Who Gets to Feel Balance?
BALANCE IS A MYTH
Between now and the Spring Equinox, yoga studios and yoga teachers are going to be selling you experiences meant to teach you “balance.” But I think we can’t use this word anymore the way we are trying to use it. It doesn’t work.
If yoga is a state of conscious awareness that arises when the incorrect thought patterns* stop (my own modern-speak translation based on Yogas citta vrtti nirodha Sutra 1.2), we are finding ourselves in the work of confronting our collective’s greatest incorrect thought pattern.
Our society’s most egregious incorrect thought pattern is that I am separate from you and we are separate from them. The US vs THEM mentality. The incorrect notion that your suffering is not my suffering. That suffering around the globe has nothing to do with me.
So our global experience is calling us to be more compassionate, loving, and broad-minded than ever before…at the same time you’ll walk down the street and pause at a sign outside a yoga studio that says Come on in, we’re teaching balance.
You are? How? What world are you living in? Are you living in the same extractive capitalist system I am?
If you are feeling balance these days, tell me how.
If you are feeling balance these days, you’re probably really privileged. I am ultra privileged, too. Just saying.
I don’t think the yoga studios or anyone trying to teach balance is bad. They are trying to help. They are trying to share droplets of the practices that nourish and sustain us. So I don’t have a problem with the offerings. I have a problem with the direction I see the world “balance” being used in. I worry it’s setting up impossible expectations, and then lulling us to sleep and numbing us out when we realize we can’t get there—can we attain balance in a world experience that is so systematically set up to be… un-balanced?
I worry that balance is yet another one of the words we’re losing. It’s starting to meander its way into the category where whitewashing and spiritual bypassing rule the day—in that odd realm masquerading as typical human experience (but isn’t) where spirituality happens only up on the mountain top in a vacuum for the select few who can afford to experience it (on retreat for 7 days in the most idyllic of settings)…rather than down in the valley in the marketplace brimming with humanity—among the majority of people where life actually gets lived. It’s one of those things where if I'm telling people to seek balance I’m either presenting an impossibility to a single mother woman of color with three jobs and there’s no way in hell I’m going to tell her that practicing 7 times a week when she’s trying to work multiple jobs will make her feel more balanced...or if I’m preaching the quest for balance to a wealthy white woman it might cause her to put on blinders to what’s really going on in the world… in the name of balance. And she could choose to sit in her nice living room with southwest facing windows in Marin, CA, and completely disengage.
I know you want to feel balanced, and so do I. I would love to balance the yin and the yang, the rajas and the tamas, the accounts payable and the accounts receivable, and I would like to think that an Ayurvedic curry would solve all of our problems. I think you should still eat the curry to level out your dosha. I think we should still practice our asana and sit in meditation to level out our energies. But that is not the end of our practice. That is the beginning.
But if you’re convinced you’re after balance, ask yourself if that's still the right word to describe what you’re after. If you read my stuff, I imagine you're more interested in justice, in collective restructuring, and building a really cool community of broad minded thinkers just like you who want to envision what the next iteration of human experience looks like… for all of us.
It’s turning into a little bit of a motto here, but here I go again—Beware any spiritual practice or school or teacher or dogma whose teachings isolate you from the reality of daily experience and insulate you from what would be otherwise formative experiences engaging with other people in real life. Beware spiritual bypassing, whitewashing, complacency, apathy, ambivalence, and stagnation—the precise elements of spiritual vacuity that keep oppressive systems in place.
Instead, use the practices to build physical stamina, mental fortitude, and emotional awareness to step off the mat and into your real life with the broad perspective of a yogi—the only kind of blue sky mind that can help you engage in the world as it is today with all its beauty and with all its pain happening all at the same time because damn do you need a really broad perspective to hold all of that…while you plant the seeds for the iteration you want to see next.
I’d love to hear from you—is it really “balance” you’re after? Or is it something else? What’s your word? Do you even want to feel balanced in today’s world? Because that would be kind of weird if you were feeling balanced today.
💫 Sending love, light, and hugs from,
Marisa
