How Can Yoga Help Change the World? Mark Whitwell on Yoga and Social Change
Mark Whitwell | Heart of Yoga
Is Yoga Activism?
Our work is to bring authentic Yoga practice into the world as a powerful and efficient means of social change. Authentic Yoga is intended as a redemptive survival toolkit full of equipment that you can put to use immediately and share with your precious collaborators. It is not a new belief system or a religion or cultic sect, but an invitation to add embodied practice to our shared mission to eliminate sectarian belief systems as a basis of culture and life altogether. Yoga exists to be fitted to your life and relationships, to your cultural background and unique directions, not the other way around. It is about unwarping yourself from all social contortions, not adding more.
We hold firm to the classic definition of Yoga from our teachers, who defined it as to go in our direction of choice with continuity, a positive step towards something, rather than an act of asceticism or restraint. Yoga was never intended as an escape from the world, as it has been popularised by misogynistic renunciate cults. Nor was it intended as mere exercise: what my teacher Desikachar described as “mediocre gymnastics.”
Rather, Yoga is the embrace of body, breath, and relationship. By empowering our intrinsic drive to contribute our life to life, to be in relationship, we break the imagined wall between individual and social change. Our daily practice illuminates the connection between the depth of intimacy we can feel with ourselves and the depth of intimacy we can enjoy with others. When we are happy and blooming in life we naturally turn outwards towards connection with others. By contrast, when we feel separate from ourselves we tend to withdraw from relationship:
“Our sensory disengagement with others, the environment, and ourselves prevents us from really participating in our own lives with a profound depth of feeling. When we are not participating fully in Life — body, breath, and sex — we are less than fully human…As we keep closing down, we lose sight of our absolute birthright: to give the truth of ourselves and be receptive of the caring wisdom of others and all that surrounds us.” — The Promise (74).
Body, Breath, and Relationship
This is why we emphasise that the first act of social change is to be intimate with our own embodiment: the power of this universe that is arising as the whole body. Every body is a location of radical autonomous intelligence. Consider how wonderful our ‘ordinary’ bodies really are: from the soft feeling capacity of the frontal line from crown to base, the highly evolved nervous system and spine and its culmination in the sublime mystery of the brain core, to our ability to enjoy creative pleasures of all kinds including self-expression, art, music, logic, feeling, and the refined movement of energy between intimates in Sex. Our Yoga does not put us in touch with anything more extraordinary than what is already embodied as us, sitting here right now.
We practice Yoga to feel in Howard Thurman’s words, key mentor to Martin Luther King, what we know to be true: that we are “part of a continuing, breathing, living existence… alive in a living world.” Our practice reveals to the mind that our individual lives are nothing less than Life itself — literally. That we are an individual expression, utterly unique and unprecedented, of a larger unified process called Life that is every person and every thing.
We are autonomous, vulnerable, peaceful, and powerful individuals who are committed to relationship. We step into our full and deeply intuited capacity for love, compassion, courage and service and we do so as a collective. And we place all our bets the power of intimacy and love to sweep away the restrictions of these dark times.
“Meaningful experiences of integration between people,” Thurman continues, “are more compelling than the fears, the inhibitions, the dogmas, or the prejudices that divide. If such unifying experiences can be multiplied over an extended time, they will be able to restructure the fabric of the social context.”
The capacity for the intimate human connection and integration that Thurman speaks of can only begin in individual bodies, in the embrace of our natural embodied state of strength that is utterly receptive.
We are Nature
As our sensitivity to Life in the form of our own embodiment deepens, we feel and enjoy our place within the entire web of Nature. We can see clearly now that humanity is not participating in the ecologies of Mother Nature, and for humanity to survive we must function in our natural relationships. Patriarchal culture has deluded humanity into thinking we are separate and superior to the Earth’s ecosystems that we are made of, creating cultures of numbness, abuse and exploitation. Yoga is to reverse this perspective, to embrace our intrinsic connection. We are empowered to speak with utter certainty of our embodied knowledge that all life is sacred, and that any system which does not recognise this truth must be dismantled.
The recognition that we are nature allows us to release the widespread sense of guilt many change-makers feel when they consider their own needs for rest and regeneration. We cannot burn-out one piece of Mother Nature in attempt to save another from burning. This is why we say that Yoga is the first act of ecology, learning how to care for rather than control Mother Nature, starting in our own body. It is our practical method to process and release our grief for the hardness we perceive all around us, and it is our direct participation in the intelligence and nurturing function of nature — the body’s intrinsic movement towards harmony and health, the digestion of experience and emotion, the recovery of self-regulation, the releasing of what is no longer needed, and the receiving of what is. If you feel stressed or burnt out, please make use of these remedial practices to rest and restore.
I know so many sincere people who care deeply and so who innocently fall into practicing their efforts for change in ways that reproduce what has been called ‘grind culture.’ Who went out to work for social change with the same instrumentalization of the body, the same drive towards burnout, that capitalist economics trained us for. As the Nap Bishop Tricia Hersey beautifully writes,
“Grind culture has a fetish for seeing human beings move at the pace of a machine. It enjoys weary bodies and limited imagination […] Everything in nature needs to rest. The Earth can no exist without deep pauses….Our bodies deserve nothing less.”
As a result, many people find themselves in their adult life feeling that they are not allowed to rest at all, or that to take any amount of time away from work (or activism as work) is a waste of energy, a luxury, something for the lazy or uncommitted. Everywhere, human beings are burning out as these internal psychologies of endless grind destroy the ecosystems of body and mind. We are not robots, and we cannot treat our bodies like machines in this way.
To conclude this article I want to thank you for your commitment to serving humanity and the more-than-human sphere. The very fact you feel interested to read this article means you are a person who feels deeply and cares. Thank you for being a serious person who perceives clearly the utter chaos of human cruelty and suffering we exist in in these times. Thank you for bringing your love of life to bear on whatever the area of life is that you have felt compelled to attend to. I honour the stand you have taken.
Whatever your cultural background, whatever has inspired you to dedicate yourself to serving the world, whatever your tactics and strategies, we offer you these simple practices as a means of empowering your chosen directions and nurturing your “soft animal body,” to use Mary Oliver’s phrase. Please put them to your own creative use.
Let’s get the job done together and put love into action, within and without, in the vision of a society where life is nurtured not pillaged. Where we are all free to rest and relate in this beautiful garden of a world and enjoy the pleasures of a free-born life.
If this speaks to you, look into the yogas brought forth by Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya and his wife Srimati Namagiriamma, their son T.K.V. Desikachar, the yogi U.G. Krishnamurti, and their friends and students around the world. Desikachar’s book ‘The Heart of Yoga,’ is an excellent place to start, and we have made a course of learning in the basic principles of practice that is available by donation on our website.
From my heart to yours.
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