Mindful yoga = good politics.

Yoga and politics? Are you for real? I am 100% real on this (if you haven’t yet checked out the about and platform pages, you may wanna do so before continuing). What I’d like to ask you is: what is there to be afraid of here? In choosing to ignore how yoga and politics intermingle, we’re denying ourselves deeper inquiry into what affects our everyday experiences, and we risk stunting the potential for true empowerment. We initially turn to yoga seeking freedom from something—a physical ailment and/or mental state. We stick with it not because it’s an immediate cure-all (it isn’t), but because we see and feel the power of altering our realities through evolving practices.

Like every other person who stumbled into yoga, I too have a story. A colleague’s wife, Melissa, introduced me to yoga in the late ’90s. I had been working 6-7 days/week, up to 15 hours/day. I buckled under the strain but kept pushing. Eventually, panic attacks forced me to change course. The attacks imprisoned me. I couldn’t travel by plane, and at one point I spent an entire paycheck on cabs because I worried about losing control on the freeway. How to escape? Clock-watching therapists and prescription-writing doctors weren’t answers for me. I figured I was the source of the turbulent panic attacks, so I must also be the source of eliminating them.

Melissa advised me to practice yogic breathing. At the time, I could’ve cared less about asanas—I literally couldn’t feel my feet on the ground, so poses would’ve been way out of the question. After about a year of practicing ujjayi, I tamed the panic attacks. Once I felt my feet on the ground again, I had the mental capacity to reflect on what I had been through. The year of disturbances left me physically exhausted. Yet knowing I had changed what had before seemed impossible to change energized me. The impossible became the possible. And I had the power to make it that way.

Impossible becoming Possible is precisely where yoga and politics meet. The division between yoga and politics is a false divide. Politics is, at its core, about human relationships—what rules we devise to live by, how we decide to care for one another. Just to state the obvious: politics as we now know it stinks. We live by crummy rules that favor the self-appointed few, we distract ourselves with technohype while people starve.

Yeah, Kim, but what’s your point? There’s nothing we can do. That’s the way things are, that’s the way they’ll always be.

Nonsense. There’s plenty we can do.

Yoga gives us the power to escape our disempowering circumstances. Awesome. So, I see no reason why we can’t change our concept of politics. I see no reason why we can’t apply our yoga practice to developing a drastically more sane set of rules, a drastically more thoughtful way of taking care of one another. We can upend the norm. Cuz, what is the norm, really, and who gets to define it?

What if radical were the norm? Think: radical mindfulness, radical awareness, radical non-competition, radical non-violence, radical creativity, radical self-realization. That’s where I’m going with this. It’s about juxtaposing very stale norms against expansive visions of what humanity could be. It’s about contemplating and engaging the possible. It’s about redefining politics.

And doing that is gonna take a lot of guts and heart. If we stick with the mindful courage, the payoff will be really huge and really sweet.