For the Love of All — J. Brown Yoga

There are moments when the maelstrom becomes transparent enough for me to see through the tragedy, hypocrisy, and injustice. In the quietude beyond the burning horizon, there is a circle of people gathered around a fire, chanting to the moon. As I approach, the circle opens to embrace me and I am enveloped into an ancient song of communal heart wisdom. Tears of relief and joy cleanse my soul and I call out with all my being in the name of love. As the vision fades, I wiggle my fingers and toes, hug my knees into my chest, roll to my side, and sit up to finish with a bow.

The contrast between this inner vision and an external world crumbling into chaos is a paradox that begs to be reconciled. How does engaging in these experiences help me? Often, they seem to remove me and set me apart by revealing uncomfortable truths that compel me to delve further into a seemingly unsolvable riddle of myself in the world. Other times, they feel like glimpses into a natural order that is both the promise of life’s grace and a proving ground in which we either perish or prosper.

Are we passing out blame? There is plenty to go around.

I can’t escape feeling angered. By so many things they almost become indecipherable from one another. Is it the corruption of our governments and institutions? Or the greed and inequality that seems to be fueling a dehumanizing trajectory towards a technocratic dystopia? Perhaps I am simply angry with God for all the strife and suffering that life brings? I want someone or something to blame and, surely, I can be righteous in focusing my anger at any number of targets who are either responsible for or complicit in perpetuating grave injustice. Yet, in doing so, I can’t escape also fueling the very dysfunction I deride.

Regardless of where blame deserves to be placed for the woes of the world, there is little I can do as an individual to hold whoever or whatever is responsible to account. I could try to run for public office or attempt to rally the grassroots masses behind a particular cause or movement but if history is any indicator then it would seem likely to be a futile effort, easily co-opted to produce a reverse of the intended effect. Whether or not the truth is being concealed or people are being exploited, misdirecting limited personal resources towards fretting over the matter is certainly not helping anyone.

‘There must be some way out of here,’ said the joker to the thief.

Even though there is nothing I can do to stop macroscopic forces of domination and harm directly, I am not entirely powerless to affect the world in other ways. The dynamics of polarization that undermine our collective well being depend upon tribal crouches that pit us against some form of “others.” My power lies in the free choice and will to break patterns of separation. The revolutionary act of our times is to be a force of reconciliation and healing despite the mores that lead us asunder.

We either find ways of getting “off-grid” and remove ourselves from societal ills or we have no choice but to live in the world as it is. This is not to say that we should blindly accept whatever the world presents without question, there is still plenty of room for us to hold true to our values even when our societies do not reflect them. However, it makes no sense to be in conflict with the world which we inhabit. To do so, is essentially the same as having an autoimmune disease in which we attack ourselves from within. The question is: how is it possible to not feel conflicted in a world that thrives on making us feel conflicted?

Either we are all connected, and care about everyone else as much as ourselves, or not.

As difficult as it is to imagine, embodying interconnectedness means having compassion for even the people we most abhor. For the record, regardless of what politicians pretend, corporations are not people. In fact, these entities are set up specifically to separate individuals from responsibility for the actions they carry out. Given the massive sway of corporate power in today’s world, caring for people inherently means distancing ourselves from the confines of the culture that corporations create or, at least, operating somewhere in the invisible margins that still remain uninhibited enough for us to envision something better.

Perhaps a vision of people coming together around universal values and living in ways that respect the diversity and sanctity of all life is nothing more than a pipe dream. Regardless of whether I entertain such wishful thinking, all the same confusions and fears that life entails remain. And yet, when I am able to set aside these confusions and fears for glimmers of time, the song my heart sings in the silence could not be more clear. We are not separate from each other and need to stop behaving as such. For the love of all, hopeless romanticism and an evolution of higher consciousness are deserving of more serious consideration.