Should Yoga Be Free of Politics?

I went to a yoga class when I was in Brighton where the teacher was wearing a T-shirt with a political slogan on it.

I'm deliberately not going to tell you what it said.

Because the minute I do, some of you will agree with it and some of you won't. We'll start discussing the cause rather than the question it raised for me.

And the question is this:

Should yoga be free of politics?

My immediate reaction to the T-shirt was discomfort. More than discomfort, actually. I resented it.

Then, at the end of the class, another student congratulated the teacher for wearing it. She said how much she appreciated it.

That bothered me even more.

I've been trying to work out why.

The obvious answer would be that I disagreed with the slogan. But I don't think that's quite it. I've been taught by people whose views undoubtedly differ from mine on all sorts of things. That's inevitable. I don't need my yoga teacher to vote like me, think like me or see the world exactly as I do.

What bothered me was the feeling that a position had been established in the room.

The teacher was at the front wearing the slogan. Another student publicly approved it. And suddenly this little yoga class seemed to have acquired a political position of its own.

Perhaps everyone else agreed with it. Perhaps they didn't. I have absolutely no idea.

But I became very aware that I didn't.

And that changed the room for me.

There is an interesting power dynamic in a yoga class that we don't talk about very much.

As teachers, we stand at the front. People listen to us. We tell them where to put their bodies, when to breathe, sometimes when to close their eyes. We might talk about how to live, what matters, what yoga teaches us about ourselves.

People give us an extraordinary amount of trust.

That doesn't mean yoga teachers should become bland, opinionless creatures who never say anything remotely challenging. I certainly don't intend to.

And yoga itself isn't devoid of values.

Ahimsa asks us to think about non-harming. Satya asks us to consider truth. Aparigraha asks questions about greed and accumulation. Yoga asks us to consider compassion, suffering, our relationships with other people and our responsibilities towards the world around us.

You could make a perfectly reasonable argument that yoga is inherently political.

But I wonder whether there's a difference between exploring a value and declaring a position.

I can talk about compassion without telling you which causes deserve yours.

I can invite you to think about non-harming without telling you what conclusion you should reach.

I can talk about justice, truth, responsibility and our interconnectedness while leaving room for the possibility that two thoughtful, decent people might apply those principles to a complicated situation and come to different conclusions.

That distinction matters to me.

Because the people who come to my classes don't all think alike.

I hope they don't.

There will be people in the room who vote differently from one another. People with different religions and none. Different experiences, histories and beliefs. There will be subjects about which they feel passionately and others about which they know very little.

For an hour, none of that needs to matter.

We can practise together.

That doesn't require us to pretend the outside world doesn't exist. Yoga isn't an escape hatch from being human. What happens outside the room comes in with us: grief, anger, injustice, worry, illness, war, loss.

But perhaps the yoga room can be somewhere we don't immediately have to choose a side.

Somewhere we're allowed to encounter difficult questions without being handed the correct answer.

Somewhere disagreement doesn't automatically make someone a bad person.

And somewhere the person standing at the front is particularly careful about the influence that position gives them.

I'm still not completely sure that yoga should be free of politics.

Actually, I'm fairly sure it can't be.

But I do think a yoga class should be a place where nobody has to wonder whether they hold the right opinions to belong there.

And perhaps that's the distinction I've been looking for.