get woke-- yoga for the revolution!

#yogafortherevolution #yogaforafearlessplanet #yoga for change #getwoke #breathingspacecollective #consciousness

Healing is revolutionary. I recently wrote this on my You Tube channel. I had attended the #weheal virtual conference on racial healing and listened to professor, Denise Sheverington speak in her eloquent, inspiring way. As I listened and mindlessly carried out the tasks of making breakfast, something stopped me in my tracks and I slid down into the easy chair to muse.

The crisis of faith that has been lurking in my peripheral gaze began to speak to me. Only this time, my brain was trying to make something useful out of all the questioning, out of all the philosophy digested, out of all the pain and heartache experienced and witnessed. Yoga seems to be the pastime of the privileged. Today's yoga. The college students who take yoga as an elective, never sit up tall, and refuse to take their socks off. In a world that is dying, in a world whose inhabitants cannot learn to get along, in a world where commodities have become the only language we speak what does yoga have to do with it?

What does yoga have to do with global warming? With racial hatred? With oppression? Everything!

Even as Sheverington and Thich Nhat Hanh report, oppression, ongoing injustice, and anxiousness and worry make our bodies sick. Even to see the Truth be awakened to what actually is and really SEE the social issues, environmental degradation, hatred and violence is to suffer deeply. Yoga teaches that seeing the Truth is not the same as happiness. If you are not suffering, Thay says then you have seen nothing at all.

Out of compassion for them, I, dwelling in their hearts, destroy with the shining lamp of self knowledge the darkness born of ignorance. __Bhagavad Gita

The Greeks called it kenosis a self emptying and becoming receptive to what is. A state perhaps experienced in meditation. A state one might seek as one connects body and mind into a yoga mindset. Insight gained in meditation is a liberatory force and as scholar and activist, Paulo Freire wrote: liberation must be for the world. And Krishna tells Arjuna in the Gita: If you will not fight this righteous war, then you will fail in your duty. Insight gained via meditation is the spark that lights the fire of tapas of our action, our discipline of liberatory praxis/action, of courage. Tapas becomes the way we address the question-- what are you going to do about the position of you in the world? To stoke up the embers slightly alight--- so you can burn for the world. Yoga asks of you: Can you be courageous in the world-- for the world-- of the world? Yoga teaches us to find our super powers and put them to use.

In 1932, psychologist Carl Jung wrote that ancient Indian psychology is reported to be one of the only bodies of philosophical knowledge that opens up and explores consciousness to the depth that it does. In The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga he continues to write that mindfulness practice and other Eastern based psychologies allows the person to move beyond the “stultifying limitations of Western thought (p. xix)” and “develop maps of inner experience grounded in the transformative potential (p.xix)” Similarly, much of the classic yoga texts marry theory with practice for an outcome to be an emergence of the individual to act with praxis in the outer world. And, interestingly for me, is that these texts existed independently of the bindings of Western thought-- even in isolation away from any influence there of. How refreshing!These texts place us in a real world and that it exists much due to the ignorance of humanity and how the individual comes to engage with the world is by the freeing of the self. As Georg Feurstein is quoted in Jung: “yoga is… primarily intended to induce a transformation in the practitioner. (p. xxii) Curiouser and curiouser! How illuminating and eye opening when it's revealed that historically the ancient psychology was taught to folks to help renounce the ancient caste system of India, thus situating the individual in a transformational praxis where ideologies and language and culture of domination and oppression existed. The psychology of yoga evolved contained within and as a result of a culture that maintained a status quo based in hierarchical domination and powerlessness.

Secular meditation can make the practitioner aware of their bondage to the status quo-- their ties to the secular, to the mythical or in false alienating thinking, and societal structures. These words have been inspired by Freire. He describes that attitudes of adhesion to the oppressor and the institutions and societal dictates are what perpetuates the status quo. So, as Will Smith’s character in Pursuit of Happiness (2006)who struggles with homelessness only to strive to become a stock broker, aspires to be an oppressor. Based on the true story, of Chris Gardner, I ask, when does Gardner ever work to dismantle the structures that created the desperate and disparate situation of the homeless problem in the world once he becomes rich? Once the character has pursued happiness, he identifies with his oppressors and turns a blind eye to the suffering of the oppressed. And, as Freire says, the context remains the same.

Freire describes groups of individuals what he calls bourne seculars-- individuals born with a blind eye maybe what we might describe as being entitled. Folks through no action, intention or thought of their own simply exist without consequence or concern for disenfranchisement of others. Here we can heed the wisdom of Walter Benjamin, whose wondrous words still rivet me today as I once quoted him in my Masters thesis in 1995. He describes a perspectival alienation and a melancholia acquired by the post-colonial subject and occur once that individual acknowledges the historicity of eternal truths, specifically the truths and values that masked the domination of Western culture and their own benefit from being part of the oppressor class; seeing our complicity with; and feeling deeply, "the shame of it all" as actor, Charlie Scheider calls it. This melancholia is an inevitable stage in self interrogation that occurs in the mind of the privileged subject. Mindful critical awareness steeped in reflective, contemplative kindness and self compassionate thoughts is just the medicine the doctor ordered to help the Western practitioner interrogate their insertion in the status quo tragedy-- the dominant, Western culture. It also opens space for interrogation and discussion of notions of indoctrination, discrimination, difference, and issues of empowerment and agency.

We need a space an inner sanctum in which to interrogate social processes that underlie societal norms. Back in the day, we called this critical consciousness. This refers to awareness of the systemic, widespread presence of inequalities in educational, social and economic systems (Simon 2010p. 26). Now, and actually since Martin Luther King, Jr. made it famous, we refer to this as getting woke. Woke refers to having an awareness of issues concerning social and racial injustices. It is understood as Benjamin revealed that it takes courage, compassion, wide open eyes, and especially a wide open heart to look within honestly-- to dig deep-- and dig deeper still-- to see the tendrils of webbing spinning out of the moment we left the sanctum of the womb-- and some would say that began with the very inceptive spark of egg meeting sperm. As this is tough and uncomfortable stuff at the least – painful and numbing at the most, we need a safe, specially designated space to enter into so that we can get woke. As author, Tomi Adeyemi writes in Oh Magazine online: "… if you can heed the call of your conscience, if you can look bravely and honestly within, you can help nudge the world toward a better place… to be woke is to see and say what has gone unseen, unspoken. Sometimes trying to stay awake is exhausting-- and you find yourself closing your eyes.” Meditation can be the safe space to allow the practitioner to safely and wisely interrogate their own bondage to the status quo. Music artists, Tribe by Quest wrote that its removing the crust from the 3rd eyelid-- “now it’s kinda open longs to see the sights" (peoples instinctive travels & the paths of rhythm, 1990)

“Stay woke implies a conscious effort at striving, course correcting, and growth. Not static-- once achieved never to be engaged in again. (Sam Sanders NPR radio 2018)” In my most humble view, there remains something beneficial in the deliberate use of this expression, in the word woke itself, that seems to be also what the liberatory yoga philosophers in ancient India meant about awakening. To awaken, or get woke in today’s lingo, has been around for quite some time as a way to relate to the world and be in the world and of the world. The process of awakening can be understood as also coming to a state of freedom-- the free to be you and me state of moksha, a liberatory self, guided by ones deep Truth. Meditation can help one find agency in the face of repression and power-- find the oasis of liberation-- to create the breathing space necessary to imagine. Let meditation and yoga be how you keep the sweet fire that is ignited in you burning sweetly.