Yoga Ethics and Community Action
How Can Our Yoga Community Contribute to A Better World?
Let’s talk about how community action can fit into our yoga practice, teaching, and yoga spaces.
Watch the video below, or scroll down for the transcript notes.
How can our yoga community contribute to a better world through our yoga ethics and community action?
I’ve recently been questioning our role as yoga practitioners, teachers, and community members when it comes to *all this* that’s happening in the world.
What can we do as yogis and yoga teachers about the state of the world and its impact on us, our friends and family, our students, and our wider communities?
What is yoga’s place in contributing to the policies, systems, and institutions – and the choices being made locally, nationally, and internationally – that impact us all?
How can we find ground, thoughtfully respond, and make a greater contribution to a better world?
These are complex questions, and my quick answer is, I don’t know, but it can’t be nothing!
Yoga As Sanctuary
I’ve been having discussions with teachers and teachers-in-training over the past few weeks to share ideas for creating community and leading with our yoga ethics at the forefront of our practice, teaching, and community action.
Many have expressed valid concerns that they don’t want to intrude on the sacred space that yoga provides. I agree, we do want yoga to remain a place for peace, calm, and genuine connection.
Yoga class can be a place where we rest, regulate, and recharge our batteries so that we can be better parents, friends, partners, and community members.
It can also be a place where we join together with common values and ethics to contribute to our community.
Yoga Means Union
Union means that our liberation is tied to everyone else’s liberation. We’re all in this together.
When I get to thinking “I’m just little old me what difference can I make?” I remember, I don’t have to fix the world’s problems alone. I am one drop in a much larger ocean of change.
The solution is not me, it’s we. Yoga is not just an individual practice but a collective one. It always has been.
Rather than thinking that yoga is a space isolated from reality, a place where we hide from the world, we can acknowledge that these events impact on our yoga spaces too. Not acknowledging the challenges we face or not wanting people to be uncomfortable doesn’t make pandemics or conflicts or a climate crisis go away.
That leads me to two issues that we commonly see in the yoga community
Yoga’s Collective Samskaras
Modern Postural Yoga has a history of collective cognitive biases or Samskaras – mental habits or patterns – that can impede our ability to see, understand, and act on what is happening in our communities.
One of the issues we face is that we that we don’t make people uncomfortable. But the truth is that we are already uncomfortable. People are losing their homes in fires and floods, they are losing jobs or support that they need to survive, the kids are all struggling, and the news is full of daily horrors.
It’s very human to have an aversion to discomfort, but as we learn from our yoga philosophy, resistance to discomfort doesn’t make the discomfort go away.
Wanting yoga to be that oasis from these discomforts, especially those we have no control over, is understandable. Our yoga class in the gym or studio certainly isn’t the most effective place to address all the issues we are facing in the world. Your class can still be a place of peace – a place for us to rest, reset, regulate, and then return to our communities energized. However, we have to ensure that we aren’t using yoga to bypass the reality that we are living in.
Spiritual bypassing is common pattern in yoga. Spiritual bypassing is a cognitive bias which explains how we might use spiritual ideas or language and practices to avoid facing our discomfort or explain away or avoid engagement with complex issues. This might include policing language with mantras like “let’s just stay positive” or “good vibes only”, or “I’ll have to meditate on that” avoidance behavior. It might come across as moralizing without taking any responsibility for our own feelings or behavior or not acknowledging the messiness of life.
To move beyond these cultural habits of avoidance and bypassing, we can draw lessons from yoga ethics to give us a bit of a guide, including:
- Viveka – discernment: being able to distinguish between right and wrong. To be able to acknowledge what’s happening now is the beginning of change.
- Satya – truthfulness: being able to see, speak, and act on the truth.
- Ahimsa – non-harming: doing no harm through our speech and actions and reducing harm to others through our speech and actions.
To practice ahimsa we have to not only not do harm personally, but also not participate in harms being caused by people or systems and be a part of stopping harms being caused by people or systems.
Strategies
We know what we don’t want to do – make yoga into another space of political opinion and divisiveness. We don’t want to use yoga as a platform to lecture our students about how bad the world is but rather provide opportunities to illustrate yoga’s ethics in a real way.
How do we make our ethics part of our practice beyond theming or dharma talks at the start of class? Well, I have a few ideas, and they begin with identifying an issue you care about:
Care about the climate crisis?
If you live in an area where it’s feasible, give students credit for walking or riding their bike or taking public transit rather than driving – add up a few trips to a free class, or give a discount, even just giving acknowledgement. Want to go further? Partner with a local bike shop to provide your students or members with a discount on a bike.
Make your classes as “green” as possible through your use of energy and materials.
Get your community involved in beach or trail cleanup days, tree planting events, etc.
During times of crisis in your community – firstly cancel classes when there are fires or floods nearby – don’t put your students in harms way. Secondly, after a crisis has passed, you might do fundraising classes or be a donation point to help people who have lost their homes.
Care about people’s access to healthy food?
Become a donation point for your local food bank. Get your gardening students involved in donating the extra produce they grow – everyone who has a veggie garden has extra zucchinis! Hook up with a local farm or market to support community food initiatives.
Care about inclusion and equitable access?
Offer free class passes or by-donation classes to underserved populations – Indigenous students, lower income students, immigrants, people living with disability.
Care about animals?
Hook up with your local birders association or a nature preserve or animal sanctuary and do a yoga + animals’ class to raise awareness and funds. When we have personal experiences with nature, we are more inclined to get involved with solutions.
Help your local humane society in ways that they need – that might include being a donation point for old mats which they use in kennels or sharing their social media posts or flyers about animals who are needing homes.
Care about accessibility?
Ensure your classes are accessible spaces with physical access for people with disabilities as well as accessible teaching strategies.
You might offer low sensory classes for people who find the usual classes overstimulating – that might include neurodivergent folks, people with sense processing disorders, or people with brain injuries. This can include choices like lower lighting, no music, no scents, etc.
If you know or want to know how to communicate with sign language you can offer classes where you sign rather than speak your cues – or use both.
Offer online or hybrid classes for people who can’t attend in-person classes due to mental or physical health issues, transportation issues, or childcare issues, etc. Live online classes differ from recorded classes in that students are part of a community – they are seen, heard, and can feel more connected to their fellow yogis.
Staying Hopeful
When we look at all that’s happening in the world and how many people are struggling it’s easy to throw up our hands – what can we do? But there are things we can do beyond posting on social media – we can offer donation-based classes or karma yoga spots for people who are doing it tough. We can have fundraisers for communities hit by floods or fires. More important than what little old me can do – we can develop mutual aid systems, and we can get our yoga community engaged in wider community efforts.
I’ve shared a few thoughts and ideas, but I bet you have creative ideas that you are already leading or contributing to, or you have ideas that we can all learn from.
If you are a yoga teacher listening, consult with your students about directions they’d like to take.
If you are a yoga student, talk to your teachers, studio or gym about your ideas to develop some community actions together – champion a program that gets others involved.
Let’s keep brainstorming ideas together – and a good starting place is to think of something you care about and then come up with some ways you can raise awareness, provide service, or get your community engaged.
Yoga means union – that means we are all in this together, and together, even in our small ways, we can make the world a better, more peaceful, more hopeful place.
For now, thank you for joining me in this discussion. As you can see I’m not an expert in these areas, but I’m trying my best, and I look forward to continuing to learn along with you.
Heather.
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