Do Politics Belong in Yoga?
Maybe the better question is, "If we don’t want our yoga teachers talking about collective liberation or social justice, what’s going on there?"
This might be a bit of a controversial post. Today I am sharing about yoga and politics and specifically, whether or not politics have a place in yoga spaces.
Ordinarily, most of this essay would be behind a paywall, including the 15 minute mellow movement class from my online studio that I share at the end. However, this feels like an important topic to share, so I left the entire essay free to read with just the movement class behind the paywall, as well as comments.
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When I did my very first Yoga Teacher Training back in 2005, there were many rules that were explicitly laid out for us.
Most were in regards to how to teach classes.
We were taught rules about physical alignment in certain poses, like “never put your foot on your knee in tree pose.”
We were taught when to teach certain poses in a class, like standing poses are always taught in the first 3rd and seated poses are taught at the end.
And we were taught that women needed to avoid certain poses during their menstrual cycles, as well as pregnancy.
Most of those rules are ones that don’t have much legitimacy from an evidence-based perspective and I no longer teach according to them. But there were some other rules we were taught that were less about how to teach and more ethical guidelines.
Don’t offer medical diagnoses. Don’t sleep with your students. And don’t talk about politics.
When I was a newer teacher, all of those seemed like important rules that would be easy to adhere to.
The first felt obvious. I am not a doctor. Medical diagnoses are very far out of my scope of practice as a movement professional, but especially when I was a new teacher with less in-class teaching experience.
The second felt essential. And within my first year of teaching, I had an experience that showed me exactly why it was important to honor that rule.
The third didn’t feel like much of an issue for me. Not because I wasn’t a political 24 year old. I was then and am now, very politically aware and active. But I didn’t really think it would come up in my teaching.
Part of the reason I felt this way is that I lived and taught in a Maryland suburb of Washington DC. Maryland and DC are bluer than blueberries, politically speaking, so very much a liberal bubble on the east coast.
I taught classes in both DC and MD, but the studio where I taught most of my classes was in a small city on the MD/DC border that had pride flags in the windows of many businesses on main street even in the early 2000’s. It was then and still is now, a well known progressive enclave within a larger liberal area.
The other reason that politics felt like a non-issue is simply that the landscape of yoga was very different in 2005, when I first started teaching.
Although there was some online yoga, starting primarily with YogaGlo in 2008, almost all yoga and movement classes were still in person. One of my teachers had a audio CD she released for her students to buy and practice to. And a few other teachers I liked had DVD’s they sold at their live events.
In 2005, Facebook was in its infancy and Instagram was still 5 years away. Although YouTube started the same year as my YTT, yoga didn’t become a big draw until 2012, when Yoga with Adriene launched on the platform.
Facebook and Instagram radically changed the way we, as yoga teachers, show up online. I think this is actually true of many people, whether they are yoga and movement professionals or not. Social media has had a massive impact on the way we engage with one another, particularly online.
But for yoga teachers, it turned many of us into more highly visible, public facing people.
This was especially true as we started to see opportunities to use social media to promote our classes and workshops — to become entrepreneurs instead of just contract workers at various studios. This gave us both independence and a little more power, but also a lot more work doing the type of marketing they don’t teach you about in typical teacher trainings.
As social media evolved, we adapted with it.
Sometimes this simply meant posting about our classes or workshops. Sometimes it looked like sharing short videos of yoga tips or teaching insights.
But as social media started to become a way for social justice movements to get more visibility and traction, it became more of a regular thing to see yoga teachers and studios sharing these stories and sounding the call for political action.
If you’ve been in the yoga world for a long time, like I have, you’d probably expect that yoga teachers and students are largely a liberal group of people. And therefore, our political calls to action would be heard loudly and clearly in a very comfortable echo chamber.
After all, it wasn’t that long ago when yoga was actually banned from schools in Alabama because it was considered "possibly dangerous for a child’s young mind and spirit."1
Plus, yoga is often linked with values that tend to land more on the liberal end of the spectrum — this I think has a lot to do with the fact that yoga is associated with non-Christian spirituality, as well as it’s foundation in Hinduism.
Even though many modern day, western yoga practitioners reject the religious roots of yoga for the feel good spirituality aspects that have birthed the “Love and Light”, “Good Vibes” and “High Vibrations” ethos, the connection remains present.
Still, the yoga scene is not the same as it was when I went to my first yoga class in a converted apartment on St. Marks Place 25 years ago.
Yoga might have once been associated with liberalism and progressive values, but it’s no longer exclusively that. Undercurrents of libertarianism combined with new age spirituality and an obsession with “natural health” kicked into high gear during the covid-19 pandemic. 2
That and yoga is much more mainstream than when I started taking classes and later teaching.
Since my husband joined the military, we’ve moved outside of the big cities and liberal bubbles that I grew up in and also lived in as a young adult. Every place we’ve lived has had at least one independent yoga studio, as well as yoga classes offered at gyms and even on the military base we most recently called home. Many of these places are in deeply red states or ultra conservative cities in blue states.
Now that yoga is both more mainstream and also hijacked by conspiracy theorists, we can’t always presume that just because someone does yoga that their political leanings will fall on one side of the aisle or the other. After all, one of the more well known people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, 2021 is Alan Hostetter, a former police chief and also a yoga instructor from Orange County California. And he’s not the only one.
All of this is to say that it makes sense to avoid explicit discussions about politics in yoga classes because it can become contentious very quickly. That and studio owners could rightly fear retribution if they or their teachers say things that might trigger someone who has different political beliefs to take action against them — whether that’s simply posting 1 star reviews on yelp or doing something far more destructive.
When I asked friends and colleagues on social media if they believed politics had any place in a yoga studio or in classes, their responses were overwhelmingly “NO.”
Some said this is simply because they live in places where politics really divide people and that bringing ideas into class that automatically create conflict will disrupt the peace and relaxation that students are coming for in the first place.
Several friends and fellow teachers live in places that are more conservative or Christian, so they too avoid bringing up politics generally because they want everyone in their classes to feel welcome — including themselves, as teachers.
A few folks mentioned that perhaps they might not talk politics directly, but instead reference ideas from yogic texts, like the Yoga Sutras — a text commonly required in Yoga Teacher Trainings.
One friend shared a photo of her copy of the Sutras that she opened at random. The highlighted section reads: “When negative thoughts or acts such as violence are done, caused to be done, or even approved of, whether incited by greed, anger, or infatuation, whether indulged with mild, medium, or extreme intensity, they are based on ignorance and bring certain pain.”
What several folks suggested is that simply by teaching yoga principles, like the one pictured above, you are offering people the opportunity to interpret these ideas and connect them to current events. Which can subtly reference political events without explicitly naming them.
And this notion leads to another, which is that the ideas within yogic texts are inherently political. Or perhaps more specifically, rooted in social justice.
As yoga teacher and host of the Connected Yoga Teacher podcast, Shannon Crow said to me, “If you replace the word ‘politics’ with social justice…I believe that yoga is all about social justice. If you don’t even talk about what’s happening now, today, with politics — even if you just talk about yoga philosophy, you are talking about social justice.”
She continues to say that social justice can work its way into a yoga class, “even if (a teacher) never talks about specific yoga philosophy, but it’s in their cues and their language. When a teacher says, ‘let’s check in with ourselves for a moment. What does my body really need today? How can I become aware of what I feel and what I need?’ Those kids of cues enable people to drop into themselves, feel what they feel, do what they need to do, and respect the people around them that are doing the same thing.”
A few friends and fellow teachers pointed out that erasing politics from yoga is just another form of whitewashing a practice that actually has deep political roots. Not just in terms of its origins, but also its ideological underpinnings.3
One of the questions Shannon leaves me with, that I think is important to reflect on is this: “Is social justice a part of yoga? Is collective liberation something we want our yoga teachers talking about? If we don’t want our yoga teachers talking about collective liberation or social justice, what’s going on there?”
So let’s consider these 2 opposing viewpoints:
On the one hand, you have the idea that politics have no place in yoga. If you believe this, you believe that people come to yoga to get relief from all of the noise and they don’t want it to follow them there. They’re in yoga class to increase their flexibility or decrease their stress or maybe just to feel good moving their bodies. And that’s enough.
On the other hand, you have the idea that politics, if not more accurately social justice, is the foundation of yoga and so therefore it is impossible to disentangle those threads of trying to make the world a better place through the practice of yoga, particularly if you view the practice as more than just asana — more than just the physical poses.
I think that part of the problem with the way we approach yoga from a western perspective is that the poses are the practice.
And as teachers, even if we studied the philosophical aspects and the spiritual foundation, those elements don’t always make it into class because they want yoga-lite: they want a physical practice that makes them feel better when they walk out the door. They want a teacher who perhaps sprinkles their classes with a few Rumi or Mary Oliver quotes, but nothing much deeper than that.
They don’t want to be confronted with the harsh realities facing some of their neighbors. They don’t want to be invited into a place of self-reflection, particularly if it comes at the expense of their ego or their privilege.
The problem is that because American yoga tends to be more focused on the physical aspects and neglects the roots of yoga, we really lose sight of some of the guiding principles of yoga.
One of those principles is to be in service.
Being of and in service to something greater than ourselves is fundamental to the practice of yoga. It’s the thesis of the Bhagavad Gita, which is one of the primary philosophical texts you’ll read in a Yoga Teacher Training, not to mention an important historical and religious text for Hinduism more generally.
That brings me to an article I read on AP News about undecided voters in Pennsylvania. The article ends with a quote from a woman in Bristol, PA. She is a former Trump voter, but has decided not to vote at all in this election because of her frustration with both political parties. 4
The article reads, “She got fed up, particularly with social media and Facebook. Online debates, she said, were driving a wedge within her own family, and she’s washing her hands of it.
“I just made the decision that I’m not going to vote and I don’t want to hear it,” she said. “Now I choose to not watch, not pay attention.” She’s found another pursuit.
“I’m studying yoga,” she said. “I got myself back.”
There was something about this statement that got under my skin. It’s the idea that somehow, practicing yoga can insulate you from politics. That doing yoga is somehow enough to protect you from the policies enacted by whoever is elected into office. Because of course, if you have the right amount of privilege, you might feel like nothing really impacts you in a meaningful enough way to take action.
This is the dark side of yoga that I think needs to be brought to light. The idea that you can meditate your way to health and happiness or do enough down dogs to be safe and secure in your rights.
It’s the toxic ideology that you are responsible for your own health and wellness, which also means you don’t have to participate in ensuring that other people have the same access. They have to take responsibility for their own health and wellness, too. It’s the “eat clean and you won’t get sick” mentality that is absolutely garbage and not based on actual science.5
So this woman in Pennsylvania, who is opting not to vote and instead doing yoga to “get herself back,” is simply acknowledging that taking care of herself is her priority and she doesn’t particularly care what happens to everyone else.
What we should argue is that, “yes you can go to your yoga class and take care of yourself,” but that at it’s heart, the practice of yoga is about collective care, rather than self-care.
When we only focus on yoga as a practice that supports the individual, we lose sight of a practice that really builds up communities.
Even if you’re just looking on a small scale, like how yoga studios can provide a community gathering space in a smaller city or town. Or how yoga studios can offer a place that, as one wonderful yoga teacher friend said, “(people can come) as respite, at least for a bit, to refuel and return brave.”
So I think we need to reinvestigate the idea that politics have no place in yoga.
Because the danger is that people will think that it’s just a practice for their bodies, just a way to engage in self-care. And they’ll never understand that yoga teaches you how to see yourself as part of something much bigger. That your actions and inactions all have a ripple effect in the world around you.
That as one social justice minded yoga teacher said to me, “our entire being is political.”
It’s less about telling people how to vote or what political actions to take; it’s more about looking at the foundational teachings of yoga and bringing them back into our classes as a way to have our students think more about what these ideas really mean, how they impact our lives, and what we should then do about them, with that knowledge.
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