Yoga and Politics - Reflections

Recently, I’ve come to notice an overlap of people who are interested in Yoga and spirituality with those interested in politics and resistance. Why is that so? Isn’t Yoga this lofty practice that creates a never-ceasing harmonious smile on your lips and makes you equanimous towards what is happening in the world out there?

Indeed, Yoga helps us to regulate our mental and emotional state. But it also encourages us to get in touch with the deeper reasons of our suffering. We tend to be afraid to look into the depths of our suffering, fearful of what we could find. Instead, we externalize it, blaming our job, our boyfriend, our parents, ourselves - encouraged even further by neoliberal images of the perfect life. Let’s just work harder, make more money, become more attractive - and happiness will come.

Vedic culture teaches us that our suffering is due to the confusion of our Self with externalities. Our identification with our body, our thoughts, our house, our marriage.

Yoga then provides a recipe and a practice for deconstructing these means of identification. To arrive at our true essence, pure consciousness, unshaken by the pressures and expectations of everyday life.

And though most of us will not go that path until the end, it does help us to question and search for alternatives. It helps us to understand that our pains, fears and lacks don’t indicate that we are unworthy, that we still need to “work on ourselves”, leading to an endless state of becoming that prevents us from ever feeling truly fulfilled.

Pain only turns into suffering when we try to change it. And trying to change it is what the Capitalist system promotes. Just go on that costly retreat, take that meditation class. Cope in order to function.

But Yoga, in its original sense, is not about coping. It is not about “becoming a better version of yourself”. It is about un-becoming. It is about ceasing to refuse to look at the parts of us that are non-functioning, embracing them instead and seeing where they guide us. Naturally.

And by providing that alternative, Yoga ultimately breaks with the Self-understanding that capitalism promotes: That our value depends on our economic contribution to and status in society. That we must continuously work on our productivity and employability.

It teaches us that life doesn’t have to be about coping – about protecting our functionality as a wheel in the system – but that it can be about flourishing.

I wonder if everybody leaned into it, what would happen? Would our economic, social and cultural systems collapse? Would there be anarchy? Would we maybe come to a more dynamic system of governance that would create space for true creativity and innovation instead of squeezing individuals into forms and shapes that ultimately restrict their true potential?

To be continued.