Practicing Yoga as Resistance

Voices of Color in Search of Freedom

Cara Hagan, Cara Hagan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000374919
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Femminismo e teoria femminista

Bringing together a diverse chorus of voices and experiences in the pursuit of collective bodily, emotional, and spiritual liberation, Practicing Yoga as Resistance examines yoga as it is experienced across the Western cultural landscape through an intersectional, feminist lens.

Naming the systems of oppression that permeate our lived experiences, this collection and its contributors shine a light on the ways yoga practice is intertwined with these systems while offering insight into how people challenge and creatively subvert, mitigate, and reframe them through their efforts.

From the disciplines of yoga studies, embodiment studies, women's and gender studies, performance studies, educational studies, social sciences, and social justice, the self-identified women, queer, BIPOC, and White allies represented in this book present an interdisciplinary tapestry of scholarship that serves to add depth to a growing assemblage of yoga literature for the 21st century.

Part I

Invitations

Chapter 1

Essential questions for inner and outer liberation

Cara Hagan

An exposition of personal experience is useful in that it provides an accessible entryway into larger conversations. In a conversation about yoga, where it is easy to spiral into philosophical territory, personal experience helps to keep the conversation grounded in an embodied realm. In this essay, I impart my personal journey to arriving at a set of questions I hope you’ll consider deeply in your own yoga practice, and as you move through this volume. Too, it is my hope that this piece is an opening to a larger conversation about the need for healing spaces full of people who are more aware of the ways oppression and discrimination effect some of the people who may show up in those spaces, and those people who may choose not to show up at all because they do not feel welcome or understood. As a Black woman living in America, I am familiar with the reticence communal yoga practice can provoke and the desire and express need for yoga spaces for people of color. Marching along my own journey in yoga practice and philosophy, I have found that regular reevaluation has served me in shedding unhelpful patterns and making important breakthroughs. These breakthroughs most often bloom from the seed of a question. In the spirit of inspiring open and honest dialogue, I present this piece to you in the form of a letter. I begin this letter with questions. At the climax of the piece, I propose a set of questions which have become my most important touchstones both in yoga and in life. Finally, I end the piece with questions for the future. Let’s begin:

Dear Reader,

What do we do with collective trauma? What do we do with collective fear? How do we transform a culture of panic into a culture of understanding? More specifically, how do we cultivate and maintain an ethos of peace? To answer these questions and to begin to move into a place of actionable outcomes, it is important to ask exactly what peace includes. I imagine the way one describes peace is different from person to person, but I also imagine each definition has something to do with ease, and with the ability to live without environmental, personal, interpersonal and institutional obstacles or burdens. For me, peace requires freedom from oppression, as oppression in my opinion – forms of oppression imposed by both outer forces and inner struggle – is the biggest barrier to freedom. As ever, it seems that the world is at odds with how to balance the roles of peace and power in our societies, and it remains up to us to determine how we will proceed toward a future with which contemporary generations, and generations yet to come, can live.

Like many, results of the 2016 presidential election sent me reeling. ¹ The idea that our country had willfully chosen racism, xenophobia, misogyny, contempt for the poor and working class, disregard for collective education and collective well-being among other social ills as the new order, sickened me. It rendered me fearful for what the future held. The most alarming events in the year following the inauguration included the rise of an emboldened White supremacist movement (Blow, 2017), a year of gun violence and police brutality with numbers of incidents and victims on par with the previous two years (Sullivan et al., 2017), attempts at dismantling public education and healthcare (Green, 2017a and b, Pear et al., 2017), imposed barriers to refuge for people in need of safe places to live (Shear and Cooper, 2017), and attempts to further damage an already ailing earth (Popovich and Schlossberg, 2017). Fast forward to 2020, and the confluence of the Coronavirus pandemic and renewed attention to the murders of innocent Black and Brown people by police and White vigilantism has created a dystopian world we could never have imagined. While not all of the events of the past four years can be attributed directly to the general election results, it can be argued that the presidential election and the minutia surrounding the installation of the Trump administration created an environment where the oppression of marginalized people and wide-spread ignorance have become socially and politically acceptable.

In the year leading up to, and directly following the election in my small, Southern, Appalachian town, I observed a multitude of reactions: panic, sadness, paralysis, apathy, and for some, a kind of giddy excitement that people could finally express sentiments about the world that may have been previously considered objectionable, at least on the surface, by accepted social norms. On the campus where I work, several White students took to the sidewalks at night, writing racist messages in chalk for our students of color to find in the mornings. For our undocumented students, messages encouraging them to “go home,” were particularly disconcerting. Several minority students experienced repeated incidents of verbal harassment on campus and expressed feelings of unsafety (Cole, 2017 Hayes, 2016). A pick-up truck, with the muffler sawed off and a large Confederate flag flying off of the back hitch, would speed down our small main street each day, as if to remind everyone what the new America was going to be like and to challenge anyone brave enough to dispute it. On televisions in bars and restaurants across the region, Fox News claimed to predict a revitalized American society where order would be restored and the American dream could be repaired (Manning, 2017, Smith, 2020). As one of a small community of people of color at my institution and in my town, I felt isolated, afraid, and wondered how any response I could muster would help to ease the impact of these events, both nationally and right at home, much less make any real change. A longtime community-engaged artist and activist, I was no stranger to action. And though I realized that the events of 2016 and 2017 were just more knots in a long string of injustices our country has experienced, the anxiety they produced felt uncontrollable. And what do I do when it feels like I can’t get a grasp on a dizzying world?

I gather people. I make place. I make art. And I step onto my mat.

Except, this time, I could not get on my mat.

At the same time I found myself fretful about the direction and future of American society, I found myself disillusioned with the yoga community. As a Black woman who has been practicing yoga for over fifteen years in the United States, this was certainly not the first time I’ve felt cynicism toward the yoga community. This time though, the sting of what felt like abandonment by that community left me deflated and unmotivated to practice. Like the times I had become disillusioned in the past, I found the violence and discrimination I saw and experienced out in the world repackaged for me under the guise of spirituality, in spaces that claimed to offer refuge from those very injustices. I found yoga teachers who problematized bodies of color, disguising such discussions as anatomy lessons. ² I found fellow yogis uninterested in the ways my experiences as a Black woman informed my experiences on the mat. I experienced out-and-out discouragement from speaking about race, gender, and class in yoga spaces. And, I encountered White yogis who claimed that the election and the events that followed were karmic events, and that the only victims of the events were those who victimized themselves. Already feeling the pressure of needing to dialogue about the role of contemplative practice in times of sociopolitical turbulence with other practitioners of color – people who could better identify with my concerns and experiences – I was compelled to begin a project entitled, Mindfulness and Resistance, in the spring of 2016. It began as a series of interviews, and a survey I sent out on social media, with the intention to write an article. However, the real intention, a deeper intention I hadn’t even admitted to myself going into the project, was to find a community. As soon as I began conducting the interviews, with such teachers, inspirers, and change-makers like Jassamyn Stanley, Dr. Chelsea Jackson Roberts, Jana Long, Hillary Lopes, and more, I realized that the project was going to grow to be more than an article. Ultimately, that initiative grew into this book and the community of writers who have shared their talents with us. In the spirit of wanting to be energetically engaged in resistance to mounting injustice and wanting to feel less isolated in my home community, in October 2016, I started a grass-roots organizing group in my town called, Small and Mighty Acts (SAMA). SAMA is a space where anyone who wants to find creative ways of being involved in community building, activism, and local politics can gather to pitch ideas, learn collective organizing strategies, and be inspired to participate in civic life from a place of power (Hagan, 2016). Built on the philosophy of Creative Social Stewardship, - “a method of community engagement, which invites citizens to tap into their whimsical, radical, colorful, innovative selves to foster and preserve inclusive, emotionally sustainable community environments that combat social stigma, discrimination and systemic oppression through outward creative expression” (Hagan, 2016) – SAMA represents an approach to activism through community care.

Despite what felt like enlivening developments, I still found it difficult to practice with any regularity. I realized that if I had any hope of returning to my practice and to the yoga community – and not in a superficial way – I had to start digging. I had to ask questions that both scrutinized and challenged my reticence, and my relationship to the practice and the community around it. I had to confront the reasons why the confluence of the election, my experience of the fallout from that, and my perceived abandonment by the yoga community had left me averse to being deep in my practice, and therefore, deep in myself.

The line of inquiry that emerged from this realization changed my practice, and it changed the ways I show up to what I consider my ongoing call to resistance in the face of injustice. Finally, the experience offered me a repeatable methodology to share with others who wish to creatively engage yogic practice as a platform for inner and outer liberation.

Instead of sitting down for a series of long, probing meditations I assumed would be wholly uncomfortable and counterproductive, I thought it best to begin with my body. Throughout the year of 2016 and the first half of 2017, I experienced incredible physical discomfort, marked by migraines, regular bouts of vertigo, muscle weakness, digestive trouble, lower back pain, swelling in my right Achilles tendon, swelling in my left knee, and tension throughout my shoulders, neck and jaw. It was a year-and-a-half riddled with insomnia from an inability to shut my mind off. I spent more time in a doctor’s office between 2016 and 2017 than I had in the ten years prior. My initial reaction to the physical sensations I was experiencing was to get rid of them, however necessary, however possible. Interestingly enough, after several visits to specialists and a battery of tests, the doctors found nothing inherently wrong with my body. They could not medicate me. Yes, they did find some allergies of which I was previously unaware, but those were mitigated easily enough. And yes, I was officially diagnosed with migraines, but other than that, everyone told me I was one of the healthiest individuals they had ever met. Many of the doctors suggested I try stress-reduction, or relaxation techniques. When I left their care, I was left with those uncomfortable sensations and no answers as to how to address them. I felt trapped.

I began to imagine my life as never feeling “normal,” again. I began to devise ways to work around my ailments, tricks and strategies to mentally override my body’s signals, and not let on to others that I didn’t feel well. One day though, I cracked. “I can’t do this anymore,” I said to myself in the bathroom mirror. I needed to get free.

“What does liberation look like?” I asked myself. “What does it feel like? What does liberation move like?”

My question, I found, was not just about physical discomfort. It was about the oppression I was experiencing in the world around me and within my own body. It was about collective liberation. A series of yoga poses may work to alleviate the discomfort in my body (and any body) temporarily, but I surmised that if I wanted to truly experience liberation I needed to look closely at mechanism...