Yoga and the Politics of Self-Care

The year 2020 has confronted the American body politic with myriad mass, affective events. We have witnessed plague, pestilence, protest, and inferno. We are on the brink of a national reckoning, with the general election mere weeks away. In response to these and other affective experiences, self-care discourse has occupied and taken hold in our national imagination. Self-care does not at first seem to be a political practice. In fact, it is spoken about as a kind of panacea for a political moment that leaves many Americans divided and disheartened.

In this depoliticizing self-care imaginary, we react to politics and politicians that ostracize or misrepresent us with a collective exhaustion: disengaging from conversation and retreating from the political sphere, finding solace in rest. This narrative of self-care is dangerous, because it promotes withdrawal from our political identities and seeks to convince us that conflict and difference are inherently unresolvable—that if we cannot find fulfillment in the public sphere we can at the very least indulge in downtime. Such logic is also limiting, failing to grasp the politicizing potential of a national practice of rest, reflection, and self-nourishment.

In a zoom yinlicious class from Sage Yoga and Wellness, a beloved Boise studio now tragic casualty of Covid-19, one of my favorite yoga instructors, Corinne, describes yin yoga as a radical act of self-care. We wouldn’t normally couple “radical” and “self-care,” as the two at first seem antithetical. When we envision a radical politics, it is modeled on historical examples of rebellion and revolution, not calm reflection. But in fact, most revolutions are born of reflection: a radical written and spoken politics. The word “radical” comes from the Latin “radix” or “radic,” meaning root. Radical politics address and overturn roots toward some ideal of progress. So what does it mean to practice radical self-care? In essence, this rhetoric signals that we are uprooting ideas and habits that do not serve us and putting down new roots with intention, observation, and compassion for ourselves and others.

Often at the beginning of a yoga class, students are encouraged to set a sankalpa, or intention, for their practice and to repeat it as though it were already real. One Sage instructor, D’Arcy, gives examples ranging from “I am happy” to “I nourish my body with healthy food,” demonstrating the real-world scope of these normative statements, reflected upon as positive realities. The sankalpa of one’s practice represents the process of re-rooting on a fundamental level, which occurs in tandem with the process of letting go.

Letting go is a threefold practice in yoga. Practitioners let go of physical stress by way of prolonged stretching and breathing exercises; of their conscious minds, observing rather than processing a usually constant stream of thought and stimuli; and finally of something deeper, which Corinne calls “old stories.” These stories can be envisaged as mental blockages, unwanted habits, or “samskaras”: impediments to our emotional and spiritual well-being. Liz, another Sage instructor, calls this the unlearning process, remarkably guiding the practitioner through it by way of a power yoga practice, demonstrating that yin yoga is by no means the only radical practice of self-care.

One of the most important things that students of yoga are encouraged to let go of is our joint capacity for anticipation and expectation. And one of the most prominent social expectations that individuals have grappled with this year is the narrative of American liberal individualism: a logic which purports to reward ceaseless labor and output with material success. In a nation whose president compares it to a firm, and in an era in which such neoliberal rationale is commonplace, it takes a radical reimagining of ourselves and our politics to recast ourselves not as economic beings but as human beings. The model of the hard-working American, propped up by the cultural myth of the American dream (in turn supported by our president) relies on a ceaseless output of productive energy—in yoga, “yang,” the compliment of the nurturing “yin.”

Yang energy, powerful and intense, is not inherently bad but should be balanced by yin. Many of us focus on yang energy at the expense of yin. Stay-at-home orders and mass unemployment force us to reconsider our often hectic pre-pandemic lifestyles. On the one hand, there is the image of the financially stable middle or upper class American who is temporarily laid off and forced to come to terms with the reality of not working from a personal, rather than economic, standpoint. The national increase in cortisol, coupled with a complete restructuring of our daily modes of being, necessitates an uprooting of this person’s personal politics. A national pandemic forces us to reckon with our identities at individual, community, and national levels alike. We can embrace this reckoning through a radical practice of self-care, taking time to nourish our bodies as well as our intellectual and emotional faculties.

On the other hand, we are presented with the reality of the displaced worker, with limited savings and scant access to social benefits. While economic precarity has long been a hallmark of the American working class, Covid-19 has thrown into stark relief the variation of lived experience of non-essential workers at the top, middle, and lower echelons of the American economic hierarchy. The hard reality of working class Americans who face joblessness, homelessness, and deportation demonstrates the insidiousness of a depoliticized and reactionary self-care imaginary. Having the time and resources to nourish oneself is a privilege, and is hardly radical or political if its effects do not extend into the world around us.

By presenting nourishment and relaxation as essential and by bringing both into the purview of public discourse and affairs, we make self-care into a political practice. Such a practice cultivates yin energy not merely to counterbalance a ceaseless national output of yang, but to encourage individuals to live their lives with clarity, gratitude, and intention. In a radical politics of self-care, the fruits of individual practice generate social effects as reflection breeds empathy and gratitude develops into a collective sense of accountability. Taking the time to retreat within ourselves by practicing yoga and meditation can equip us to re-enter the polis as conscientious individuals with a strong sense of ourselves, our values, and our visions for the future.

Self-care gives us an appreciation for the generative capacity of leisure time, a luxury which may be more broadly accessible were we to elect officials concerned with implementing policies that counteract income disparity and economic precarity. Supporting the implementation of universal basic income, affordable higher education, federal assistance, a living wage, and universal access to affordable, quality healthcare prioritize our equal treatment as human beings. In this sense, self-care might effectively uproot a neoliberal narrative of the self as a unit of production, replacing it with a complex self whose interests are not merely economic but are also creative, spiritual, and political. Radical self-care, not to be confused with reactionary or passive self-retreat, is foundational to a vibrant and progressive body politic whose members work to support and understand one another. It bears mentioning that the best way to exercise our newly reflective faculties is to engage in conversation with the people with whom we disagree, and also to vote.

An archive of Sage’s yoga classes, including those mentioned by Corinne Hathaway, D’Arcy Valverde, and Liz Hilton, can be found here: https://m.facebook.com/pg/sageyogaboise/videos/

Definitons:

Affect: emotion; affective experiences generate an emotional response.

Depoliticize: to make non-political; remove from the public realm. Depoliticizing rhetoric removes our agency and choice, as well as our capacity for political action.

(American) Liberal Individualism: a logic/ideology that enshrines individual rights and promotes individual enterprise, positing that Americans are equally capable of material success through hard work and ingenuity.

Neoliberalism: a logic that economizes people, ideas, and processes generally outside of the realm of economics and the corresponding phenomenon in which this rationale pervades all aspects of social and political life. Theorists Wendy Brown and Elisabeth Anker use the example of George W. Bush encouraging Americans to continue shopping in the wake of 9/11 as a presumed exercise of agency.