Practicing the Social Body: Yoga, Race, Freedom Kris Manjapra

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.

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

internal, situated knowledge of this pain. Native peoples also know the pain that courses through the social body, given the seizure of their lands and their forced displacement over the past 500 years of settler colonialism. Asian Americans, especially Muslim Americans, subjected to exclusion laws and Orientalist stereotypes for hundreds of years, also know about this ongoing social trauma. Jewish Americans know of the longterm genocidal record of Christian ethno-nationalism and the deep social scars it leaves. And Latino people know the pain of the social body too, as the bully pulpit preaches “a great wall” and deportation, while English-speaking society claims paternal superiority over Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking cultures.

As yoga practitioners, we know that “liberation is near for those who are intense in practice” (YS I.21). Yet, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, a queer Black woman and Buddhist monk, reminds us that “liberation cannot be achieved alone.”

“ Come on, sister, come along… we’re almost home.” —Sweet Honey in the Rock,

We’re Almost Home

What does Iyengar Yoga do in response to this ongoing and articulating social pain, expressed by intersecting experiences of race in America? B.K.S. Iyengar developed a method of yoga that put focus on detailed instruction, the art of sequencing, therapeutics, and the use of the body as an instrument of meditation. In Iyengar Yoga, we gain attentiveness to the body in a lifelong pursuit of integration and freedom. But what is the connection between the study of our personal body and the study of the social body, which is in such pain?

This question is important to me, especially since the typical Iyengar Yoga class in the United States is a very white space, in which whiteness and class privilege is continuously, if unconsciously, re-enacted and performed. How do we recognize our social ties and our responsibilities to each other in and through the way we teach and practice yoga, and thus practice for the social body?

Two years ago, I started to explore this question and began teaching Iyengar Yoga classes for people of color and their allies. In addition to weekly classes, I also offered special workshops from time to time, beginning with a “Yoga in Troubled Times” workshop co-taught with my teacher, Patricia Walden. Recently, these endeavors have developed into a workshop series called, “The Relational Body,” in which we use yoga to explore our responsibilities to each other.

“ Words, sounds, speech, men, memory, thoughts, fears and emotions, time— all related, all made from one... all made in one.” —John Coltrane, Love Supreme In the Relational Body workshops, yoga does not serve as a retreat from the world. Rather, yoga takes our attention where it needs to go—to social experience. Yoga practice serves to bring us closer to the pain of the social body, but in a transformative way. We do this by acknowledging and talking about the effects of racialization on our physical and emotional experience. We complement asana practice with small group discussion and intentional exercises such as listening to music, journaling, and art-making. Placing asana in a social context allows us to keep vigil with groups that contend with the effects of race in America. We “try a little tenderness” together, as the Queen of Soul sings.

“ But it’s all so easy

All you got to do is try

Try a little tenderness” —Aretha Franklin, Try a Little Tenderness

We can use asana practice and sequencing in the way a singer uses musical notes and the voice: We transform the social order from within by creatively rearranging it. In practice, I have co-taught workshops with Lucilda Dassardo-Cooper, Annie Hoffmann, Nadja Refaie, and Betty Burkes. Collaborative teaching changes the dynamic in the room. By co-teaching, the classroom is already opened up as a community space and convened in concert. The workshops are also donation-based, so there is no financial barrier to participation.

Before the asana practice, we start off working with soft tissue. A friend, Bo Forbes, showed me how to use a tennis ball in class to bring students’ awareness to particular parts of the body, such as the trapezius, the pectorals, or the buttocks. “Ball work” invites students to shower a particular part of the body with tender attention, while also physiologically hydrating the tissue. Students come to use their interoception, or their internal awareness, to recognize places of tension or even unexpected stores of pain. The use of the ball allows students to pause in places of discomfort and work intelligently around them.

We always integrate music, especially the music of the Black American tradition, into the workshops. This showcases a long and deep musical tradition, with profound insight into the meaning of freedom. We use a mix of blues, reggae, jazz, and gospel.

After the introductory work, the workshops turn to asana sequences, but in a thematic mode that helps explore the connective tissue of social life. For example, we might do asanas that ground the legs and buttocks in order to address the disembodiment and alienation that racialization produces. On another occasion, we might do asanas such as twists and bandhas that press parts of the body into other parts to address the ways racialization impresses itself on the skin. If race writes a script on our flesh, yoga asanas can serve to rewrite that script.

Lucilda Dassardo-Cooper

We use chest-opening poses and backward bends to lift the heart, the site of passion and compassion, and to energize the throat from which we speak out against injustice. In another class, we might use restorative asanas, especially ones that support and spread the chest, to illuminate the way racialization seeks to contain people in small boxes. In yoga, we experience the expansion of space as we feel ourselves crossing internal limits into boundlessness. Space unfolds, and this experience provides an embodied way of counteracting racial containment.

I was inspired to take this thematic approach to asana practice from the work of Gwi-Seok Hong, who also connects yoga to the experience of the social body in her “Yoga for Brown and Black” classes in Detroit. Both Gwi-Seok and I recognize the great wealth of the Iyengar Yoga method’s repertoire of sequencing, which can be deployed to address the themes of social justice in our classes.

In the two-hour Relational Body workshops, we also make time to feel the social bonds in the yoga room itself and to be in community with others. After asana practice, we reserve time for artistic activity, such as journaling, poetry writing, or drawing, which allows participants to create an imprint or “signature” of their experience that they might choose to share with others in We can use asana practice and sequencing in the way a singer uses musical notes and the voice: We transform the social order from within by creatively rearranging it.

the class. We also incorporate a sharing circle at the end of each workshop, allowing time to reflect on and integrate as a group the insights that come out of our embodied, communitybased inquiry into freedom.

This workshop approach, in which asana practice is cradled by a set of intentional activities that acknowledge the effects of race on the social body, leaves us with an awareness of our interconnection. We feel we have played the body’s music together and sharpened our social intelligence.

Such relational yoga practice does not retreat from the world but listens for the calling beyond the yoga mat. Spinning out from the workshops, we have started a collaboration with an inner-city public school to teach yoga to students. As opposed to a missionizing project, which involves “parachuting in” without context and imposing foreign practices, we would like to evolve a practice of “going there,” in which yoga serves as a bridge and an invitation to collaborate with communities that know first-hand the pain of the whole social body and that live at the flashpoint of this society’s ongoing violence of racialization.

Iyengar Yoga has a calling in these critical times and in these flashpoints of race in America. Prashant Iyengar has said that our method sees asana postures as “iconic forms.” These forms are not meant to impose a universal shape on each body or create a top-down ideal of perfection. Rather, they bring our attention to a vast array of relationships: shoulder to hip, skin to flesh, outer world to inner world, and so on. The iconic forms of asana serve to create an embodied, physical experience of stability and balance—making our own bodies into objects for meditation, so that we can embark on the inward journey to freedom. We use our own bodies as instruments for objective study, while we also inhabit the instrument from within. In Iyengar Yoga, embodiment is subject and object simultaneously, which opens up a glorious path of succor and liberation. Iyengar Yoga is especially primed to address the pain of the social body, if only we allow social dynamics to be recognized within the ambit of our practice.

Feedback from the workshops allows us to hear the voice of students. “This was divine for me, to do yoga in a space, conducted by a person of color, with such integrity and inclusivity. This is yoga. This is the world I want to live in,” wrote one student.

Another student shared, “I was honored to be part of something that brings yoga and our connection to the world together. We are exploring an educational crossroad here.”

And another participant contributed, “As a person of color, it is so encouraging and lovely to be in a space with other people of color, which is so rare for both Boston and the yoga community.”

By practicing the social body, we develop receptiveness to the social responsibilities that result from our involvement in each other’s histories. We develop the capacity to linger in places of soreness and social pain, so as to transcend that pain through creativity. And we tap into archives of bodily intelligence that come out of our own varied cultural backgrounds and memories. We bring the world into the yoga room, as opposed to feigning retreat from it.

When we introduce the language and themes of social justice into our teaching, a door to freedom and transformation is automatically opened. When we teach in collaboration, the spirit of community flows into the class. Yoga practice can be about hearing the polyrhythms and the vibrations, tarrying with the tensions and the pressures, and dealing with the scars and the wounds of the social world. We have the ability to riff, improvise, and make music in yoga. This rhythm and resonance, for the liberation of the social body, is something that our times are calling for—and something that our yoga practice should cultivate.

“ May the heavy become light,

May what’s ill become well,

May what’s violent become peace,

May rage be settled,

May the idea of enemy be banished,

May actions be filled with sincere purpose,

May wellness be illuminated,

May gifts be recognized,

May all that we know to BE LOVE,

Pour out and overflow,

Wherever it is needed.” —Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, Be Love

Kris Manjapra (CIYT Intermediate Junior I) teaches in Cambridge, MA, and is a professor of history at Tufts University.