Should We All Just “Stick to Yoga?”

Today, I’m going to interrogate the misguided notion that we should separate yoga, mindfulness, embodiment, psychology, or “wellness” from social and political matters.

This column will likely make many people uncomfortable. And that’s OK; inducing productive discomfort might be one of my superpowers. Also, I’m neurodivergent, which makes it hard to soften my words. What’s more, I respect my community enough to state things directly.

Discomfort isn’t inherently bad; it's a necessary part of evolution. Should it arise, I include an exercise at the end that, when practiced over time, helps build the capacity for social resilience.

With that in mind, let’s take a deep breath together, both as an entryway into the body, and as a way to condition our nervous systems to explore this topic.

What’s the “What” Here?

If I had a dollar for every time someone has told me to “stick to yoga,” I’d be wealthy. And from what many of you speaking up for Palestine are saying, you’re hearing the same refrain.

On the surface, this “advice” bears the sigil of intimidation, an exhortation to silence. Underneath, it conveys a world of pain and alienation.

The pain is conveyed through a white-hot cast of outrage. It’s become familiar; I encounter it from white people in response to every social justice issue I write, teach, or speak about—and sometimes, even before I teach, in the way people respond to learning that we offer scholarships for BIPOC, but not for white people.

I’ve also received many emails over the past ten years that say, “I didn’t sign up for your newsletter to hear about your political views.”

In a recent survey of my Substack readers, several people asked me to continue writing about science, psychology, and embodiment but “leave out the ‘racial focus.’”

And when I lead workshops that incorporate social context and equity (always advertised as such), a white yoga/mindfulness/embodiment person frequently complains, in the presence of BIPOC, “Does everything have to be about social justice?” They haven’t yet considered the way the question itself embodies privilege, how it testifies to injustice and inequity.

What are these messages really trying to convey? To begin with, they are an emblem of social privilege.

When people want the “racial focus” removed, they’re saying that they prefer the racial focus that’s always been there—but that favors dominant white culture—and that they want it to stay invisible.

They’re saying that when their own experience isn’t centered, even for a short period, or a justice lens is brought to yoga or mindfulness or embodiment, it feels unfair and seems suddenly like a racial focus.

They’re saying they wish to remain in a world with a racial focus (read: racism) that oppresses Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC) and that undergirds the systems we live in, while leaving white people “out of it” (literally and figuratively).

This is particularly true since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7^th, followed by Israel’s War on Palestine that began shortly thereafter. As of this writing (January 9, 2024), Israel’s assault on Palestine has displaced 95% of Gaza’s population of 2.2 million, destroyed 85% of its infrastructure, and killed over 21,000 people—more than 10,000 of whom are children.

Israel has targeted and killed more than 110 journalists, more than double the entire number killed in any single year worldwide since 2019.  

Despite these atrocities, we still hear people plaintively demanding that everyone focus on the initial Israeli deaths, though the scale of destruction and violence Israel has wrought since then, and its threat of ethnic cleansing and genocide, has made it impossible to focus on anything else.

When people tell us to stick to yoga, mindfulness, or embodiment—and to stay out of “politics”—they’re saying that our words stir deep discomfort in them. This is the kind of discomfort that rings true but that also carries deep pain and ignites intense rage. And most people, especially when feeling threatened, don’t recognize where the pain and rage are actually coming from. (Hint: It’s not the messengers.) And we’ve never been taught how to develop the inner capacity to process this pain and rage.

I get it. I have a well-entrenched system of defenses myself, and places where I’m uncomfortable looking closely. My body tightens; I forget to breathe. A buzzing begins around my ears and a searing heat moves into my chest.

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Let’s breathe together again, let our breath open us to this exchange. Take a moment to inhale through your nose, and exhale, either through your nose or mouth, whichever you prefer.

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Back to the notion of keeping our yoga, mindfulness, embodiment, or psychology separate from “political issues.”

Like other forms of segregation, keeping spiritual practice separate from social or political issues doesn’t just defy the laws of Nature. It upholds systems of oppression. And it hurts all of us.

Photo: Annabel Lee-Ellis, Ghetty Images

How Colonialism, White Supremacy, and Patriarchy Are Bad for Everyone

Colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy are bad for all of us. What they do to the people they marginalize, they also do to the body and mind—and to extension, all of us.

Colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy don’t just impact groups of people they target, like BIPOC, disabled, and gender-nonconforming people. They also practice colonialism not just in a social context, but in relation to the body itself.

They privilege the mind and marginalize the body.

They value reason over inner knowing, mind over matter.

They control our bodies and exploit them economically.

They prize the outer appearance of the body over its function.

They center the personal body over our larger social body.

And they target the larger social body that our personal body connects to and depends on.

All this lead us to believe that we are disembodied minds that need to produce and achieve. That we are individuals without a collective. And that the beloved yoga or mindfulness practice, the psychotherapy we rely on are confined to us alone.

Even worse, we need to “fix” our own issues before we can tend to social ones.

When we suffer emotionally, we’re led to believe that it’s a “mental illness,” as though health happens just in the mind.

People call it a ”brain disease,” as though depression and addictions are simply “problems” with the brain.

They say it’s “biochemical,” as though our biochemistry is affected neither by the trauma we’ve experienced in this lifetime nor the epigenetic trauma of our ancestors.

This means that when we suffer mentally and emotionally, we come to feel as though we are alone in this, too—that our emotional suffering is our fault, and our responsibility alone to address.  

But what we call "mental illness" is a social disease: an illness in the system we live in. Many other cultures know this. Our deliberate forgetting of it, our collective disembodiment, also gives us the social diseases of racism, interpersonal violence, and social inequity.

People know this. They feel the pain of this separation. This is why, when faced with issues that remind them of it, they want to silence those speaking up, to silo personal practice from social and political praxis.

And yet, our personal and social bodies, individual and collective suffering, private and collective liberation, are all connected.

We know this in our tissue and tendons, in our blood and breath and bone, in the wisdom of our ancestors.

These connections are built into us, even on a neural level. The brain’s neural networks have a lot to teach us about the way the body, our psychology, and the practices we do for well-being are inherently tied to our social world.

We Are Built for Social + Political Activism

Humans (and some mammals) have a unique body-to-brain communications network that allows the gut, heart, and lungs to mediate information about the body’s inner state. They relay this information to a newly expanded region of an enclave in the brain called the insula. Here, simple body states are reinterpreted as complex social emotions. A lingering touch from a partner becomes the feeling of desire. Witnessing someone in pain engenders empathy. The sights, smells, and sensations linked to using a substance elicit cravings.

The link between body, emotion, and society grows even stronger in humans. Clustered abundantly in the right front portion of the insula, like tiny watermelon seeds, are a specialized group of nerve cells called spindle neurons. Although some scientists have dubbed them “the cells that make us human,” we share these cells with other mammals, such as great apes, whales, and dolphins.

These high-speed communicators have a hand in social interactions, emotional processing, decision making, and intuition. Spindle neurons sense social emotions such as gratitude, pride, distrust, contempt, and empathy. They play a role in the guilt we feel when we’ve hurt someone and the efforts we make at atonement. They let us know when we’ve fallen in love with the person we’re dating. They even help us discern whether something’s amiss with that offer from a new business partner. And they factor prominently in the visceral response we have to matters of social justice.

Even on a microscopic neural level, humans and other mammals have a built-in capacity for connection, for shared emotional experience. We feel the emotions—joy, fear, anger, sadness, pain—of others. Seeing someone in pain triggers an empathic response that we process through our own pain system. This response is wired into most of us; it’s part of what it means to be connected. And it extends to our refined system of tactile intelligence, too.

In two previous columns (see this one as well), I talked about how our touch system is mapped in the brain, with parts of our somatosensory cortex corresponding to parts of the body.

And our amazing touch system is not just individual, but social.

When we observe someone else being touched, our own tactile sensitivity is enhanced. (Isn’t that amazing? Here it is, the indivisibility between our individual and social bodies.)

But this remapping of touch, which researchers call somatic resonance, decreases significantly when the person we observe is a member of a racial or political outgroup.

In an innovative study, an illusion was induced that administered two minutes of multisensory stimulation to subjects while they viewed the face of an outgroup member. The experience of identifying with the outgroup member’s face increased the visual remapping of touch to the level usually associated with an individual of the same race.

These studies, along with our own direct wisdom, confirm the fact that the body’s power and intelligence extend far beyond its physicality. We’ve evolved in such a way that our bodily self is inherently emotional, social, and—yes—political. But our sociality has limits; we have to prime our prosocial behavior—the kind of behavior that helps humanity—like a muscle.

Our body is as social as it is personal, as public as it is intimate. Human rights are body rights; social justice is body justice.

The concept of empathy creates a dilemma: Even cognitive empathy is linked to a projection of someone else’s internal state, and therefore can center the person experiencing empathy. Furthermore, we can get stuck in empathic distress and not make it to the next stage of empathy: compassionate action.

Yet empathy on a visceral, embodied level can be a potent instrument of prosocial action, the kind that benefits not just us, but all of humanity.

This is what activists mean when they say, “None of us are free until all of us are free.”

And the practices that help us get free—yoga, mindfulness, embodiment, psychotherapy—are inherently social and political, too.

In the words of one of my favorite liberation teachers, reverend angel Kyodo williams, “You can’t have social justice without the body.” She means that among other things, embodiment has to be part of our social justice praxis.

In my opinion, the converse is also true: We don’t have a personal body without also having a larger social body.

In the 1999 film The Matrix, Neo, the protagonist, is given the choice between taking a red pill or a blue pill. If he takes the red pill, he learns a painful, life-changing truth about his world, one which might even be dangerous for him.

If he takes the blue pill, he remains embedded in an illusion. He sees only what he wants to see, what’s comfortable to take in—which is a metaphor for social privilege.

Coming to terms with the way the forces of colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and all the other isms have fooled us all and caused us to suffer—and will do so as long as they remain empowered—is like taking the red pill.

And it’s not just about seeing the “matrix” of these social forces; it’s also about taking actions to dismantle them.

In many ways, it’s easier to go back to sleep. To choose to remain ignorant or indifferent to what’s happening (to us and to others) socially and politically.

The wish to “maintain positive vibes only” or to “not let it get us down” or to separate (artificially, as we can easily see) “our yoga from politics” is cultural and spiritual bypassing—that is to say, the passing over a key principle, like ahimsa (non-violence) that we want to apply to some instances but overlook in others—such as the plight of Palestinians.

And that, we know, is a device that people with privilege use often.

Any fight for bodily autonomy like abortion rights and healthcare rights can’t just be for people with social power and privilege.

It can’t exclude Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. It can’t exclude Jews or Muslims.

And it can’t exclude Palestinians.

Any fight to protect the bodily safety of children and vulnerable people against sexual assault can’t exclude Palestinians.  

We can’t effectively fight for any kind of bodily autonomy or safety while Palestinians don’t have theirs.

The Red Pill (the Truth) Can Be Painful

What arises when you contemplate the fact that your body is not just physical, but emotional and social and yes, even political? Does this insight feel threatening? Freeing? What do you feel, and where?

I’ll share with you that when I entered into anti-racism work many years ago, it led me into a morass of depression. I didn’t realize the connection until my best friend pointed it out.

The depression passes—until it gets reactivated by a fresh injustice, that is, or by a novel revelation.

Anyone who has done even a modicum of anti-racism and social justice work will know the discomfort—and reward—inherent in coming to terms with the injustices perpetrated by our country of origin, the one we live in, or the one we feel strong ties to.  

In the United States, this work includes reckoning with America’s genocide of its First Nations indigenous people. The work includes the transatlantic slave trade and 461 years of the institution of slavery, followed by Jim Crow, followed by mass incarceration, voter disenfranchisement, redlining, and the school-to-prison pipeline. And it includes something that many of you know more about, which are the harms done by gender-related violence and discrimination.

This is difficult work, but ultimately necessary work for a free and just society.

I’ll never forget a three-day workshop I held at Triyoga in London in 2015 or 2016 in which we began to unpack these connections. One young woman who’d grown up not being told or shown these connections felt a deep grief and anger bubble up from within. I remember her raised voice and her tears—the empowering and not the fragile kind—and her commitment to living differently from that point forward. I hope she kept the vow she made then. I hope she never took the blue pill.

It’s helpful for me to remember this when I come face to face with Zionism and the similar generations of shared belief, privilege, even indoctrination—and I hope it will be for you, too.

But we need to combat our lack of resilience around this. We do well to flip the notion of our own discomfort on its head.

The discomfort of undoing one’s racism is infinitesimally small in comparison to people who contend with it—with oppression and marginalization—on a daily basis.

I’m going to suggest that many people struggling right now with my criticism of Israel have not fully engaged in anti-racism work. They have not yet experienced, and may not yet be willing to enter, the discomfort that comes when we reckon fully with our national and cultural histories and with them, the wrongs that our own culture or nation has committed against other people.

It’s important to have compassion for that while being able to challenge it. To make space for it without indulging it.

Stress Reduction vs. Stress Resilience

Many people want their yoga (or mindfulness or wellness or embodiment) practices to serve as a "respite" from the stress of today's world. I get that. At the same time, this is a stress reduction strategy. It predicates well-being on the ability to control our environment by removing anything that causes stress. Over time, this is harmful to the health of our nervous (and immune) systems, which not only thrive on but require stress in order to survive. The alternative: A stress resilience strategy which incorporates all experiences, even the ones that stress us out.

The term "respite" derives from the Latin respectus (Don't you love that?), which means consideration, regard, and literally, "the act of looking back (or often) at one."

We have a lot to look back at and reckon with.

And in the long run, doing so builds not just our stress resilience, but a space of respite.

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The Three-Step Framework for Embodied Resilience

When something challenging occurs or is present within you, here’s what you can do.

First, do a mind-body check in.

(For more information, you can view this article I wrote for Yoga Journal.)

Lie on your back with your knees bent, one hand on your heart and one on your abdomen. Close your eyes and breathe slowly through your nose as you explore the following nodes of self-inquiry:

• Are you present in your body in this moment?

• Can you feel the sensations of your breath?

• The ease or discomfort in your muscles and tissues? (It’s OK if you can’t; asking is the first step.)

• Notice the depth of your breath. Rapid breathing can signal nervous system overdrive. Slower breathing indicates rest-and-digest mode, which is conducive to setting healthy boundaries.

• Notice the speed of your mind. Do your thoughts channel surf? A speeding mind often means rising anxiety.

• Note any tension in your abdomen, home to your ENS, or “belly brain.” Tension here can change your gut microbiome, increase anxiety, and make it hard to set boundaries.

• Check in with the level of energy in your body. This will help you recognize when you are depleted and need deeper self-care.

• Bring awareness to your emotions: Are sadness, anger, or anxiety present? If so, do they feel like yours, or do they come from someone with whom you’ve recently interacted?

·       When you’re done, slowly open your eyes.

Choose a Practice.

This could be anything from “being with sensation” to connective tissue work. (Try the QL Release in the article linked above or one of our Restorative Yoga favorites, Face-Down Burrito Pose ) to the Empathic Differentiation exercise (see the same article).

Then, do another check-in.

What abides now? What remains? Here, you can do a little more “being with” practice. What remains present in your body after you’ve allowed time and space for reactivity? Does this bring fresh embodied (not mental) insight? Body resonance with the “other?” A change in your self-to-body relationship?

The idea here: Continue to move underneath the meaning-making, underneath the mental narrative, even underneath the social emotions. What do you feel? Where do you feel it? Does it change as you stay present with it? Sometimes it will change, and sometimes it will remain the same. Often, you’ll receive an image to work with, like the bird with flapping wings I referenced above.

The key: Continue to relate to what’s happening in your body without needing to understand it conceptually, or label it (a little labeling goes a long way), or act on it right away. Just keep going in, and in, and in, following your body. Remember to slow your breathing and relax your organs of perception (jaw, face, tongue, and mouth).

Repeat these steps whenever you feel activated or strongly entrenched in your views. This method also works well for interpersonal conflict, too. Just go through the steps when you feel activated in a relationship with a loved one.

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Sources:

Israel has targeted and killed more than 110 journalists: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266229/number-of-journalists-killed-since-1995/

Seeing someone in pain triggers an empathic response that gets processed through our own pain system: Decety, J. (2011). Dissecting the Neural Mechanisms Mediating Empathy. Emotion Review, 3(1), 92–108. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073910374662. See also: Decety J. (2011). The neuroevolution of empathy. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1231, 35–45. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.06027.x. See also: Keysers, C., & Gazzola, V. (2014). Dissociating the ability and propensity for empathy. Trends in cognitive sciences, 18(4), 163–166. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2013.12.011. See also: Krishnan, A., Woo, C. W., Chang, L. J., Ruzic, L., Gu, X., López-Solà, M., Jackson, P. L., Pujol, J., Fan, J., & Wager, T. D. (2016). Somatic and vicarious pain are represented by dissociable multivariate brain patterns. eLife, 5, e15166. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.15166. See also: Singer, T., & Lamm, C. (2009). The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1156(1), 81–96. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04418.x

But this remapping of touch, which researchers call somatic resonance, decreases significantly: Serino, A., Giovagnoli, G., & Làdavas, E. (2009). I feel what you feel if you are similar to me. PloS one, 4(3), e4930. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0004930

In an innovative study, an illusion was induced that: Fini, C., Cardini, F., Tajadura-Jiménez, A., Serino, A., & Tsakiris, M. (2013). Embodying an outgroup: the role of racial bias and the effect of multisensory processing in somatosensory remapping. Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience, 7, 165. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2013.00165