PRACTICING THE SOCIAL BODY: YOGA, RACE, FREEDOM BY KRIS MANJAPRA
“ We forward in this generation Triumphantly Won't you help me sing These songs of freedom? 'cause all I ever have Redemption songs” —Bob Marley, Redemption Song
Lucilda Dassardo-Cooper
Yoga practice is a kind of music. At its core, yoga, like music, is about vibration, after all. The vibration we feel in the body, like vibration in the universe, is the original principle of existence. If all life has breath, then all existence has vibration. Yoga plays an important role in awakening the deep bodily vibrations that move us to freedom. But what is this “body” that we play in yoga practice? What is its scope and what is its nature? We know the body is more than our limbs and sense organs. We practice Iyengar Yoga because at the core of our method is the insight that the body has many sheaths, and we can access the subtler layers through the more apparent ones. I have come to understand the social body as one of these sheaths. It consists of the subtler historical tissues that make us up, and the legacies of social experience and social power that tie us together. The social body is the connective tissue that ties me to you. And the social body is in pain.
Yoga Samachar Fall 2017 / Winter 2018
In Iyengar Yoga, we gain attentiveness to the body in a lifelong pursuit of integration and freedom. Racism in America is one major source of this pain, alongside patriarchy, sexism, and greed. Structural racism ensures that some groups in society are systematically disempowered, given limited access to wealth, education, health care, and the vote. Cultural racism alienates minoritized people from their own bodies and cultures, demanding that they cede to the values and judgments of the dominant group. And interpersonal racism covers up the actual interdependence between peoples, and instead creates a world of self versus other. After 500 years of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and “the New Jim Crow” today, defined by civic disempowerment, police violence, and mass incarceration, Black people know that the social body is in pain. But it is not just Black Americans who have an
15
