Three Ways Yoga is Helping me Respond to Trump’s Tyranny

Image: Author’s own

A friend replied to my last essay on the inspirational model of leadership set forth in the Bhagavad Gita with a note of appreciation and a desire for a follow-up. He wanted to hear more about how inspiration from the Gita was affecting my engagement in the political process. My essay had contrasted the Gita’s exemplary leadership archetype with Trump’s disgraceful and destructive power wielding but did not speak to the implications of the Gita’s model for my own involvement in public life.

My friend’s interest in a follow-up seemed very reasonable. But I hesitated to respond because I didn’t think my actions as a concerned citizen were especially noteworthy or distinctive. (For anyone interested, I’ve offered in the appendix to this essay a quick look at what I’ve been doing politically since Trump’s inauguration.) Further, my articles on Substack were intended to be about yoga and life, not about political action.

But as I reflected more on my friend’s request, it seemed to me that my yoga practice has not been separate from my response to Trumpism. Rather it has played a part, in concert with my long-held social and political values and my prior experience as a participating citizen, in shaping how I’ve approached the Trumpian political landscape.

I’d like to explore three ways in which yoga is making a difference in my response to the Trump regime. Each of these ways concerns the qualities of mind and heart I hope to bring to public life. Yoga is an embodied, inner experience, and it is helping me summon my best inner self to the Trump-threatened outer world. Yoga’s influence is less about what I’m doing and more about how I’m doing it.

I’m writing mainly to other yoga practitioners who also are drawing on their practice to support their public activities in this turbulent time in our country. If you are among this group, please share your perspective in the comments section, whatever your political viewpoint might be and however you are living your yoga in the public realm. Perhaps we can create a dialogue that mutually expands our understanding of the responses that yoga practitioners are making to the new national political order.

I’m also writing for readers who are not yoga practitioners but who have an interest in how embodied and contemplative practices might contribute to political engagement. If you are one of those readers, I invite you to ask questions or raise issues in the comments section, and I will get back to you.

Experiencing my Body as a Microcosm of Life, Including Political Life

The first thing I think about when I think of yoga is not yoga poses. It’s about how interesting and illuminating it is to see the body as one model for what happens in life and in the world. This focus on the body as a source of insight into a broader reality is part of what it means to embrace yoga as an embodied life practice.

Consider the issue of scale, of how big or small a life issue is. In the context of this essay, the life issue at hand is Trump’s assault on democracy. For me, the most immediate and compelling way to relate to the scale of the Trump attack is to think of injuries my body has sustained. For example, just short of a year ago, I was hit by a car while walking in my neighborhood. My lawyer has advised me to refrain from writing about the extent and impact of my injuries, so I will say very little about this topic, other than to note that I broke my neck, also fractured bones in other parts of my body, and sustained additional serious injuries.

What I can say is that I have never before experienced physical injuries as extensive and severe as what the accident caused.

What strikes me is that the bodily harm I sustained is analogous to the unprecedented harm that the Trump regime is inflicting on our democracy and on our relations with other countries that share our democratic values. I can feel the immensity of the injury to our body politic by touching into the pain and dysfunction I’ve felt in my own body. I can feel what it’s like to experience brokenness, in my physical self and, by extension, in our democratic order.

To be sure, conceptual knowledge of the magnitude of Trump’s degradation of our public life is necessary to fully appreciate the significance of what Trump has done. But conceptual knowledge that I can also feel in my bones, muscles, breath, and energy is an especially resonant form of knowing.

Something similar can be said about the value of grounding political abstractions in the flesh and blood of the body’s experience. When I think of the ideal of freedom, for example, I think of the freedoms guaranteed in our Bill of Rights, such as freedom of speech and assembly. But I also can feel freedom in my body, both freedom from pain and restriction and freedom to move readily and purposefully. When Trump assails the free press or attempts to muzzle all dissenting voices in the civil service, for example, I feel my body react with a clenched jaw, a sharp gaze, and a tight chest. The stifling of freedom in public spaces is mirrored in the constriction of my body.

Of course, being able to feel in my body how terrible Trump’s actions are is not in itself a step forward in countering his regime. But it feels like a way to anchor my actions in the ground of my being rather than initiating action from a purely abstract place. When I’m literally shaking inside at the news of the day, I know something acutely alarming is happening. This is a sign for me to pay very close attention to events in our country and the world and to begin planning a constructive response.

Meditating to Tap Into What’s Beyond Anger

One of the lessons I learned from being hit by a car was that the anger I felt at the driver and at my condition was only one of many feelings that came up. I found meditation, a central part of my yoga practice, helpful in learning about the range of feelings that were there, often under the surface. For example, at times I felt despair. At times I felt afraid. At times, I was hopeful. And often I could experience bodily signs of these feelings. When I felt despair, for instance, I slumped into my meditations. My shoulders sagged, my spine felt pulled down into the earth, and the color of life seemed gray. When I felt hopeful, I sat up tall (for four months with the aid of a neck brace I wore 24-7), squared my shoulders, lengthened my spine, and opened to life’s brighter colors.

I’ve found meditation to be helpful in connecting with my evolving feelings about the Trump regime. And one facet of this evolution has been a sense of moving from anger to grief. I’ve felt the grief underneath the anger, as if the grief were the stump of a big tree, and the anger a fire in its branches.

An early sign for me that I was grieving a loss and not just feeling fury at Trump was an image that arose during one morning’s meditation. The image was of my maternal grandmother, Caroline, sharing with me when I was about 12 or 13 that she had cried when Franklin Delano Roosevelt died. She told me that FDR had led the nation through the soul-crushing hardship of the Great Depression and in the fight against the ruthless brutality of Hitler and the Third Reich. I could tell that Roosevelt symbolized for Grandma the power of government to do right and to accomplish big things. She believed that FDR cared about the people he was representing and had the vision and skill to harness government to a high purpose.

As I settled into my memory of this conversation with Grandma, I let my mind roam around other memories that were arising. One was of my dad sharing with me when I was in junior high that in 1952, the year after I was born, he had proudly voted for Adlai Stevenson, a liberal democrat, for President in his race against Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican candidate, who won the race. Stevenson was a civil rights advocate well before the Civil Rights era in our country and helped found the United Nations, where he served as U.S ambassador during a period in which the UN held such historic promise.

I think these memories arose because they connected me to the social and political values that I grew up with and formed a big part of my identity. From an early age, being a liberal democrat seemed to me like the most natural, ethical, and vital way to engage with politics and contribute to public life.

Yet those formative values, which I continue to stand for, are the antithesis of the Trumpian approach to politics. Underneath the anger I felt at the injury Trump was inflicting on our country was a deep sense of loss, a loss of trust that our government was a force for good that could, with an active and informed citizenry behind it, make life better not only for Americans but for people around the world (and maybe show our stewardship of the planet as a whole).

Under Trump, our federal government is neither championing decency nor honoring the dignity of diverse individuals. It no longer aims to serve high purposes. It has stopped caring about those in need in our nation and abandoned any pretense of caring about people around the globe. It has become a government less like the New Deal and more like a mobster’s rule.

As I came into my sadness at this loss, which felt deeply personal and not merely political, I also sensed in some of my meditations glimmers of light. The light felt like a reaffirmation of those core values that I had first internalized as a boy but which had grown and found expression throughout my life. This included my career in public education as a teacher, researcher, and program director, in which federal grants were essential to support education for students with disabilities, students from high-poverty districts, and students from historically underserved groups. I’m well aware that we liberal democrats need to fashion an electable alternative to Trump’s agenda and not simply recycle policies and campaign messaging from the past. But what I’ve felt rising from the ground of grief has been a kind of reverence for the cornerstone democratic values that have long been for me a steady source of guidance.

Embodying Commitment and Resolve in Warrior I

I took the glimmers of light I felt in some of my meditations to my mat as I practiced yoga asana, the yoga of postures. What I found on several consecutive days was that I was especially drawn to Warrior I.

At the front end of this piece is a picture of my upper body in Warrior I with rising arms and hands in the Kali mudra (a mudra is a hand gesture in yoga). Warrior I is a standing pose in which one leg, with a bent knee, is in front of the other. (Here’s a link to pictures of the full Warrior I pose but without the Kali mudra.)

Being in Warrior I with the Kali mudra was a way to embody not only the light of foundational democratic values but a resolve to move with the light into the world. My arms reaching energetically overhead symbolized hope and possibility. The Kali mudra, in which my hands came together with my index fingers flat against each other and pointing upward, extended the actions of the arms. The gesture reminded me of a church steeple drawn upward to the heavens. In yoga mythology, Kali also represented the force that cleared obstacles, and I couldn’t help thinking that my hands spontaneously assumed this shape as a symbol of removing the historic obstacle that is Trump.

Further, the firm grounding of the pose in the earth with one leg strongly rooting back and the other firmly planted in front provided a solid base for the skyward rising of the arms and hands. And as I felt the strength of the pose, I tried to keep my heart open. Tenderness as well as strength seemed needed to move beyond Trumpism.

In my recent essay on leadership in the Bhagavad Gita, I spoke of imagining myself as Arjuna, the warrior prince who was about to lead his troops into battle. But lately, when I do Warrior I and other active poses with strong lines of energy, I haven’t been imagining myself as Arjuna. Rather, I’ve been imagining myself in different scenarios of political engagement in the here and now. When I feel calmly and confidently emboldened through asana practice, I can try out in my mind different possibilities for constructive action. While I can’t say that all the actions I describe in the appendix grew out of my asana practice, some of them definitely did.

Yoga did not give me my political values. But yoga is helping me live those values more fully. It is helping me experience my reactions to Trumpism deep in my body and not merely as an intellectual critique. It is helping me feel my grief at the loss of democratic ideals. It is helping me find my confidence and determination to make a positive difference. Yoga doesn’t tell me what political actions to take, but it brings genuineness, clarity, and resolve to my political decision-making.

Appendix

A Quick Look at What I’ve Been Doing

Politically Since Trump’s Inauguration

In the past six weeks, like hundreds of others in my home city, Portland, Oregon, I’ve attended three town halls, two live and one virtual, with elected federal officials, including both U.S. Senators and a House Representative, to see what is being done and might be done in the future to oppose the tyranny of Trumpism and stand up for the values of our Constitutional, pluralistic democracy. Further, I’ve increased my involvement in local and state public affairs, including a visit with fellow volunteers to the State Capitol to advocate for an important piece of legislation. I’ve also joined the City Club of Portland, an organization founded in 1916 to promote informed and fair-minded deliberation on important citywide issues, participated in a City Club meeting with my district's new city councilors, and am attending a forum on a long-term vision for central city livability. Further, I’ve increased my donation to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and registered for a local meeting in support of the Equal Rights for All campaign. Finally, I increased my donation to the liberal arts college I graduated from to support the kind of mind-opening and perspective-widening higher education that Trumpers so viscerally oppose.

I plan on continuing to participate in local and state affairs at a higher level than I have in past years. The activities I engage in and the organizations and efforts I support may not be a direct counter to the Trump regime, but they are intended to affirm alternative civic values to those that Trump represents.