Mainstream American Yoga Avoids Suffering

After co-teaching a workshop on yoga and other movement practices in our social movements, I have been watching folks talk online about Yoga Journal and the state of American yoga these days. There's a lot that can be said in this regard, from the continued influence of colonialist narratives, to the heavy commodification of the practice. However, today I'd like to focus on this:

Much of the modern American yoga world avoids suffering.

Thinking that people are already challenged enough, yoga teachers, studios, and the like spin everything towards bliss, or its poorer cousin comfort.

Which seems to be a balm for the mundane stress of office jobs, traffic, or dealing with upset children, but leaves people absolutely stranded when something like loosing a parent happens. Or how to process the ongoing imperialist war machine. Or how to face, and possibly effectively challenge systemic racism, sexism, or homophobia. Or how to be and act in ways that resist eco-cide, and promote eco-centricism on an individual and societal scale. In other words, how to be a liberated being in the world.

For several years now, I have regularly said this verse at or near bedtime from the 8th century Buddhist monk Shantideva:

There's nothing that does not grow light
through habit and familiarity,
putting up with little cares,
I'll train myself to bear with great adversity.

These four lines have been more useful to me than a thousand yoga platitudes. But they also are, if you actually put them into practice, challenging words to swallow. When I bitch and moan and fuss about the "little cares," I'm forgetting them. When I fake being happy, or dismiss something bothering me as "nothing," I'm forgetting them. When I indulge in easy hatred towards the folks in power positions that are creating so much hell in the world, I'm forgetting that buddhanature is boundless, and that my liberation is bound up with everyone elses'.

Over the years, I have worked with perhaps four or five excellent yoga teachers. All of them gave suffering a fair shake; all of them understood the balance between challenging people to face their lives as they are, and also to be kind to yourself and relax; and the majority of them saw the teachings not just as individual tools, but also as gateways into understanding and acting in the world around us. In this, working on a political campaign or being part of a collective effort to develop new alternatives was just as worthy of a dharma talk as facing emotional challenges, or becoming more intimate with the breath or some other object of meditation. Along these lines, taking up Warrior Pose (see teaching image above) can more easily be seen as a training ground for cultivating the strength to stay grounded in the midst of a protest, or picket line, or heated meeting with a public official.

As I see it, American Yoga is not devoid of bodhisattvas - to use Buddhist language - it's just flooded with people who are essentially trading in the destructive addictions our our society people use to cope, with something that is more beneficial, but ultimately is still just a coping mechanism.

Being able to cope without destroying yourself is a big plus. But what happens when the bottom falls out on the coping mechanism? What if, in being able to cope more, you're also aiding the continuation of the systems of oppression and suffering that brought on much of the very misery you sought relief from in the first place?

The best medicine goes straight to the roots, taking out that which feeds all the surface-level disorders. Sometimes, it acts swiftly; other times, it slowly seeps in, like Shantideva's words above have for me.

In any case, perhaps American yoga can take a cue from the Buddha and turn more directly towards suffering, individually and collectively. This won't solve the myriad of issues with the American yoga scene, but in my book, it would be a step in the right direction.

Seeking Peace

There's nothing that does not grow light
through habit and familiarity,
putting up with little cares,
I'll train myself to bear with great adversity.

I chanted these lines from Shantideva daily for about four years, and still bring up them up from time to time.

Those "little cares" that arrive in our lives have the ability to muck things up greatly, if we can't meet them as they are in the moment. The pain in your back, for example, easily can lead to tension, and then irritation, and then angry acting out of some kind. So it often goes.

Many people come to Buddhism seeking relief from all of this. Seeking something they call "peace" and "calm." But how many of us really understand what peace and calm actually are?

It's easy to mistake a kind of relaxed dullness for peace and calm. Some think things like television, video games, comfort eating or drinking, and other such commonplace activities will bring them peace and calm. Others reject such notions, and try to avoid those activities all together, thinking that a certain "purity" will bring peace and calm. Of course, neither way "works."

I had a period of the latter during my early years of Zen practice. In some ways, I think the extreme of cutting out and avoiding all together many commonplace activities was helpful. A form of renunciation needed to gain clarity. However, it wasn't true renunciation, because I was still attached to "not doing" those activities. My identity of being a Zen student seemed tied to it in some ways in fact. Not eating meat. Not watching TV. Not drinking a drop of alcohol for a period. Never playing video games and similar "distractions."

Avoidance based renunciation is useful for breaking old habits, however in the end, it becomes a cage. It also ends up being a way to stall or push away the little cares of life. You can hide out in your meditation practice. Hide out in your view that you are a "good Zen student." And you can rationalize away whatever problems that arise, blaming others or dismissing them as not existing at all.

Those who are mostly lost in comforts and dullness, and those who live in ivory Zen towers, are easily thrown off balance when adversity arises. And this is often when learning to "put up" with little cares can slowly lead one to the peace and calm that is our birthright.

The Zen of Monsanto and Weeds

On the whole people might be better off if they threw away the crops they so tenderly raise and ate the weeds they spend so much time exterminating. Euell Gibbons, Stalking the Wild Asparagus

I have a fondness for weeds. For the forgotten, dismissed, and marginalized. Anyone who visits my garden in mid-summer probably wonders if I'm just not tending to it. Which is true. I'm not. Partly out of neglect, and partly out of a love of the wild.

When I saw this quote today, the first thing I thought of was Monsanto and the GMO revolution. A revolution not being televised, and one I have zero interest in supporting. Never mind the human dietary consequences, the push by Monsanto and other giant companies to control and manipulate plant life is about murder. About death to the wild diversity that brings our planet alive and makes it what it is.

Murder to the point of extinction for short term profit. It has to be one of the stupidest moves humanity's elite has made throughout it's history.

I had a poem about Monsanto published recently at Turning Wheel Media. One of the things it speaks to is our human desire for comfort and ease, and how giant corporations like Monsanto thrive on that. In fact, some of us become to attached to their products that it's akin to having another lover in your life. I recall the mother of my sister's childhood friend who drank a case of Diet Coke daily. You read that right. A case. Maybe not a full a case everyday, but she probably averaged that over the long run. She didn't live to 50. And I'm guessing that even after she found out about the negative health impacts of soda pop, she kept on drinking it. Wedded to it, and the company that makes it.

Weeds are the antithesis of ease and comfort. In the practical sense, their appearance mucks up uniform lawns and tenderly raised garden beds. Psychologically, weedy thoughts can stir up all sorts of emotions, from confusion to perverse desire. Spiritually, it is the lowly weed that frequently blows through the seemingly perfect answer we offer to life's deepest questions. How often have you thought "I've finally got it," only to have some simple and forgotten thing appear right along side the answer, almost as if in mocking.

The lowly dandelion, with it's bright yellow head, can grow in almost any soil, thriving in some of lousiest conditions imaginable. Every spring, I'm amazed at it's early appearance here in Minnesota, when the weather is still up and down, sometimes even poking through fallen snow from the tiniest cracks in sidewalks.

Eliminating weeds means destroying our toughness, tenacity, and flexibility. Whether we do it for profit or out of a mistaken sense that the best food comes from weed free conditions, the results are the same.

When I look back at the history of Buddhism, its best teachers might be considered weeds. Wild and unruly. Their ideas spreading in all directions.

Who the hell could tame someone like Ikkyu or Milarepa? You might, like the best of gardeners, manage some of the mad growth of their life stories, but that's about all.

Apparently Milarepa was fond of drinking nettle tea. So much so that his skin turned green in some accounts. You might wish to prune that detail away. Seems like anything bordering on supernatural or unexplainable is being pruned away by a lot folks these days. But there's no doubt in my mind that regular consumption of weedy teas changes you. Just as drinking diet Coke changes you.

Weeds remind us of this. They get in the way of our notions that we're separate. That we can keep out anything we don't want to deal with. If Monsanto or some giant oil company poisons the soil 1000 miles away, it impacts all of us. There's no escape.

I've tried cultivating weeds in my garden. Deliberately up-earthing them and giving them a specific home. The only ones that ever survive are the ones replanted in a mess. They respond to uniformity by shriveling up and dying.

If we keep giving in to the push for uniformity, comfort, and ease, we'll go the way of the House of the Hapsburgs. Liberation is a dandelion splitting though the spring soil. Bend down and touch it, breath in the bitter sweet fragrance. This is what you are truly longing for.

Hope Isn't Really a Buddhist Teaching

Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.

By Thich Nhat Hanh

I disagree with this statement. It panders too much to the stickiness that lies behind hope. The longing for a future that may not come. The desire for something comfortable and stable to rely on. The fear that things will "get worse." I have written on this blog before, and continue to believe, that hope is mostly a hindrance. Thus my disagreement.

Given that many of us live in places where hope narratives are really strong, using the word "hope" can be a skillful means. Telling someone "I hope you feel better soon" can be skillfully supporting them, as can offering optimistic views of the future. That's where comments like Thich Nhat Hanh's above might be pointing us in a useful direction, but you have to reflect on where that might be.

We can come from a place of offering that is open, and not caught up in the futurizing of hope. I can imagine hospice workers and chaplains have to work with such language all the time, and must consider the people before them and what is most skillful in the given situation. But I think there are ways to work with really difficult situations like families facing terminal illnesses that are both realistic in the now, but also optimistic about life as a whole.

Optimism is different from hope in my opinion. Although it tends to be linked with hope, I think optimism is grounded in confidence and a trust in the boundlessness of the world.

My mother is a pretty optimistic person. And although she gets caught up in misleading hope narratives like the rest of us, what I tend to see from her is a great trust that things will unfold in the way they need to unfold. The other day, her car broke down on a freeway ramp. She was initially irritated about it, and worried about having to get a new car. However, within a few hours, she had shifted all of this. With a friend of hers, she'd considered some of the possible outcomes, and then let it go to the mechanics to deal with. And although she had a hunch that it wouldn't be too bad (which it wasn't), what I mostly saw was that she trusted that what needed to happen would happen.

Optimism also, in my view, is seeing everything as an opportunity to learn, to become more fully yourself. That whatever comes, there's a way to integrate it into the whole of your life. I don't see hope doing that. Hope is usually about a desired outcome or set of outcomes. And a rejection or avoidance of other outcomes.

Now, even the word optimism is tied to a binary: pessimism. It feels a little clunky to me as I write this, but I'll opt to use it anyway.

As a final thought, I'd like to ask people who feel hope is essential a few questions. When you say hope, what exactly do you mean? How does it actually function in your body and mind when you hope for something? And what happens in your body and mind when you don't get what you hope for?

Wasting Time

A friend of mine, who has been struggling to make a few key decisions in her life, said to me something like "I don't want to live the rest of my life doing the same things." But then she goes back to doing so, for now (that's what we all think, for now).

Like my friend, I have done the "for now" return many times.

This returning doesn't define either of us, but it does make me think that the mind is so desperate for things to be stable and predictable, even if it's causing a crap load of suffering.

We aren't patient enough to let things fall apart on their own accord. To do only what is necessary, and then get out of the way.

When Shitou wrote of not wasting time, I think he was talking about everything extra.

The endless rounds of blather about making changes (soon).

The pressured effort to make things change (sooner).

The fussing over or fighting whatever is happening now.

People, myself included, seem to do everything in our power to resist liberation. It's like we are addicted to punishing ourselves.

As if it's not enough to experience the pain the first time around.