Yoga and Social Justice
By Linette Hwu
I am sitting down to write this blog post on the Sunday after Derek Chauvin was convicted of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and culpable negligence manslaughter in the May 25, 2020 death of George Floyd. There’s a sense in which that seems appropriate to me, in a coming-full-circle way. I feel a little bit like the TSTC social justice statement began to take shape in the days and weeks A.G.F. (After George Floyd)—as Carol Collins and I texted each other about #BlackLivesMatter protests and 6 p.m. curfews in D.C., as Nicole Griffin and I emailed each other about Yoga as a tool for social change, as I worked both taking a knee and “hands up, don’t shoot” into my Zoom classes.
The summer of 2020 prompted me to revisit my Yoga manifesto. TSTC teachers, do you remember having to write and share your Yoga manifesto as one of the first TT2 assignments? Do you still have a Yoga manifesto? If yes, is it the same as when you started TT2?
The first sentence of my Yoga manifesto was, and is, “I believe the world would be a better place with more Yoga in it.” But somehow—in the midst of auditioning to teach, taking on private clients, creating my website, feeling the unspoken (or not) pressure of increasing attendance at my studio classes, being encouraged to develop my “following,” therefore checking my email constantly so that I could respond as fast as possible to sub requests—I had lost sight of the service component of Yoga, of the fact that it is a spiritual practice. You could say that I was thinking of Yoga as a self-care experience that I could offer on someone’s path to self-confidence, self-esteem and self-actualization (such a western focus on the self!). Indeed, Yoga has become a huge driver of the wellness industry, with the Yoga market being worth over $130 billion worldwide.
In the same way that last year’s racial reckoning forced predominantly white institutions (PWIs) all over the country to confront both the ways they are implicated in the myriad inequalities and inequities of American society and the ways they can show up for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) folx, it got me wondering the extent to which Yoga studios are also PWIs. The more I looked around, the more it seemed like the majority of Yoga teachers in the U.S. are white. And the more I thought about it, the tougher that was to square with the reality that what most of them teach is some version of a religious and cultural tradition that originated in South Asia. (For an analogous example from the world of linguistics, read this powerful New Yorker article about how a white man came to own the Penobscot language.)
Of course, I also considered the makeup of studio classes. They were pretty white too—and thin, and able-bodied, and female—not too far off from the clientele of your average spa, actually. It occurred to me that if an alien were dropped from outer space into your average Yoga studio, it might be hard-pressed not to draw the conclusion that wellness isn’t for “all beings everywhere.” (Note that you could make this comment about a number of things. “To treat food as a commodity rather than a necessity is to accept that there will always be people who can’t afford it and must go hungry.”—Nigaya Mishan)
I’ll offer a few last questions that I find myself wrestling with these days. What does it mean to serve a community? What is my community? Is that also the community I want to serve? If not, why not? We see the strength of the Tranquil Space community in the establishment of this collective, in the hours that folx have put into getting this website up and running, managing our social media presence, organizing and promoting benefit classes, researching t-shirt options and so on. Is there a larger community that the Tranquil Space community can and should serve? Is it too ambitious to suggest that the Tranquil Space Teachers Collective can serve the world? What would that look like?
I don’t have the answers. But I think we can figure them out together.
****
Let’s start at the very beginning (it’s a very good place to start!). Please join the TSTC social justice sangha in deepening our Yoga practices with a discussion of Embrace Yoga’s Roots by Susanna Barkataki on June 6th at 4:30 p.m. ET. Registration is pay-what-you-can, but any amount you can contribute will go directly to support covid relief efforts in India (thank you to our friends Annie and Amir at Sun & Moon Yoga Studio here in the DMV for curating this list!), which is buckling under its latest pandemic surge.
Future topics for our sangha include the eight limbs of our Yoga lineage, as well as Yoga and capitalism. We invite you to suggest others.