Usually, when I wake up, I involve myself in a grueling morning routine for something like two hours. This routine includes caring for my neurotic cats, cleaning up any mess from the night before, making coffee and ideally also food, and, most importantly, yoga. I've done yoga off and on for more than ten years, and over the last few years of the pandemic I developed a home hatha practice that I really like. Still, in my eagerness to spend some more time out of the house recently, I've gone back to a few in-person yoga classes at studios. I do like to do this. The sociality, the particularly yoga-studio smell of incense and feet, and being forced to do poses and sequences that I myself didn't select are all very good for me. Studio yoga, though, has seemed to change since I was last in it.
Now, this could be a product simply of secular trends in my life. I'm older and have more money than I did before. When I first started, I did yoga at donation-based studios where I was taught by average-looking middle aged people, many of them in recovery, who wanted to share the benefits of yoga asana and spiritual practice with others. I'm sure there were lots of studios full of tight-assed ponytailed blonde women in expensive gear somewhere, but that wasn't my world.
Fast forward to 2023. After an emotional period of personal turmoil, returning to in-person yoga classes that are full of crystals and tarot cards and affirmations felt good. It feels good to hear things like that I should "follow my dreams" and "stand in my power" and "take up space" or "live my truth" or whatever. (This is a genuine howl of supplication, though: please stop making me listen to coffee shop ho-hey music in yoga classes. It's undignified.) Anyhow, I didn't think much of this until one day, I was in the shower listening to Brown Acid Trippin’ on NTS Radio (as I am wont to do) and was pleasantly surprised to hear a deep cut I actually recognized, “Good for the Gander” by Hot Chocolate. The refrain: “What’s good for the gander / gotta be good for the goose.” Being in the shower, the crucible of deep and innovative thinking in today’s relentless world, my mind wandered a bit; I dwelled on the question, in particular, of when, under what conditions, is what’s good for the gander also good for the goose? How do we understand the relationship between a part (the goose) and the whole (the gander)?
As an American, particularly an American scientist, everything I have learned and internalized, consciously and unconsciously, has instilled an reductionist, individualist mindset in me -- these are the tracks my thoughts run on. The geese are all distinct individuals, the gander then being nothing more than the simple aggregate of some number of individual geese. Is what’s good for the gander good for the individual goose? It depends on what the “what” is, and how representative the gander is, leading us to down a silly path (dare I say... a goose chase) that forks off into goose participatory democracy, goose demcent, goose Borda. How can an individual goose “make their voice heard,” what is the consensus rule for deciding who wins and who loses?
There are other ways of conceptualizing this relationship between part and whole. Hegelian (or Marxist) dialectics is one; Hindu cosmology is another. What if the gander is the goose? What if each goose body is nothing but the cage for a little scintilla of the great goose Godhead? And so on to increasingly absurd infinities. But the important thing is that the Hindu cosmology that yoga asana is a part of holds that the self that we perceive to be the self is an illusion conjured up by our unsettled, thinking minds (there is another self, the atman or universal self, analogous to the soul in Christianity but not quite so individuated).
Follow my dreams? Stand in my power? I don't really exist, right?
It's a little weird to see this trippy Eastern spirituality stuff get vacuumed up into the dust bag of the great New Age revival of 2019-present, but honestly not that weird. Americans love to do this shit. What's a little weirder and more interesting is the sudden -- or so it feels to me -- paroxysm of interest in applying these spiritual concepts and ideas to liberatory politics and to "healing" in both alternative and thoroughly medicalized forms. In the first place, this shit is rife with outright scams, and I'm just not convinced we can MLM our way to council communism or whatever.
In the second, and at a more philosophical level... can we heal the world by healing ourselves? Is that conceiving of the relationship between part and whole in the right way, or at least in a productive way? I'm not convinced. Maybe so. But maybe all this inner work is just a distraction, from the injustices of our world and our powerlessness against them?
I have lately become interested in the way that relationships are becoming, for lack of a better term, medicalized through the popularization of psychological constructs and therapy-speak on social media. Mutant variants of attachment theory, inner child work, various pseudoscientific theories, and always trauma, trauma, trauma. I think what I am maybe describing is actually just an epiphenomenon of the absolute explosion of trauma and trauma-centric approaches in popular psychology and self-help lately.
I'm not trying to say self work is futile -- I actually think it's essential. What I am saying is that essential doesn't automatically mean politically productive, not to mention emotionally fruitful -- maybe this makes me problematic or old-fashioned or something, but I think this stuff can encourage a kind of relentless and impossible self-focus. Maybe we should be asking not what New Age healing modalities can do for us, but what we can do for New Age healing modalities? Even that is a cul-de-sac, though, because the defining feature of New Age spirituality places, according to Wikipedia, "a strong emphasis on the spiritual authority of the self."
This isn't going anywhere. I'm tired and just kind of dumping some ideas out here to see if any develop into fuller themes to explore. Cheers!