Listening with a Yogic Mind and Heart

The events of the last two weeks worldwide since the murder of George Floyd have propelled us into an unprecedented national dialogue on #blacklivesmatter.

All I can do some mornings is hang my head at the racist system I am part of. The very neighborhood of Austin I live in is clearly thoroughly privileged. My education was largely paid for. Neither I nor any member of my family has experienced gun violence, or racial violence or violence of any kind, except perhaps the self-inflicted kind.

When we as part of this privileged minority ask what we can do about the problem of racism which has such deep roots in our history and our culture, I think of my parents who thought education was the answer to everything. I know now that it is decidedly not the answer to everything, but it does not hurt to read and learn and listen and observe carefully.

When I think of the global community of Iyengar yoga students and teachers of which I am a part, again I hang my head. The originators of this approach to yoga are people of color. Iyengar himself when he first came to the West experienced racism directed to him personally. He spoke about it and pointed out that our job as yogis is to practice the yamas and niyamas. He left it at that. So for years, I thought we could leave it at that, too.

It is now, however, abundantly clear that we absolutely cannot leave it at that. Although reading has helped shape my thinking about where to go from here (and I’ll mention a few books below*), the times demand action. Social media are now full of links to online sites where we can donate to bail funds, to Breonna Taylor’s wrongful murder fund, to the George Floyd family fund. More than this, though, we need to redefine something ESSENTIAL.

What is ESSENTIAL work? Is it ESSENTIAL that we continue to live in a society where not all children have access to day care, where not all children have access to a quality education, where not all young adults have equal access to housing and jobs? I think not, so we have to work on the local level and then state and national levels to bring new legislation forth that will protect our young equally and our elders equally. We need new legislation to mandate a living wage for day-care workers and primary adult-care givers, plus health and vacation benefits for them. We need to recognize who actually performs these ESSENTIAL jobs and pay more than lip service to their SERVICE. They deserve medals! They deserve benefits. We all deserve equal access to jobs and education. Surely the sixties and seventies showed us part of a way forward on those issues.

But we need to go much further if our values from those years are to truly have meaning.

If that will create a world in which my descendants have less than my parents’ generation or my generation had or has, so be it. I’d like to share with you a few words written by our SOLE Iyengar Yoga teacher of color from Austin Texas. Her family has lived here for generations; her grandfather built the house in East Austin where she and her husband now live:

I believed BEFORE the death of Mr George Floyd that this country is embedded in systemic racism. Most are blind to this fact. they don't need to see. This country was built on racism. This
concept is so difficult to explain to people who have never had to deal directly with it. The whole thing makes me angry. It made my parents angry, their parents and so on. When people say "all lives matter" it devalues me - directly saying that systemic racism doesn't exist. The brutality and the murders of black people all around the world is proof that the lives of black people don't really matter. 

The entire system needs to change, education, housing, employment, judicial all of it, it's all designed to suffocate me. –Lisa Johnson, Iyengar Yoga teacher, Austin, Texas (with permission)

“Designed to suffocate me.” Those words hit me very hard and have me determined to seek a path to a better world for all in this lifetime, on this earth NOW. Surely our work in Yoga can help guide us on the path. As Resmaa Menakem so eloquently points out in his transformational work on racism, it’s not so much “white supremacy” as it is “white BODY supremacy.” Maybe he has struck nerve here. Trauma, as we all know, lives deep within the body. When that trauma is racialized, as we see in our country, the BODY needs to be treated as well as the mind and spirit. Of course, in this lifetime, on this earth, all are interconnected. Yet we still cannot treat one without treating the others. The body and must be dealt with. It can, if left untreated, lead to the deepest suffering.  Perhaps this truth is part of the reason why so very many people have found solace, meaning, and balm for trauma in the practice of Yoga. My hopeful expectation is that we can all move forward and do the needful to dismantle white degeneracy in order to create a more just world.

Books: 

The Warmth of Other Suns, about the Great Migration after the Civil War

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, about one black family’s journey through the medical maze

Just Mercy, about Brian Stephenson’s work with the Equal Justice Initiative

The New Jim Crow, about our Prison Injustice System

My Grandmother’s Hands, about white BODY supremacy and the necessity to address racial trauma, by Resmaa Menakem

Other media: 

Lots available from a movie about Henrietta Lacks, to one about Bryan Stephenson to a series about the four Black adolescents convicted and later cleared of the crime of rape in New York (“When they See Us”).