Why I Can't Just Stick to the Yoga, or, All Yoga is Political (Part 1)

Photo by Emma Weiss.

Some weeks ago, a longtime student sent me a note. 

“Stick to the yoga, Beth,” she wrote, in response to a message I had shared with my email list. “I enjoy your class, but I don’t need to hear your political views.” 

I thought long and hard before responding that I didn’t think I could do that. 

Believe me, I get the desire to compartmentalize our politics. (And you will never hear me discuss my political views during classes.)

But I didn’t think I could just stick to the yoga, and if that meant she needed to unsubscribe from my list, I would be truly sorry to see her go, but I would understand.

Since that exchange I’ve been pondering the nature of yoga and what it means for me, as a yoga practitioner, teacher, and business owner, to speak out on the issues that I feel strongly about.

Here I’ll offer a few thoughts from my perspective as a yoga teacher. In a future post, I’ll share some ideas about how this plays out for me as a business owner.

I see yoga, like everything else, as rooted in a political framework. And rather than an abstraction, yoga is a practice, and it’s practiced, daily, all around the world, by real people coping with real circumstances.

The notion that it is somehow un-yoga-like or inauthentic or radical to bring politics into the yoga space represents a fundamental misreading of the nature of yoga itself, it seems to me.

For one thing, that view just doesn’t line up with history.

It’s true that yoga is a fluid and evolving tradition, and the yoga we practice today looks very different from yoga in the past. But the idea of political engagement is not an add-on or a recent innovation. It runs through yoga’s earliest texts.

I’m not a historian, but I have read pretty deeply in these texts. Among the best-known are the Yoga Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita. The Yoga Sutras were compiled around the year 200, purportedly by the sage Patanjali who organized and synthesized knowledge from an array of older texts and traditions. The resulting Sutras emphasize an engaged, ethical journey on the path to enlightenment. (Yoga as a physical practice is an innovation that would be introduced in the 19th century.) The Bhagavad Gita, dating from around 200 before the Common Era, explores, among other themes, the individual’s responsibility to respond ethically to specific conditions in the real world. This plays out initially as a dialogue between the prince Arjuna and his guide, Krishna, in the context of bitter wartime violence.

Yoga teacher Jivana Heyman pointed to the early sources in an essay about the place of politics in the yoga space, written in the wake of the mass protests that followed George Floyd’s murder:

“[T]here has always been an intersection of yoga and politics. The Bhagavad Gita itself revolves around politics, war, and yoga. Or we can look back to Gandhi, and the way he used the yoga teachings as the basis for nonviolent resistance. He led a movement that overthrew the colonial British government and inspired Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement. Those movements were a model for the social protests we see today.”

- Heyman, “Why Yoga Has Always Been Political,” Yoga Journal, March 2021

That said, you don’t have to study yoga history or read the original Sanskrit to understand yoga as a necessarily engaged practice.

Relatively few yoga practitioners have read the early texts, but it’s my hunch that many do understand the practice to be fundamentally “about” community and social responsibility.

It’s my sense that many people who practice yoga, over time, begin to see this as a logical, even an inevitable inevitable leap from their physical practice.

That was certainly my experience, long before I started delving into yoga’s history, and, long before I began to think about the possibility of teaching yoga.

Like most people newly discovering yoga, I was drawn initially to the physical exercise part. I craved the stretchy movement and the relaxation response. But before long, I began to sense something deeper, richer, and more interesting to me than the physical practice alone.

If you’re reading this and you practice yoga, maybe you’ve had a similar experience, where over time you’ve come to appreciate something more complex at work in the practice. The practice changes your perspective on things.

Maybe you’ve walked out of a yoga class flooded with a new and palpable sense of connection with the people you’ve been practicing with - even if you’ve never laid eyes on them before.

Maybe that sense of interconnectedness has returned to you at unexpected and mundane times during your day.

Maybe you found yourself making choices based on the possibility that all is truly interconnected, that we’re all dependent on one another, that community includes not just those we know and love, and that our choices have rippling consequences. Maybe it struck you that a yoga practice is, in a way, practice for regular life, or life “off the mat,” as yoga teachers sometimes describe it.

Jivana Heyman suggests that those who don’t see this connection may be misconstruing yoga - either as a practice of “fancy poses and physical attainment,” or as an ascetic, monastic practice “focus[ed] solely on working with our own minds.”

Neither of these are the yoga I practice and teach.

As a yoga teacher, my sense is that yoga helps us get to know ourselves, not for the purpose of looking good while standing on our heads, and not so we can cut ourselves off from earthly concerns, but so we can figure out what really matters to us and take action. Yoga helps us feel more relaxed and more comfortable in our bodies, not for an end goal of relaxation, but for the purpose of engagement in the real world.

So I will say this. If you join my classes because they help you feel better in your body, I am so glad to have you with me. If you practice with me because yoga has changed the way you understand yourself and how you live in the world, that is fantastic.

If you need to unsubscribe, I will be truly sorry to see you go, but I will understand.

If you’d like to hear more, please consider joining me for a class and signing on for my email newsletter.  (And I welcome your comments - scroll down to the bottom of the page to add a comment or a like.)