Part of being a good yoga teacher is that you take a lot of other people’s yoga classes, and yesterday, I took a great class with one of my favorite teachers, Ira, who’s family is from Puerto Rico.
Ira, who’s not white, asked all of her students, most of whom are white—this is, after all, a yoga class of students mainly living in Manhattan—to type in the Zoom chat box what we thought was the biggest issue of our time, and I wrote, “I don’t know, but I think it might be racism? 🤷🏻♂️”
Others wrote about disconnection from each other. Narcissism. (I suspect that one might have been directed at me—it reminded me of Carly Simon’s song about being “so vain”, that you “think this song is about you”…) Others wrote about talking about injustice and not doing anything about it.
Ira said that she thinks the biggest issue is disconnection. From our own humanity. From our bodies, and from ourselves. And that as a result, we struggle to see the humanity in each other. And that’s how problems like racism arise.
I thought hard about it and could see the truth in it. It was a fantastic yoga class as always—Ira is the yoga director at Stanton Street Yoga on the Lower East Side, and I like her combination of being fiercely devoted to everything—she’s deeply spiritual—and also, occasionally, just bloody hilarious in class. I’ve enjoyed learning so much from her about how to connect more to myself and to my body, and to other people, honestly. You should try to take one of her classes through the MindBody app, sometime.
It’s a bit of a miracle, really, that I turned out to have any kind of social conscience. I’m not asking for a medal, or a cookie. I just often marvel at the fact that I care about these things.
I grew up in Croydon, a crap town in Southeast London, and was lucky enough to go to a private boys’ school there where the majority of us ended up as lawyers and accountants. But we didn’t think that we were lucky. We weren’t grateful.
Perhaps because South London is renowned for being a bit shit, many of us grew up with a chip on our shoulders. The goal was to prove yourself just as good as the archetypal toff. Or if you couldn’t beat them, join them. It’s remarkable how our accents have changed as we’ve all grown older. Some of us have started sounding a lot less Croydon than others. And Croydon, too, has changed.
I don’t remember anybody, ever, saying that it was a good idea to consider people less fortunate than we were. Maybe I blocked it out, if they did. I do remember the headmaster of our school giving us a speech about how we were “the cream of the cream”, once. It makes me shudder to think about it.
I’ve got a huge tattoo of the biggest office building in Croydon on my left forearm. It reminds me of where I come from, and of some of the values and the forces that created me. Winston Churchill said that kites rise highest when they’re against the wind, not with it, and I like to think he was thinking about Croydon, when he said it. Although of course, he probably wasn’t. I mean, nobody thinks about Croydon when they say anything. Except for me. Far too often.
For whatever reason—I think it could be because I just find social conventions too funny, most of the time, to take them too seriously—I’ve been lucky enough to escape the boring and selfish life I could have very easily gone in for. I am a lot less inclined to seek safety and security than most of us were taught to, growing up, when the overwhelming belief was that “money doesn’t grow on trees.”
I actually think about other people, sometimes.
And I’m lucky to have found my way into yoga. I feel a responsibility to contribute to social justice and anti-racism, and I’m grateful for Ira’s wisdom in class yesterday.
We can all do our bit for social justice. On the mat, I think it often starts with connecting more deeply with ourselves. What drives us forward. What shapes our desires and beliefs.
Why we don’t feel good enough, perhaps. Why we need to take our insecurities out on others.
It doesn’t end there, of course. But for me, yoga is a big part of where social justice starts.
Photo by Mark Crick—I was lucky enough to be his assistant 15 years ago, and I think that you should book him for jobs in London and around the world.
