Collective Trauma and the Dilemma of Over/Under-Achieving

In the 2000s, I used to teach Iyengar Yoga in the Dance Department of Alverno College, a small women’s institution in Milwaukee. They made a point of being accessible and affordable, and was over 50% women of color, with a high percentage of first generation college students. These students were often commuting, and juggling other roles: mothering, working one or more jobs, caregiving for family members, and more.

It was a huge departure from my own college experience, as a residential student, far from my family, who went out of their way to make sure I could focus solely on my studies. As Korean immigrants, they were absolutely insistent that education had to be my highest priority.

So when I met Alverno students who missed their midterm because they had to take their grandmother to the hospital, or stay home with a sick child, I had a hard time understanding how this could be so. Hadn’t they rearranged their entire lives to accommodate their education? Wasn’t extended family sacrificing everything to make sure they could graduate on time? At the time I couldn’t relate to the other demands on their lives. But now I understand all too well the dilemmas these heroic women faced.

I’m also able to see the bigger picture now, of the personal, collective, and intergenerational trauma people of color need to manage in order to complete milestones like college degrees. I am increasingly aware, at this stage of my life, of personal and familial patterns of trauma, that perhaps go back even further than I can see. I am recognizing themes of abandonment, betrayal, addiction, violence, and more, passed through generations of my family.

After all, my parents and grandparents lived through decades of colonization, war, and empire. The war on the Korean peninsula has never ended. The tiny nation with a profound indigenous heritage became a target of manipulation and exploitation by burgeoning superpowers after World War II, following brutal Japanese colonization. My ancestors lived through genocide, partition, and deprivation. My family emigrated to the USA, where I breathed the air and drank the waters of dominant white culture, learned to internalize racism, and fell deeply under the spell of capitalism.

I am peeling back the layers and climbing out of this story. Tell me, how can I think about anything else, without dealing with this shit?

When I began my yoga journey at age 33, I took to the practice like a moth to a porch light. The poses made sense to my body, and all the pieces of myself seemed to fit together. After 6 years of embracing the practice, I started to teach, and the teaching also seemed to flow. I found that I could impart clear and effective instructions, and connect with students and their needs. I was a quick study, and made rapid progress.

But to be honest, I did not maintain that progress. In Sanskrit, you’d call it Alabdhabhumikatva—failure to achieve, and Anavasthitatva—backsliding. Up to my 30s, I was on a personal, vertical trajectory of growth. But in my 40s and 50s, my scope has become much wider, and much more horizontal.

The same could be said about my poetry career. In my 20’s, a mentor referred to me as a “a rising star.” I continued ambitiously into my 30s, churning out work, teaching a ton, publishing frequently, reading widely, getting awards and fellowships, and staying current with the literary scene. But after 9-11, all that drive drained out of me.

What happened? My focus started to shift from the intensely personal practices of yoga and poetry, to the larger issues of society and community. The purposes of the practices shifted for me. My relationships to these practices have remained steadfast, but are differently oriented now. After all, these practices are what open up the locked stories, memories, and traumas that I am only now beginning to access, and that now, I need to take the time to understand and heal.

From an outsider POV, I should be farther along in my work, right? I should be traveling around the world as a renowned teacher, with many books under my belt, making a comfortable living. Instead, my life has revolved around a different set of decisions and values.

I’ve slowed down, way down, to live as a caregiver. I lived upstairs from Grace Lee Boggs to assist her in her final year of life, and I currently live with Baba Baxter Jones. You could call these internships in life. From Mama Grace, I learned about vulnerability, and the spiritual work of preparing to transition. My time with Baba Baxter has been an immersion in Black history, Detroit history, and disability justice. Through these pivotal relationships, I am growing my soul, as Mama Grace would say, and this soul work cannot be quantified in a resume.

This soul work has connected me to marginalized people and communities across the planet and across history. It has been preparing me to open the doors of my own family history. My Iyengar Yoga teaching is geared primarily toward other people of color, and focuses on healing, and using yoga as a tool for collective liberation. These days, I mostly write essays instead of poems, which allows me to more directly, urgently, and accessibly address issues of injustice and pathways to healing.

On some level, this essay reads as an excuse for underachieving. I can just see my parents and teachers shaking their heads in disappointment and disapproval. Some years back, I had a brainstorm for an Iyengar Yoga teachers’ alliance with the acronym MAITRI (Sanskrit for friendliness): Milwaukee Area Iyengar yoga Teachers Reaching Into community. We would coalesce to bring Iyengar Yoga to nontraditional communities like prisons, schools, neighborhood rec centers, and more. I excitedly shared my idea with a colleague who rolled her eyes and said, “Don’t you think you should be concentrating on certification?”

Shouldn’t I be focused on my vertical trajectory? Getting my own shit done? Letting grandma take a taxi to the hospital so I don’t miss my midterm? Making someone else take care of the sick child so I can go to school? Devoting hours to my yoga practice every morning so I can nail that difficult pose, and pass my next certification?

Maybe.

It’s a privilege to live that life, which seems so 20^th century now. I would have to put blinders on, like I had to do in grad school in my attic hovel when the planes exploded in the Twin Towers. Or now, when members of our Black community in Detroit are still dying of Covid19. I need to give myself permission to weep on my Prāṇāyāma bolster, seek out the untold stories of my grandparents, and patiently coach my heart to widen, and my front hips to lengthen.

True, sustainable growth is actually a combination of horizontal and vertical development. Study any living object, like the lilac tree on the corner, or the strawberry plant in your garden, and see how this is so. Growth is often invisible and not visibly measurable. The coronavirus stay-at-home order is reminding us of this everyday. I’ve stopped berating myself for my seeming lack of progress. I continually remind myself of my purpose here on earth, in this embodiment, at this time. May we each honor ourselves and our unique paths.

Addendum:

Iyengar Yoga with Gwi-Seok Personal Teaching Statement, April 2020

I invite you to collaborate with me to:

Share Iyengar Yoga as a practice of liberation, centering those who have been systemically marginalized.

Cultivate the limbs of yoga as practices to dismantle oppression:

-       Recognize the ways we have been colonized, traumatized, and oppressed in:

o   our individual embodiment,

o   intergenerationally through our families and genetic lineage, and

o   culturally/historically through our nations and ethnicities.

-       Recognize the ways we have been perpetrators of colonization, trauma, and oppression, intentionally or accidentally.

-       Reveal, examine, and heal these wounds.

-       Transform the wounds and their lessons, to use as impetus for change, personally, interpersonally, systemically, and culturally.

Honor yoga and Sanskrit as pre-Hindu practices, and dissociate them from caste, class, and religion.

-       Collaboratively learn and develop yoga as a contemporary practice for personal and collective liberation for our particular time and place.

Honor the teachers who have come before me, especially BKS Iyengar and Geeta Iyengar, and channel their teachings to develop Iyengar Yoga for the current and coming era.

Dismantle oppressive pedagogical hierarchies, and to make the Iyengar Yoga classroom interactive, collaborative, generative, creative, and equitable.

-       Dismantle systems and structures that reward single charismatic leaders.

o   Recognize and reverse the ways we have been trained, habituated, and colonized to seek and embrace such figures.

-       Resist authoritarianism in all forms, including dominant narratives defining  Iyengar Yoga pedagogy.

-       Recognize and value multiple modes of ability, intelligence and contribution.

Employ all the tools of Iyengar Yoga to create the culture we want to live in, in the classroom, in our lives, and in the world.