Hi Matthew – I love this post and think it’s brilliant, absolutely. But I can’t help but feel critical too. I’m sensitive to its politics and not comfortable with them. Bottom line is that I don’t think that this points us where we need to go to get out of the almost solipsistic individualism that pervades so much of yoga (and of course the culture in general) today. There is an analytic slippage between your consideration of the body and the body politic that really troubles me. Let me try to explain.

The desire to feel, own, and experience your own body fully – including its repressed rage and capacity to produce and even enjoy violence – doesn’t necessarily translate into a useful social ethic or political strategy. Boxing is another form of self-development that channels a different energy than you’re experiencing in yoga, and may well be a needed balancing. Shooting a deer that ‘s on your land for all the right reasons is very cool (at least in my book), but it’s not all that different (at least in my mind) from the less glamorous business of buying carrots from your local small-scale organic farmer. Defending yourself, your family, and even your land from direct attack is acceptable violence from my perspective too. But it’s not clear how that translates into a political ethos unless we want to start moving toward the sort of survivalist libertarianism that’s actually quite big in a lot of more rural parts of the U.S. today – and I for one really don’t.

Derrick Jensen? I can’t claim to be an expert but from what I learned about his politics I’m really not impressed. More saddened. It seems like he’s made a career out of channeling his pain and rage (rooted in the horrors of growing up with a sexually abusive father) into a one-note call to magically “destroy civilization” by calling for heroic acts of violence that somehow he never gets around to actually committing. But in the meantime he’s spreading around more hatred. That’s not what we need.

I could not agree more that we need to break out of this pastel-colored box of pseudo-ahmisa. But if and when we find the courage to face the terror and pain that we will almost inevitably feel when we start more fully apprehending what’s happening in the world, I believe that the path of the warrior is one of fierce compassion – not the romaticization of violence.

I spent a long time studying the politics of the 1960s-80s trying to figure out what went wrong – I wanted to know whether I could pinpoint a missed opportunity for a better historical turning point than the one we took. That’s a different story, but one thing that it did instill in me is a deep suspicion of romantic leftist violence – which, it must be said, is a very male thing, on the whole. In my opinion, a good part of the New Left really went off the rails with a masculine romance with “revolutionary” violence (not to say that women didn’t get into it too – just that the energies were very male) that would up hurting a lot of people and the cause (such as it was) itself.

I’m all for breaking out of this emotionally tepid, socially insulated ahimsa and stoking a passion for confronting what’s happening in the world. And I definitely believe it’s important to pursue whatever personal practices we need to ready ourselves to do so – whether it’s reconnecting with our rage or becoming willing to start letting it go. But the step from there to meaningful socio-political engagement requires a lot more thought and a lot more work. And it’s necessarily a collective process. Personally I think that your obviously formidable organizational skills would be of a lot more value here than a gun.

Thanks so much! :)

Wow, beautiful writing, Hilary. "Adapt and filter." I'm going to try to remember that.

Love the photo, too.

Beautiful. Thanks!

so you didn't live in a wisconsin ashram for 3 years, you just hung out and ate custard and butterburgers?! WTF

Ah. Sounds like you and Bob might have similar diets - there must be some indigenous Wisconsin equivalent? they are renowned for their dairy.

Thanks for reading and commenting!

Thanks Bob!

ha ha thanks. thank goodness for the level-headed among us . . .

Hi Sean, thanks for reading and commenting! Like I said to Nancy above, I think that for many of us who grew up in homes with insecure attachments, it can be a long learning curve to work through these relationship issues. Here I am referring to the whole psychological school of thought known as attachment theory, which is too much to go into in a blog comment, but it's a very rich and robust research tradition that sheds a lot of light on why these dynamics are so powerful for so many people.