(FYI: this post is the second part of a 3-post series on political anatomy. Check out Part 1 here.)
I’m gonna start off on a tangent, with a statement bound to make a whole bunch of yoga devotees cringe like crazy: It’s A-OK to be judgmental at times. Now I’m not talking about petty and unnecessary judgments (as grownups, we all know what I’m referring to). Naw, I’m talking about the sort of judgment that is truly deserved. That’s right: deserved.
The global Occupy movement is expressing deserved judgment against the financial institutions holding us of the 99% by the cajones. It’s not right for institutions and people to manufacture desperation and then profit off the resulting agony. How can any of us be truly free if we’re all (well, at least most of us) the slaves of a vast money machine? I don’t know about you, but I can’t feel free in a system that places all of us in artificial (and yet very real) circumstances based on wealth or income or debt. No matter how much asana and mediation I practice.
Why do I mention any of this? Because the accepted tenets of yoga (i.e. no judging allowed) occasionally work against my sense of truth. If we’re not judging realities from time to time, how can we even know what truths we’re operating from? To develop a truthful platform, ya gotta know the danged truth. Don’t shy away from judging situations if it gets you closer to that truth. Sugarcoating won’t getcha very far.
Developing your platform is pretty easy once you acknowledge that your most authentic yogic self is one and the same with your political self.
Developing your platform begins by understanding how you want things to be in the world, why you want things to be that way, and who will benefit as a result. Notice that I’m not saying anything about aligning with political parties or identifying with established labels. If you completed the short exercise mentioned in the first part of this series (here), then you should already have a pretty solid idea of where you’re headed platform-wise. Whether or not you did that exercise, go back to the first sentence in this paragraph. Turn the “how,” “why,” “who” pieces into questions, and then answer those questions.
Write your answers down so you can reflect on them later. You could even organize them under 3 main headers that correlate with the questions: “How I want things to be in the world”, “Why I want things to be that way,” and “Who benefits.”
Your platform supports your values and beliefs as they are now. So in answering the questions, don’t worry about locking yourself into truths and circumstances that are bound to change.
Yes, it’s really that easy. Now it’s just a matter of putting your platform to work. We’ll get into that next week.
