from Leading with Love: Inspiration from Spiritual Activists
Like love and wisdom, trauma is cumulative. Every new trauma re-opens the doors of past traumas. The traumas can be personal, collective, and intergenerational. No one is exempt from experiences of trauma, but definitely some people have experienced more traumas, and more repeated and severe traumas, than others.
Global white supremacy, empire, patriarchy, and capitalism create a breeding ground for both individual and collective traumas. Theft of people, land, and resources over centuries…wars fought to control these people, land, and resources…ensuing genocide…divide and conquer strategies pitting neighbor against neighbor…hypermasculinity as a survival response to incessant violation…abuse within families, especially of women and children, repeated over generations….I hope you get the picture.
We are all trauma stewards. We are all required to tend to, and hopefully heal and recover from, our own traumas, if we are to survive in this world. As adults, we each need to develop ways to feed and house ourselves, which requires some level of functionality, despite the blows we have endured. We’re extremely fortunate if we develop livelihoods that nourish us spiritually, and enable us to be present as trauma stewards for each other. Due to structural inequities, as well as cultures of violence, neglect, and blame developed as a response to trauma, many people are just surviving.
Even some with accumulated material wealth are just surviving, from a soul perspective. They are spiritually bereft. #45 reminds us daily of the brutality and systemic violence our nation is built upon, and the ill-gotten generational wealth, shaped by generations of abuse, that put a sociopath in power. We witness daily the unspeakable ravages such a person, operating within systems and institutions built on oppression, can commit. We witness the hordes (stil a significant minority of this nation—30%) who respond to the dog whistle of his trauma, which resonates with theirs, who support him unquestioningly. They resonate with his fear of white annihilation, scarcity mindset, desperation to blame the other, and inexorable smugness of white superiority, because what else do they have to cling to? They even insist their God is white.
This is what our nation is made of. This is the culture Iyengar Yoga has emerged from. This is what all our institutions have emerged from, including IYNAUS.
Our nation is also shaped by struggle, boldness, vision, and resilience. Too many heroes to name from over the centuries, but off the top of my head, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Grace Lee Boggs, Charity Hicks….
Will we take it upon ourselves to shift and transform our culture and its institutions? There’s a part of me that says, fuck it. I am so thoroughly disgusted with mainstream society and I long to disengage from all of it.
But then I get hungry, and thirsty, and cold. I need a vehicle to acquire necessities. I need electricity to heat my home and wifi to communicate and get information. I need a goddamn debit card. I have not managed to get off the grid.
So like most of us, I am carving a middle path. I practice harm reduction. I am stewarding my trauma through somatic, creative, spiritual practices. I build community with others on parallel paths. We compare notes, teach each other, share food and resources, and support each other.
We are all survivors of abusive lineages and colonization. Most of us have been both survivors of harm and perpetrators of harm. How could it not be so? What parent has never lost their temper and lashed out at their innocent child? Or have times of shutdown or dissociation, when we are emotionally unavailable? In our intimate relationships, haven’t we all done and said hurtful things? When we open up so wide for each other, we make ourselves vulnerable to each other’s traumas. I’ve not met anyone who is exempt.
Iyengar Yoga in the USA is no exception. No institution is exempt. We need to regard each other and all our institutions through a trauma-informed lens. Why the fuck would I ever expect an institution to protect and serve me? Every institution and system was designed to serve the dominant power structure, and to protect their property.
IYNAUS emerged from a need to control who could represent, control, and access the teachings of BKS Iyengar. The community had grown exponentially worldwide, and Guruji was no longer able to personally mentor each teacher, nor monitor what each nation was doing. So associations were set up, with guidelines established locally, and overseen from a distance by Guruji.
Is it any wonder that despite the extreme minority of men in yoga classes, at least the past 5 presidents of IYNAUS included only 1 woman? Is it surprising to anyone that the culture of IYNAUS and Iyengar Yoga is overwhelmingly white? Even in a nation that is increasingly BIPOC, and will soon be majority BIPOC, the culture of Iyengar Yoga lags far behind.
IYNAUS as an institution reflects the community that comprises it. In our nation it has traditionally been a practice of the educated upper middle class. The middle class serves, in this nation, as functionaries of the upper class, and have been given access to many resources in exchange with compliance, and willingness to uphold the power structure. As such, are we surprised that our community struggled to figure out how to hold Manouso Manos accountable for decades of sexual abuse? And that allegations of other men abusing their power in the Iyengar Yoga world remain unsanctioned and unabated?
We excuse none of it. But I am thoroughly convinced that healing will come from outside the institutions. I hold their feet to the fire, at the same time that I actively build the alternative.
Iyengar Yoga Detroit Collective has a reach that extends beyond our city and region, due to globalized technology in the face of Covid-19. We have Iyengar Yoga practitioners from around the world able to participate in our webinars, workshops, and weekly classes. We are able to share our imperfect, evolving, trauma-informed, anti-oppression practices. We have study groups and committees explicitly addressing the prevention and correction of harm. We have a fund to support our many projects. We are in conversation with other communities with the same goals. We identify with the global Healing Justice movement, as defined by Cara Page and Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, emphasizing the relationship between social justice and healing trauma, individually and collectively.
How do we hold each other accountable without relying on institutions bound to repeatedly betray us? This is the starting point for radical, revolutionary love. We must create these containers for each other. It’s our only hope for healing. Transformative justice and restorative justice circles can meet with or without survivors, with or without perpetrators, because participants understand that harm occurs in social and historical contexts. There are many ways TJ/RJ sessions can be structured, and no one structure fits every situation. Each community must take responsibility. TJ/RJ is not a quick fix. It will require multiple sessions, with expert facilitation, possibly over weeks and months, and even years. As we know, healing happens in layers and spirals, and hopefully, never truly ends. TJ/RJ is the alternative to cancel culture, which never really works because it doesn’t address root causes. If healing happens in layers, acts of harm result from layers of trauma.
In the words of abolitionist Angela Davis, “We have to imagine the kind of society we want to inhabit. We can’t simply assume that somehow, magically, we’re going to create a new society in which there will be new human beings. No, we have to begin that process of creating the society we want to inhabit right now.”
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