No Justice, No Peace
At the beginning of my quarantine, a friend sent me the interrogation of OJ Simpson before he was arrested. I had never heard it before. After listening to it, I couldn’t believe how obvious it was that he is a sociopathic narcissist who murdered Nicole Brown (after years of battery and abuse) and Ron Goldman. It sent me down a rabbit hole of the entire trial. I watched (again) The People vs. OJ Simpson on Netflix. I listened to Kim Goldman’s podcast. I watched the bizarre interview with Judith Regan where OJ tells how he would have done it “if he did it”, during which there’s a panel that discusses the psychology of OJ.
Eventually I exhausted the OJ material, so I moved on to watch LA92 on Netflix. It sent me down an adjacent rabbit hole, and I started to feel like I was stuck in the 90s. It also became clear how much of our current culture is rooted in the 90s. I remember Rodney King being beaten and the riots that followed the acquittal of the 4 officers who were charged. I was just a kid then. Seeing it with adult eyes, I feel outrage and grief that police brutality and systemic racism are still going strong. I acknowledge that I haven’t actively done much to change it.
Learning of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder by white vigilantes in Georgia pulled me out of the 90s. Another unarmed black man killed, this time for jogging while black. Ahmaud was killed February 23, but the video of the crime being committed didn’t surface until May 5. Two days passed before they arrested and charged the father-son duo who murdered him. Two more weeks passed before they arrested and charged the man who recorded the video and participated in the murder.
Mid-month I remember seeing that Breonna Taylor was killed in Kentucky on March 13, the day my quarantine began. She was sleeping, as people do at night, with her boyfriend when they heard banging on the door. She was shot eight times by plainclothes cops who were executing a “no knock” warrant that left her dead in the hallway of her home. Today she would have turned 27.
The day after Memorial Day I woke up to see the video of Amy Cooper threatening a black man in Central Park after he asked her to leash her dog in an area where the dogs are not supposed to be off leash. Instead of leashing her dog and moving along, she was aggressive toward him, threatened to call the cops and tell them she’s “being threatened by an African American man”, and ultimately did just that. All while choking her dog by its collar because he’s not on a leash and she was out of control. Her self-entitled racist behavior was truly disgusting and put a spotlight on the way white people weaponize their privilege.
That day ended with news that George Floyd had been murdered on video by a Minneapolis cop who pressed his knee into George’s neck for more than 7 minutes in front of many witnesses who were pleading with the cops to stop. (Turns out is was 8 minutes and 46 seconds.)
You may be wondering what all of this has to do with yoga. I’ll get to that.
I attended the protest in Salt Lake City last Saturday. I arrived just before it started. I worried that it might be lame. It was planned as a caravan of honking cars around the police headquarters. Every protest I’ve ever attended, I marched. Many did march, but with Covid-19, I felt more comfortable being in my car. It turned out to be anything but lame. Thousands of people showed up, and there was so much solidarity. Honking was a cathartic release.
I didn’t stay all day, I watched some of the live coverage from home. I watched the police officer push an older gentleman, who wasn’t even protesting, down to the ground. He was walking with a cane. It wasn’t until the next morning I learned about Brandon McCormick, Bow and Arrow Man.
I’m glad to see people are still showing up in the thousands to protest police brutality and walk with Black Lives Matter. 400 years is too long.
So what does all of this have to do with yoga? Prāṇa is your life force, your breath. It’s your birth right. Both George Floyd and Eric Garner said, “I can’t breathe,” while they were being killed.
Common definitions of yoga are “Yoke” and “Union”. Both are nouns. Yoga is thought to be the union of a person with the divine.
Merriam Webster: 1: capitalized : a Hindu theistic philosophy teaching the suppression of all activity of body, mind, and will in order that the self may realize its distinction from them and attain liberation
2: a system of physical postures, breathing techniques, and sometimes meditation derived from Yoga but often practiced independently especially in Western cultures to promote physical and emotional well-being
Oxford: A Hindu spiritual and ascetic discipline, a part of which, including breath control, simple meditation, and the adoption of specific bodily postures, is widely practised for health and relaxation.
These definitions are also yoga as a noun. Yoga, in its beginning, was a verb. In Spanish, yoga is a verb, hacer yoga. Yoga as an action, an active process, means to engage, to get involved, to participate, to connect. First we must connect and engage with our own mind and body. We have to be able to quiet the mind, tame the wild horse (yoke the horse). It’s an active process seeking understanding. When we move beyond our own self, we have our home, we have friends and family, beyond that our neighborhood and community and local ecosystems, beyond that the city or town where we live, the state, the country, the global community. It keeps going, beyond boundaries created by men. We are part of a planet, a solar system, beyond that our galaxy, and finally the entire universe.
When we connect and engage with the world we are doing yoga. Ultimately, yoga is an open invitation to play in the game (participate) rather than sit as a spectator on the sidelines. When we stand with Black Lives Matter, we are engaging and connecting with people to build relationships and create a just and peaceful world. We are participating in dismantling a crumbling violent system (patriarchy). We are also engaging with our own self in recognizing our racism and doing the work while connecting with others who are doing the same.