intellectual resources, support for initiatives in less progressive areas, and a greater sense of national cohesion?<\/p>\n Yoga practice will continue to help those of us lucky enough to do it to self-regulate. But\u00a0can yoga infrastructure<\/em> help resist the tide of the next four years — especially for those who don’t have time to do yoga<\/em>?<\/p>\n I’m thinking that an “Engaged Yoga Network” would consist of two arms:<\/p>\n There\u2019s so much great progressive yoga-related content out there, being generated by organizations like CTZNWELL<\/a>, Off The Mat<\/a>, and the Yoga Service Council<\/a>. EYN would be about helping to aggregate it and integrate it with the rhythms of\u00a0physical practice spaces.<\/p>\n In addition to the\u00a0class downtime space of rooms for strategic meetings, many studios already use a potential delivery device for this often-fragmented content, in the form of client management software. Imagine studios being able to add a tab or menu item to their MindBodyOnline interface that they could load up with news, resources, and events from an EYN content consolidator? What if every signatory had an EYN portal on their homepage?<\/p>\n But yet\u00a0another fancy web-based tool does not a movement make. The value of EYN could be to mesh the best of progressive yoga content and activism opportunities into the presentation of regular studio programming, through which actual people people actually meet and feel things together and maybe have tea. It could function as the thematic backdrop for self-work. That’s what politics is, anyway.<\/p>\n An online foundation\u00a0could open the door for studio owners to pick and choose initiatives and commitment levels that suited their time and budgetary limitations, as well as the tolerance of their student base for activism. A studio in Ithaca would be well-positioned to go full-on progressive-political, trying all kinds of things that wouldn\u2019t fly in Phoenix. But both could be supported by and affiliated with the same stream of content and inspiration. And neither\u00a0would be working alone.<\/p>\n I mentioned above that global yoga operates under the pretence of political neutrality. Not to belabour this, but it\u2019s a pretence because the culture lives in spaces of privilege and non-diversity where financial boundaries and time constraints restrict accessibility. Modern global yoga has grown in popularity in perfect sync with the rise of neoliberalism. We could almost say ((Brian Culkin has a forthcoming book chapter on this.)) that yoga functions as\u00a0the individualistic religion of the neoliberal era. Even most of its physical spaces exist through the processes of deindustrialization and gentrification that have mercilessly increased inequality.<\/p>\n In other words, as the notion of the common good has catastrophically devolved over the past forty years to where we are today, yoga culture has thrived. Isn’t that weird? Its thrived\u00a0in part by not pushing back, by letting white and privileged people restore themselves without questioning themselves.\u00a0Maybe, this week, this fact has become unbearable to many\u00a0of you.<\/p>\n The\u00a0typical yoga studio is already a politicized space. At this critical juncture, what kind of politics do we want it to communicate? Could\u00a0there be a more pressing time\u00a0to mobilize every resource we have?<\/p>\n![\"as](\"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/Screen-Shot-2016-11-11-at-12.14.43-PM.png\")
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