yoga and #metoo

"On some level, I wish also that I had spoken publicly about them (Jois' sexual assaults) before now, but they were confusing...I didn’t really know how to talk about them without disparaging the entire system." Mary Taylor

The #metoo movement has roiled social media and the news cycles for months.  Industry after industry has shuddered through a series of allegations that prove sexual abuse goes hand in hand with our current structures of power.  

I've been quiet.  

I've been angry.  I've been upset.  I've felt a need to set my agenda aside when it comes to wider social issues.  As a woman I've felt a need to take care of my own boundaries.  As a yoga teacher I've been upfront about the reality of sexual abuse and the inherent vulnerability of a yoga practice.  I hope my teaching stands in defiance to cultural standards; I want to provoke exploration of our own inner worlds, both joy and sorrow; I hope I have been approachable as an ally. But I've avoided any kind of public statement about #metoo.  It felt inopportune.  I didn't want to use shared pain as a personal platform.

More honestly, #metoo hit a nerve. I've been confused, hurt, and pissed off.  More close to the bone, still: it's one thing to read the news, to have conversations in public, and to do some serious ball breaking in all sorts of contexts, but another thing again to question yoga.  I've wanted to keep yoga separate.  I've wanted to keep it sacrosanct.  I don't want to befoul something so dear to my own sanity, so necessary to my own well being.

But #metoo applies to yoga as much as it does the red carpet or the Senate.  We need better conversations in our yoga practices. We need more integrity in our teaching. We need  accountability and willingness to face reality in our yoga practice.

Silence, incredulity, and misogyny trickle down social ladders with far more efficacy than economic benefits ever have.  Social outrage has brought with it a barrage of information, emotional overwhelm, and pain.  Good men have been left confused by the prevalence of sexual misconduct, the systemic undermining of women and kids.  Women have expressed relief and a swelling of pathos.  But people have also expressed pain.

There is a sense of hope, of justice.  We are alight with passion and righteous anger. But there is also a sense of frustration and foreboding.

I'm frustrated.  I've found the movement hard in its hyperbole and late to the game insights.  I'm angry that we're still surprised by revelations of sexual assault.  It's infuriating that we should debate the reality of rape culture when we have a pussy grabbing predator in chief. #Metoo has brought important issues to the table - including bringing some perps to task, shaking up institutional hierarchies, and creating a platform for victims to speak out.

But let's not make the mistake of thinking it is entirely safe for victims to speak out.  Let's not think publicly sharing their story is the right thing for all survivors to do.  For many it's really not.  It's really, not.  

#metoo is a good thing.  But it isn't an answer to the problem.  Its just a collective howl.  

The language of this whole discussion still places the burden of proof on women*.   That language keeps us talking about how many women are assaulted per annum rather than talking about the number of men getting away with rape.  This burden is an inheritance -  the inheritance is generational, deep to social structures, possibly foundational .  It's a heavy weight that shames girls and diffuses accountability.  The burden of shame distorts real vulnerability to 'men are bad' and 'women are angry'. The truth is not that men are bad, but a small minority of abusive people get away with harm over and over again.  The issue is not that women are angry but that women are targets.

This pervasive atmosphere threatens even those women and girls who are not personally targeted and it confuses the population as a whole about complicity.  This is the means by which fear can wound as deeply as physical blows, this is how the psychological damage of rape culture lays hold on so many voices, even those who aren't directly involved. Shame poisons everybody.  Shame dirties the whole damned culture.  It's a displacement of accountability. It's a way to think that 'it happened to me once' is the end of the story, when in reality women often live through repeated transgressions.  The transgressions begin when we are children. They range from unsolicited demonstrations of adult penises, to date rape, to a shame based gendered reality as working adults. Women will be objectified in school, in the workplace, by the media, and in public spaces while making less than a man for the same job done.  It's patronizing, pure and simple.  The difficulty is the way in which we're all participating in it.  

Dismantling the patriarchy means acknowledging the ways in which we lie to ourselves.

Gurus and cults

Spiritual, physical, and emotional power over others creates abuses of power.  Yoga is no exception.  We've got ourselves a long litany of known, suspected, and occasionally outed abusers.  The current manifestation of yoga is shallow: social problems breed in its atmosphere like fungus.  Things are positioned to get worse, not better.  

These practices call to people who are lost.  Yoga is marketed as a balm for physical and emotional pain. We all come to yoga as clients or students, which makes us vulnerable by definition. There is zero accountability and a high expectation of charismatic teachers.  Projection and transference run high.  I am not interested, here and now, in naming the names of the patriarchs or the revered saints who turned out to be assholes.  That work is important.  But it's not the work I'm doing right here. Right here I'm simply establishing the background:  like #metoo, ours is not a culture of isolated abusive incidents, it's an atmosphere in which harm thrives.

I have never been hurt by a yoga teacher.  My traumas preceded yoga; yoga was the thing that helped.  So when criticisms of yoga come up, I tend to distance myself from the crazy.  I compromise.  I trade off a little insanity in order to keep what is dear to me close.  

Although the cliques and scandals of the yoga world didn't have anything to do with me personally, I was always aware that they were there.  There have been teachers who were inappropriate.  There have been weird moments, too much skin, too much touch, uncomfortable spaces.  There have been studios and schools in which the relationships between students and teachers, insiders and outsiders, were clearly unhealthy.  But this always existed just outside my personal orbit.  

This is my point: misogyny and abuse of power are systemic issues. They are old school and endemic.  It shouldn't come as any surprise, then, that the same issues exist in yoga.  

But when it comes to yoga, I'm (and I'm means we're) oddly disinclined to do the right thing.  I'm prone to selective listening.  Sometimes this expresses itself as spiritual contortion, a kind of dichotomy between yoga and real life.  Oddly, this also shows up as unity talk, a kind of everything happens for a greater purpose and therefore acceptance, trance.  Personally, and this is important, there is a renunciation of responsibility.  I lean back into the safe distance of theory and philosophy.  Again: I, and I mean: we.

My first exposure to yoga was the Bikram school as taught in New York City in the mid 2000s.  I was new to the whole shebang; my experience was limited to local teachers and a room that shook when the train passed below.  I never came anywhere near Bikram himself, nor his inner circle.  I heard the stories.  I knew what went on at trainings.  I was familiar with his outlandish 'script' and heard each and every one of his lecherous jokes second hand. I saw pictures of his throne and his body, nearly naked, mounted on the nearly naked bodies of his students.  I knew.

But I wanted the yoga.  I needed it.  And so, as millions of others have done in similar scenarios, I rationalized.  I figured it had nothing to do with me.  

Accountability and complicity

The 'none of my business' response is familiar.  It's how most people respond to domestic violence or campus rape.  It's also how we respond to abuse by the upper classes, as if rules and ethics no longer applied, there.  Like middle ground Americans dumbfounded when someone like Trump is elected to office or confused by the urgency of Black Lives Matter, ‘none of my business' is related to 'I had no idea'.  It's an attempt to focus on a rare and evil individual so that we don't see how pervasive the bullshit in the atmosphere has become.   

By ignoring the broader implications, 'none of my business' shores up the status quo.  It's complicit, but banal.  It's only ever guilty of having had really good intentions and really bad information.

This is how #metoo has been effective: Hollywood suddenly refused to be complicit.  It outed Harvey Weinstein.  Hollywood kicked him to the curb.  Charges have been brought against him in multiple countries.  The press ran and continued to run the story.  Other power brokers refused to work with him.  Once the ball got rolling and other men were accused, they too were canceled from programming, dropped from studios, contracts were ended and charges brought.  The tech industry did the same.  The media followed suit.  With Roy Moore, the good old boys themselves came under fire.  

#metoo is a rare case of society holding perpetrators accountable.  

I watched all this with a kind of guttural, primal, deep satisfaction.  It was as if all the ancient rage of wounded sisterhood had finally, finally landed a blow. My oldest, deepest, personal and ancestral wounds flickered in the dark. The fall of the patriarchy seemed a plausible, and a tremendously beautiful, and a completely earthly season whose time had come.

And I started to wrap my mind around something I'd not been able to, before.  

To say 'it has nothing to do with me' is complicity.  Generally speaking, even if a man in a position of power is known to have committed an assault, he'll not lose his backing.  He won't lose his job.  People will still buy whatever it is he's selling.  So long as we buy in, we're part of the problem.  I don't say this lightly.

As some of accused are seen as heroes, there is pain associated with realizing their behavior is less than heroic.  That Bill Cosby could be a serial rapist blew our everything is happy here stories out of the water.  But disbelieving a charismatic and powerful man has targeted an individual women belies an ignorance of how this kind of abuse works.  Behaving like a hero in public is part of it.

In those first few years of practice, one of my teachers used to tease about how slavish we were to the practice.  We're a cult, you know, she'd say.  She meant this as a joke.  I took it as a joke even as I knew, more or less, that it was true. It spoke some ugly realities about the things I was doing and the people I was associating with.  But I couldn't admit a flaw to something I loved so much.  I didn't know how to question the system without dismantling the system.  

So instead of questioning, I said it was none of my business.  That is, I said exactly what society taught me to say. It's slant talk, proof of the ways we're taught to believe it's in our own interest to undermine victims.  So long as ordinary human beings are complicit, rapists won't be held accountable.  If it is in our interest to uphold the system, accountability is impossible. Rape culture, thrives.

I said scandal in the yoga world didn't concern me, although it very much did concern me.  It was everywhere around me, at every single stage of my practice.

Separating the 'teaching' from the 'person'

I was so addicted to the practice I was willing to ignore the glaring defects of the subculture.  Sometimes we dismiss the problem by trying to parse 'the teaching' from 'the man'.  The movie business does this with Woody Allen and Roman Polanski;  offense is acknowledged, then  excused in the name of art.

This is a hard, inquiry, but it bears asking: what do you do with the art?  Do you watch Annie Hall?  It is hard, but I think human beings can do hard things.  I have to believe human beings are capable of that much discernment.  I think we can both take Woody Allen to task and talk about cinema.

I imagine Catholics faced with this same, mildly sick in their center, feeling, when the question of diddling priests comes up: how do you maintain fidelity to God, when God's earthly works are evil?

In feminist studies, it's said complicity in a culture's wrongs reflect our own self-hatred.

This is a challenging premise.  It posits agency, but most of us would argue ignorance of having any.  How are we responsible for the whole of a system?  Who are we to disparage the great works? How are we to assume ourselves responsible for something we stepped into ignorant?  What does an ordinary Catholic have to do with sexual abuse in the church?  What did Americans know of what was happening in Hitler's Germany, or Stalin's Russia?  Am I my brother's keeper?

In the first few years of my practice I was certainly naive.  I was ignorant.  I kept practicing because I needed the practice.  But when the John Friend scandal broke a few years later, I was a teacher, and I did feel a sense of responsibility.  I spoke out even when I knew it put my job on the line (I lost it).  I trusted what I was doing more than I needed the system.

It's only in retrospect that I can see the differences between the two periods of my practice; other than my response, there is very little difference between the scandals in the two schools.  So why did I respond differently? Where did that confidence, come from?  Why did I feel compelled to resist as a teacher when I hadn't as a student?  

Maybe this is just the gift of love and relationship: a parent will take personal risk to protect the vulnerable.  

Maybe it was just enough time, a few years, to move me from self-hate to something beyond it.  Here’s another thing feminists say: you can't 'empower' anybody, women included; women already have power.  

Maybe self-hatred and  self-ignorance are the same thing.  

So how do we move from disbelieving it has anything to do with us to shaking the system down?

I don't have a terribly hopeful answer, other than to say it is possible.  Hard inquiry is valuable.  If we feel empowered enough, we won't have a problem disparaging the system.  

That's easy to say and hard to see happening.  While I and lots of folks I know have dismissed the astanga system, for example,  I have a hard time imagining a time when yoga as a whole says, let's just end astanga yoga.  

Too many people still feel the system is beyond repute.  Too many people still want it.

In other words, too many people don't believe themselves, or us collectively, capable of anything better.

The false narrative of karma, the problem with trauma

One of the gifts of this practice is the way in which it changes our perspective.  Only when we realize we've been seeing things from a very specific point of view are we able to take in the possibility of there being any others.  You wake up one day and realize you've been stuck in a story or an old tape.  You observe your own thinking and behavior in practice, and suddenly understand that this is the way you think and behave all the time.  Only then do you have the option of doing something, different.

It’s important to realize the dominant narrative is not the only narrative.  It's important to challenge the stories we've been taught.  The familiar and well worn story of compassion fatigue, of doing the best we can, the idea that some things will never change aren’t the whole of reality.  These are just stories like other stories.  To say that this is just the way men are, or society is, is like using karma to argue powerlessness.  It’s bigger than me, therefore I can do nothing.

I don’t think karma works that way.  I think karma says here’s what you’ve been given, now what are you going to do?

Our use of the word trauma isn't much different.  Indeed I think there is a danger to habituating language, medicalizing it, or abstracting it away from ourselves.  These days it's become popular to talk about trauma, victims, even a need for 'trauma sensitive yoga'.  I'm not saying trauma sensitive yoga is a bad idea.  I'm just wondering if yoga without trauma sensitivity means anything.  I’m wondering what trauma is supposed to mean.  I wonder if there is any one who isn't touched and impressed and wounded.  Nobody gets out of here without a broken heart.  And I don't think a broken heart is the end of the story.

The cultural exchange between east and west had some problems, and yoga as we know it today has some major character flaws, but I don’t think it has to be this way.

To look for psychological, rather than cultural, reasons for rape culture and make victims of survivors might be causing us more trouble.  It slides dangerously close to the idea that men are aggressive, predatory, and irrational when aroused (read: ''men are bad").  It also comes dangerously close to dismissing  victims as damaged (read: "broken humans can't be fixed").

If we look carefully, alternative threads to this story are readily available.  I'm partial to the one that says not all men are predators; those few who are abusers tend to have been abused; the opposite, however, is not true: most survivors of abuse do not become abusive.

Read that five times slowly.  Most survivors of abuse do not become abusive.

I'm partial to the story that says healing is possible.

Forgiveness, redemption, and accountability

We conflate forgiveness, redemption, and accountability.  I was once asked if I had done the work of forgiving my rapist.  I shot back something snarky.  I said the suggestion blamed me, rather than my rapist, for the pain of rape.  I said some things are unforgivable.

I don't know why, other than ignorance, we find it so hard to hold sexual offenders accountable.  Why we should excuse the founder of a yoga school, or Picasso, or the college kid who rapes an unconscious girl behind a dumpster.  It's as though we fear holding people accountable would make everything fall apart: life as we know it would end, where would the accusations stop, men would no longer be men, we’d never understand each other or get any sex.  

But this is conflating accountability for redemption.  They are distinct, not either or.  We can both hold offenders accountable and redeem things like yoga, hollywood, politics.  

Which brings me back to forgiveness.  I don't know if I can say I've forgiven.  I don't know that any one should.  I don't even know how possible forgiveness, is.  I think trying to forgive prematurely, or being told to do so by others, means we're not really doing the work of healing.  I think the work of healing is hard.  But when we do that work, something happens.  Maybe it's not forgiveness, exactly.  It's not like the pain ends.  Nor does the shame.  Nor the need to be very careful indeed about who you share your heart and skin and pussy with.  

But I do think something happens.  There is a new thing in your experience.  This new thing both remembers and no longer has to.  It's rather wild, far beyond what you think of as you, but when it speaks it speaks with your own voice.  Forgiveness insists on having a life with love in it.  Forgiveness has fuck all to do with the people who cause harm. Forgiveness has to do with the folks who vow no further harm, not from this point forward, not in my name and not here and not now.  Forgiveness is wild.  It's brave enough to be vulnerable. Forgiveness recognizes that the system can and should be dismantled.  We can do better.

*when I say women, or indicate women are gendered targets of sexual violence, I understand and imply that sexual violence affects people of color, GLBTQ, immigrants and children as well.  I understand that this is systemic.  These issues are intractably related.

Magical Thinking, Yoga, and Internal Inquiry

Mostly, yoga is bullshit. This is breaking my heart.

One of my teachers says I should allow my heart to break.  Another shrugs when I say I'm about ready to leave the path and start working retail.  Leaving the path may be the path, he says.  Neither of these feel helpful. I'm finding myself standing still in the middle of the room a lot, lately, forgetting what I meant to do or losing the motivation. I find myself pausing before the locked studio door in the mornings, looking at the key, asking some kind of question that doesn't have words.

I started to write this last week.  I had been invited to a party.  Since I live in bare feet and messy hair, I generally thrill at the chance to put on a dress.  I've lived in New York and Paris, after all.  I am a woman who firmly believes in pretty shoes.  I sat down, the pretty dress on but the shoes, not.  They lay on the floor in front of the closet.  I looked at the shoes and I poked around with what I was feeling.  The yoga people were going to be at this party.  When I say that, I mean Lululemon, Yoga Fit, and Core Power.  A new yoga magazine has been launched.  As a studio owner, I ought to be there.  I ought, really, to advertise in it.  But their rates gave me sticker shock that lasted four hours and no small amount of cussing.  The party was to be artfully catered.  The magazine spread boasts luxury spa retreats, a few recipes, and a solid block of pretty ads with pretty girls.

My ambiguity about the party wasn't really about the party.  It probably wasn't even about the magazine.  In my normal mood, I would have damned the pretense but enjoyed the swank music and night out.  But there was too much subtext.  My mood was fragile.

The yoga world has been gearing up for something called International Yoga Day.  Studios are hosting special classes.  They're running sales. The internet and social media preen and belch.  But no one mentions that this event is largely being pushed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Indian BJP.

I'm crabby. There's a new mn yoga magazine and they're running a column called "ask a swami". Green smoothies and finding your tribe (on a beach, apparently) are in the same sentences as satya and ahimsa. Its my day off and maybe I'm just exhausted, maybe it's my own crap coming up, but all I really want to do is quit and stay laying right here. Be very angry or start working retail and leave this yoga crap to the corporate gyms and self help self publishing monolith. The bad guys win. The goodness in us is wounded. I'm tired. #yogateacher

A photo posted by Karin (@coalfury) on May 18, 2015 at 1:09pm PDT

Modi's government is enforcing yoga postures much in the way the third Reich pushed calisthenics.  Modi is connected to a government that is selling wide swaths of his country off to global corporations - think Lehman brothers - dispossessing an already starving people living on less than 20 rupees a day.  Modi is mobilizing one of the largest armies in the world against some of the poorest and hungriest people in the world.  India is allying itself with the U.S. (and Isreal) against China, much in the way Afghanistan was drawn into the orbit of the U.S. against Russia in a previous cold war.  We've seen how that worked out.  International Yoga Day is Modi's nationalist propaganda.  It's then taken up by yoga studios in the west as a very good idea.  I bristled.  I began to write this all down.

Then the shootings in Charleston happened, and I stopped writing.

* When I was a little girl, I really wanted a pony.  I believed I would - someday, after I rode my pony to Olympian fame and wrote a Book - fall in Love and live happily ever after.   I've heard that other people dream of being President.  Or flying.

I'm a recovering alcoholic and the only woman I know who has two bought-as-wedding-dresses, never worn, hanging in my closet.  I haven't ridden a horse in years.

It seems to me that much of our understanding and practice of yoga is this naive.  It amounts to magical thinking.  Suffering begins in the mind, says the superficial reading of this stuff: think positively and your suffering will end.  Doors are said to open and teachers appear.  Wealth is said to manifest.  We will, vaguely, thrive.

Magical thinking is self indulgent, petty, and dangerous.  It's a version of spirituality that hasn't grown up.  Most of us stopped believing in Santa Claus and many of the tenets of 'theology' a long time ago; the archaic structures of religion no longer seem relevant in our post-modern and post-metaphysical world.  We believe in science, after all.  The premises of Buddhism, yoga, and 'mindfulness' suck us in like Walmart's halo over a parkinglot.  Convenient.  It's all the sweetness of soul, with no god in it!  We can go for this.  We consume it.

And why shouldn't we? It's so pretty.  Who wouldn't want to meditate in Costa Rica?

Who wouldn't buy a product that packages 'happiness' backed by modern day science?

We've overlooked, or failed to appreciate, the more substantial and difficult teachings of this path.  The prior ones.  The difficult work of accepting pain as true.  Ourselves as self-interested and completely, absolutely, contingent.

Sometimes, pain doesn't go away.  Sometimes we are rejected.  We don't thrive.  How could we thrive when we don't even live up to our own standards? Green smoothies, aside.  I used to think I was a pretty damaged piece of work.  But any perusal of Barnes and Nobel and it's oversized self help, motivational, and DIY sections reminds me I am not the only one.

Yoga students swarm to the teachers who promise 15 day makeovers, personal power, and bliss. The modern popularity of mindfulness isn't indicative of a healing culture.  It only proves how many of us are wounded.

*

Today, in India, a right wing government is pushing yoga exercises.  In our Western yoga culture, yogis push yoga in the schools.  I am concerned.

Magical thinking is dangerous.  It pushes 'living our truth' to narcissistic action.  It displaces responsibility for doing our own work onto 'the divine' or 'karma'.  Magical thinking obverts self inquiry and neglects the suffering of the world.

We are dangerously loose with our stories about what 'yoga' and 'India' are.  We idealize, taking what works for us while dismissing what we don't want, a kind of buffet style enlightenment. We adopt the names of Hindu goddesses or the sanskrit words for 'fire' or 'space'.  We hold big festivals with reggae superimposed on Kirtan and asana teachers signing autographs to applause and sighs.  We have no real idea what India is, and tend to forget that Pakistani border, let alone Kashmir and the Tamil, the Maosit uprising, megacity overwhelm and the displaced agrarian community in which IMF and microbank endebted farmers commit suicide and an overwhelming - unthinkable - number of human beings live in famine conditions.  We forget that Muslims even live there.  If we do remember, we remember only in the context of terrorism;  we wonder what 'kind' of Muslims they are.

Tourist yogis who go to trainings and retreats in India send back Instagram pictures of themselves posing in temples, climbing on holy sites, and doing asana in front on the poor street children. Meanwhile, back stateside, the confluence of money and power results in sex scandals. What sells is emphasized over what is honest. Franchised studios shadow Starbucks like a kid brother.  Local studios disappear.  Advertising goes sexy.  Youtube videos teach people to do advanced asana and suddenly orthopeadic surgeons and physical therapists are treating yoga injuries as often as hockey injuries.  Sweaty, enthusiastic urbanites chant 'om' in spa like settings but few of them chant in protests, and while we're vaguely aware of riots in Baltimore we don't do anything other than post on Facebook about it.  Yoga 'service' trips amount to a vacation to third world countries, nominally advocating but really accomplishing about as much damage as Christian missionary work did.  We didn't realize a flash mob style 'om the bridge' event in Vancouver would insult First Nations people or inconvenience anybody.

We didn't think about anybody, at all.

We just wanted to feel whole.

And then the shootings happened in Charleston.

*

In trying to hold the space of the studio open to process the shooting, I felt exhaustion.  As though I were holding the walls up with my shoulders.  I found myself saying what my teachers have been saying, to me.  I get the irony.

What I say as a teacher is always something my teachers have said to me.

I didn't invent the path.

But I know what it says: now, the heart is breaking.  Now, the teachings of yoga.

*

I say this, often, when I teach:  we don't practice for the good days.  We practice for when it gets hard. I've wanted to say, in the national debate about mental illness, gun control, and the goddamned confederate flag, that we were racist last week, too.  I've wanted to say Baltimore.  Ferguson.  I don't know a black person who hasn't lived with racism their whole entire lives, and if I inspect my own life I find it in there, too.

I talk about death and grief and mourning in my classes, I talk about the waste feeling of our busy lives, I talk about fear and sadness.  I try to say love and strength and healing, but I say death. Grief.  Ghosts.  I know that in every single class I teach, there is someone who has lost someone near in the last few weeks.  I know this affects a persons practice for a year and more; I've seen it, even if they are so close to their own thoughts and bodies they can't see it for themselves.  I know that in every class there is trauma, financial fear, self doubt, people who have been rejected, taken for granted, people who are afraid to grow old.

I want, sometimes, to say 'feel how much I love you'.  I want to say hope and I end up saying look at your life.  I suppose these are the same thing.

*

There is more, subtext.  I've been full of piss and vinegar at the yoga world in recent weeks.  But that isn't new.

What is new is my own body going through a shift.  I had thought my yoga practice and changed lifestyle 'healed', mostly, my fibromyalgia.  In recent months, the pain has been steady.  I'm laid up and a week later I'm laid up again.  I feel betrayed.  I feel confused.  I wonder how I can teach if my body starts to give out.  I wonder how seriously I can take the 'healing' promises, if I am losing my health.  I wonder how seriously I can be taken.

There is more, still.  My best friend died this spring.  I wasn't expecting it and I wasn't expecting how deeply grief would move into my days.

And perhaps it is grief, only.  Or grief and physical illness.  But I'm watching myself lose my appetite, sleep, motivation.  I realize I'm depressed.  This makes me angry.  I ask someone for a referral for a therapist.

This is the question: did my lifestyle of overwork and physically using my body as a business tool lead to a worsening of my chronic condition?  Did grief trigger it?  Did depression fray my tolerance of the (always has been there) yoga bullshit to the point of disillusion?  What does any of this have to do with the shootings in Charleston, a pair of high heels, a continent I've never been to?

My teachers have shrugged.  This has felt like loneliness.  I keep finding myself standing still in the middle of the room, some forgotten thing in my hand.  But I know they are giving me solid, and downright traditional, guidance.  They are pointing me back to my own heart, asking me to stay with the question of my life, to answer not with ultimatums or theory but with as honest a next moment as I can stand.

I've been telling people, over and over again: yoga began as inner inquiry.  Through all of it's variations, history, branding.  Through all of those flashy characters and instagram super stars.  Through it's becoming a mass practice directly because of it's association with Indian nationalism.

My writing in the last few months has been hijacked.  It's all about grief.  Or perhaps, more truthfully, about friendship.  Maybe there is no difference: grief, friendship. When he died, I got a tattoo.  This was silly.  Also, not.  I lay in the back of a tattoo parlor in the East Village and listened to the punk rock we used to listen to, back when the East Village was the East Village and we were 16.  I get the irony.  The tattoo has words, they say 'I know I have a soul, because you touched it'.  This is what friends do for us. Make us better.  Illuminate our stupidity. Give us a sense of home and self.  The words of the tattoo are covered with more tattoo, a wordless black band.  

The friend is gone and all I'm left with is this shitty tattoo.  And when the hard days come, the only thing left is soul.  I'd be lying if I said I can wrap my head around this.  

It is impossible to step out of my body.  It is magical thinking to think that my body is anything but the body politic, that there is not a direct sutra-ed thread between my body and nine other bodies lying dead in a church.  There is a direct line between commercialism, economics, and terrorism.  I am all tangled up.  

It is maturity to know this, to go on loving when the heart breaks.  I can't very well leave the path, if I am it.  I might as well have some good shoes.  One of the teachers says: if yoga means union, what is it we are joining?  And what does that union feel like?  I am not writing about rage or morbid grief.  I am writing about love.  

I was, however, totally dressed for the occasion. A photo posted by Karin (@coalfury) on Jun 12, 2015 at 8:59pm PDT