Re-Entering the Stream

In 2020, I quit teaching yoga.

 It was for a variety of reasons, some intensely personal, some political, and all driving me to turn inward in my practice, to go into yogic hibernation.  My partner and I had just closed our small studio where we offered yoga, massage, and Aikido, and moved from Boise, Idaho to Seattle, where I had taken a position teaching pre-college and first-year college English at Edmonds College. There was a natural pause in my yoga teaching to adjust to a new workload and new environment. However, the downshift had been coming for a while, and a short pause soon extended to a lengthy hiatus.  

I was struggling to interface with the late-stage capitalism yoga machine that had swallowed up this beautiful practice into a burgeoning right wing wellness grifter hellscape that soon went completely berserk over the coming years of mass social collapse. The brilliant yoga teacher Sadia Bruce called this the “yoga industrial complex”, and it really couldn’t be more aptly named. At that time I was no longer equipped to offer something real and true in the precarity of the spiritual marketplace. My inability to interface effectively with social media, and the pressure to play ball with the beast that was the subsumption of yoga into dominant culture made me a nervous, nauseous wreck, and my anger toward it caused distortions in my teaching that I simply wasn’t comfortable with. In that particular moment, I knew it was time to pause, in case I was doing more harm than good. 

The writing had been on the wall for some time. I had been lucky that when I initially learned yoga in the 1990s, it was in a small studio in my hometown, from an old hippie who trained during his college days in the 70s with T.K.V. Desikachar. Yoga in the northwest was still primarily the domain of nerds and freaks disconnected from the capitalistic yoga fitness trends of LA, who were some combo of witchy, pathologically antiauthoritarian, intellectually curious, dirt-worshipping, or traumatized. Of course, there were still a number of rabbit holes of spiritual bypassing and other questionable thinking I got all wrapped up in, so I’m not aloof from having bought into some laughable bullshit, but I do still feel lucky I got the yoga intro I did. When I finally got around to teacher training in 2010, it was easy to notice how much the yoga world had changed from whatever bubble I’d been in. I was fortunate to be in a wonderful training with fantastic teachers devoted to sincere, evidence-based and historically informed practices, but it was hard to miss the presence of herds of Vickis from The Real Housewives of Orange County populating the studio scene, with their penchant for dancercise wine yoga, merged with their latent racism, homophobia, and fitness fascism sprinkled with toxically positive pop-psychology. For that first decade of teaching I persevered, and gained some real solace while working through some immense personal difficulties. Even while navigating the competitive market of yoga teachers as DJ/dance leader/entertainer/plastic shaman, teaching yoga brought meaning, culminating in opening a space with my wonderful partner. A small but very supportive community had our backs, whether we were at our best or not, and it was quite nourishing when we needed it most.

But I finally wore out, and in the virtual space of the pandemic, the hydra head of totalitarianism infiltrating our society through wellness and yoga commercialization exploded into a lenticular galaxy of grifters, creeps, and thieves. In response, a lot of good people emphasized the powerful and long held traditions of therapeutic, antiracist, and trauma informed yoga as an ocean wall against mass market ignorance. Some very real, earnest, and vitally needed work of yoga decolonization was happening, fighting back the global wellness-industry monster, but after awhile the desperation-breeding algorithms did their thing, and people were trying anything to sell themselves in an ever shifting marketplace, up to and including commodifying these very teachings of liberation and social justice. I simply couldn’t hang in it. I’m glad some people kept the work up in the increasingly toxic wellness arena, but for me it was a time to go into the cave and do some deep inner work of personal practice and attentive learning. 

Fortunately, this time of hibernation from the yoga world was supported by my work as a pre-college and first-year college writing professor, where I was a immersed in antiracist, culturally responsive, and decolonial pedagogies, which offered profound lessons in how to be a teacher while confronting the hegemony of dominant culture, and in the process confronting some of my own latent ignorance and positionality in systems of oppression, work that will be ongoing till I’m dead, as learning and unlearning is for life. I also dove deeply into my Aikido training, a period of rich focus that had been beckoning for a number of years. The break from the yoga industry, and the dynamic of ultra-capitalist selling of any half-baked idea that isn’t tied down, sprinkling it with essential oils and calling it yoga was much needed, and offered an opportunity to dig in and face some core truths, to recalibrate the way I interfaced with society and the greater currents in our culture. 

Now, of course, I make the very questionable decision to re-enter the yoga milieu at a time when everything that drove me out has only gotten worse. We are at the precipice of an absolute authoritarian takeover of our country that was enthusiastically abetted by fascist yoga practitioners. Much of what the minority world has so far externalized to the rest of the planet has now become apparent in every waking moment of our lives, even for those of us living in the anesthetized center of the global empire. Religious nationalists are further gutting every chronically underfunded service to the vulnerable, stripping the country like a gaggle of tweakers burrowing for copper, and an opportunistic, antivax, anti-science grifter is at the helm of the HHS, bringing with him a clouded definition of what wellness means, and compromising the mass solidarity it takes to support a healthy society. Also, the co-opting of legitimate traditional healing modalities and body-based practices by the marketplace seems to be at an apex, where the real value of these practices has been conflated with the false promises of disingenuous and exploitative actors, who raid the treasuries of ancient wisdom traditions, while undermining the findings of the scientific community, and in consequence robbing our communities of the benefits of both. 

Despite all this nastiness, the deep personal draw to teach again is calling. It is time to re-enter this strange and convoluted world, and explore what is to come, to help where I can. It may be a rough re-entry. There will be mistakes, further unlearning, anxiety attacks, and probably some feelings of abject terror, but hopefully these can be transmuted into learning, development, transformation, and some moments of joy, stability, and peace. Hopefully there can be some healing, relief, and liberation for all of us, on an individual and collective level, and my intent is that I do more good than harm, and bring something of use to the spaces I enter.