Leaving Love-and-Light Land
I didn’t leave because I wanted to. I left because I had to.
On a Friday night in June, during the tumultuous summer of 2020, six months into a nine-month yoga teacher training, I quit. Not because I didn’t want to teach yoga; because I was left with no other choice. I am relieved that I left when I did. The next day, a member of the training cohort committed a hate crime — during practice hours.
When I quit drinking at the age of twenty-eight, five years before I signed up for yoga teacher training, I didn’t know that it would lead me to a path of healing, waking up, remembering. I knew it would improve my life, that the life I was living was no longer sustainable — waking up without knowing how I got home, finding mysterious bruises on my legs or arms from unremembered falls — but I didn’t know how the world would open up to me, how I would remember who I was, slowly emerging as an entirely-new-yet-the-same person. Perhaps a person who had always existed, but who had become lost beneath the waves.
This new person, me, a woman I barely recognized but felt at home with, began learning about yoga. She left toxic relationships and jobs and environments. She became conscious about what she absorbed, what she took part in, whether it was news, food, friendships.
I reclaimed myself. I have that privilege, I have that luxury, to say no, to choose. Not all of us do.
The right to joy, the right to heal, the right to nourishing food, water, and shelter — the most basic of human rights — are predominantly afforded to only the wealthy and the well-off. In other words, the white.
Though I am neither wealthy nor white, I do have privilege: I live in an area with abundant resources, I am college-educated, I am employed, my wife and I own a home. I never thought I would be in a position of power, but when I found myself with it, I knew I couldn’t afford to waste it. What to do with power? Use it. Use it to empower those of us who suffer from addiction in its many forms. Use it to empower other women and girls of color to remember who they are, too.
Over the years of my new self re-finding herself through healing, through yoga and books, nourishing food, the desire to share what facilitated this selfhood grew steadily from a spark to a forest fire.
I don’t want to merely “focus on myself,” a common refrain in spiritual circles. How can you take care of others if you’re not taking care of yourself? True to some extent, but self-care is more than bubble baths and face masks and turning off the news, as it is for so many white people.
Self-care, as noted by Audre Lorde, is an act of “self-preservation,” which as a Black woman, is “an act of political warfare.” We are not meant to care for ourselves. We are meant to drain our light, to caretake others, to make ourselves palatable for white consumption. And when we care for ourselves and one another? We fight the systems that have been in place for centuries, systems that purposefully extinguish our light.
The “love and light” that’s prescribed in spiritual circles as a solution for all ails — a broken heart, a lack of abundance, hatred, discomfort — is not a one-size-fits-all mentality. It may be palliative when you are safe, secure, worried about which private school your child will attend. It may soothe when the world is a stressful but altogether welcoming playground.
You see, you can’t love-and-light racism away. You can’t love-and-light your way out of a lost job, Coronavirus, unequal pay, food deserts, not being safe in the world. You can’t love-and-light your way to a place of safety. But you can seek out others and build a supportive community, you can find ways to heal. If you’re lucky.
After years of doubting myself and what I had to offer, I decided that the new self had something to offer. She had herself. What was the foundation of her healing? What had led her home? The bedrock of my clarity — not to be confused with a lack of suffering, as suffering is an integral part of human existence, especially and uniquely so if you’re a Black person living in this world — has been living a life free from the confines of alcohol; writing; yoga and meditation. Sharing these healing modalities with people who look like me, with women who have suffered as I have suffered, offers a different love, a more expansive light. Where would I be if I had had these tools at a young age, or if I’d had a supportive community around me? So I signed up for yoga teacher training.
Yes, I know what you’re thinking, because I was thinking it, too: Does the Western world need another yoga teacher? There has been a surge of yoga teacher trainings and subsequent yoga teachers in America for decades now. But when I looked around, I rarely saw a reflection of myself. In my small Northern California town, I couldn’t find teachers or studios where I could bring myself fully to the practice. I had benefited from it, but I hadn’t found a home. What if I could create one?
Though there’s a surplus of yoga teachers, there is still a disparity in who makes up these numbers. I know firsthand the capacity that yoga has to heal; I also know firsthand that the spaces one typically finds yoga are exclusive. Expensive class rates. Intimidating postures. Light-washing. Yoga has become an elitist endeavor here in the west, a consumerist pastime — Lululemon yoga pants, tone-deaf encouragements to manifest happiness and let go of negativity. How many studios honor the philosophy, history, and culture of yoga? How many recognize racial trauma?
Knowing all this, I signed up for a nine-month weekend training. Knowing all this, I signed up for teacher training in my white-majority small hometown in Sonoma County. Should I have known better?
I was hopeful. The training I selected has historically been led by a white woman, at an Ayurvedic center featuring mostly white teachers and healers, but the center had also been a source of healing. When I first got sober, I took my first yoga classes at this center, thanks to a Groupon I’d found. Many of my friends have worked there over the years. I’d received an introduction to Ayurveda there, had my pulse read, attended workshops, and purchased my first tongue scraper and gua sha stone. After considering the few options in the area, it felt like the best choice for my training.
And for nearly six months, it was enough. For six months, I was excited that I had chosen for myself and my future to participate in the training. I learned pranayama and mudras, we went into the forest and chanted. When the pandemic hit, we shifted to make it work. We met over Zoom, which wasn’t what anyone wanted, but it’s what we had. I kept waiting for more study on the asanas, how to sequence and lead a class, but I assumed those lessons would be forthcoming. I’ll never know.
The world was on fire. White people were waking up after the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. Never mind that there’s been Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland. More names than there’s space for here. This time, for white people, was somehow different.
I started receiving text messages from well-meaning white people, checking in, as if this time was different than the centuries stretching out behind us, bleeding into our present, woven into the tapestry of American life. Without an awareness of the grief we Black people are feeling, and have been feeling for as long as we’ve been alive, white people were reaching out to have conversations, to “learn and share.” They wanted accolades for hashtagging Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name. They wanted us to be happy and hopeful, grateful for their support. And when we weren’t ecstatic? It was too much for them to bear.
This “moment in time,” perhaps exciting for white people who are waking up, is a doubly traumatizing time for Black people. It is more than a moment. We are all-too-aware that racism and subsequent murder have been happening since America’s inception, and now we’re also subject to “conversations,” or white people wanting our gratitude for waking up to a system that we suffer from but had no part in creating. And perhaps worst of all, as it is under the cover of healing, we are subject to spiritual bypassing within the communities that once gave us solace. Perhaps it is better to know than be suspended in a bubble of love and light, a bubble that was never meant to hold us, always on the cusp of popping.
Many white people think that because they don’t say the N-word, they’re not racist. That they have a Black friend, or Black children, or a Black spouse, so there is no way they can be complicit. But that does not exempt them, or us, from existing in white supremacist culture. It lives in our bodies, all of our bodies. It’s the water we swim in, the air we breathe. And to wish it away with love and light? To pray the mean racists away? That’s not going to cut it. What we need is a global dismantling of our systemically racist institutions, and to do that, white people need to do the work.
My belief: It is the work of white people to educate themselves to effectively dismantle racism, and it’s the work of Black people to heal. We all have work to do, but it is not the same work. What’s happening “right now” or “last summer” is not new, especially not new to us. It’s not different or unprecedented or surprising. And this uprising? The Great White Awakening? It’s painful. I keep thinking, Where have you been? How have you been asleep for so long? This call for radical change, which is not radical — for how can recognizing humanity ever be radical? — has been echoing through our country since its birth. It didn’t evaporate when slavery was abolished. It didn’t resolve itself with the Civil Rights movement. It didn’t disappear when we elected a Black president. (Miss you, Obama. So much.)
Some of us have not had the luxury of turning the other way, of insulating ourselves in bubbles. We can’t go for a run, go to the store to get Skittles; we can’t birdwatch in the park. We are not safe and we have never been safe. Is it surprising that we’re tired? That perhaps we may not want to “have tough conversations”? That we may not want you to offer us space that was never yours to give in the first place? Are we supposed to be grateful that you finally care? We’ve been dying, we are continuing to die, and the violence against Black and Brown bodies has not magically ended, nor will it end anytime soon. Probably not in my lifetime. This truth, what we know deep in our bones, that is evidenced in the news? If we utter it, we are cynical.
June 2020. A new friend in my yoga teacher training, someone who at the time I believe will be a part of my life forever, texts me a week before we are scheduled to meet for class on Zoom. After the random texts I have already received, I brace myself before I open the text. But I am still hopeful. We have built a rapport that I haven’t had in a long time — it’s hard making friends as an adult, rare to find friends who are also sober.
As I read her text, the hope begins to fade. She asks how I am doing (a loaded question but a good start), and then she launches into a monologue: She doesn’t want to be the silent white friend, she is outraged and horrified, and Black Lives matter to her! The heat of hurt, the sting of humiliation, floods my body. I know she means well, but. But. The text is all about how she feels. She says she is “open to learning and sharing.” She centers her experience, her outrage, her grief, with no awareness that this proclamation of disgust and solidarity is asking me to do emotional labor for her. And I am surprised I am surprised.
I hope Black lives matter to someone I am supposedly friends with. I’m Black. I don’t need a proclamation; we’re not at a protest. And “learning and sharing”? I am not here to teach anyone. I do not receive compensation for that work. I am grieving. I am scared. I am disgusted. And I am not surprised. The deaths that awoke a sleeping white world are just a few in a never-ending procession of death. Deaths that could be me, my sister, my nephews, my niece. Deaths that are my sisters and my brothers.
I write back to tell this well-meaning white woman that I am exhausted and angry and not surprised. That I appreciate her wanting to learn, I do, but that I cannot be the one to teach her. That she is welcome to reach out to my white wife if she wants to learn and share. That it’s white people’s job to educate themselves and it’s Black people’s job to heal. This is not what she wants to hear.
After four days of silence, she texts me back, shortly before we are due to see each other on Zoom. She hopes she hasn’t offended me, and she’s already educated on the matters of race. Her parents were activists in the Civil Rights movement. If this is true, that she is educated on race, she would not need to dismiss me or erase my experience. Open to learning and sharing? Not if I want to share. I am disappointed that she, once again, dismisses my feelings and centers her experience. I do not respond.
I enter the sixth weekend of my teacher training on Friday night exhausted and on-edge. I sign in to Zoom, the only Black face on the screen.
In our monthly “sharing circle,” I am unsure of what I want to share. White people do not deserve my pain and my vulnerability. But what is the other option? Silencing myself to alleviate their discomfort? To alleviate my discomfort with being the “only one”? I have been the only one, or one of the few, for most of my life. Living in the Sonoma County bubble, where we love and light it away, where people know one Black person and think they’re exempt, where we use reusable bags and drive Priuses; it is time to let down the façade.
Share after share — everyone alluding to this “moment in time” and the only other person of color remaining eerily silent — it is my time to speak. I don’t know what I am going to say, but I open my mouth and the words tumble out.
“I am exhausted. What is happening right now isn’t new; it’s been happening for over 400 years. Where has everyone been? I am glad people are waking up, but why has it taken so long? I’m so scared for my nephews. I am so tired. I don’t know if I will see the end of this in my lifetime. But I am cautiously hopeful.”
The training instructor, who has been silent after each person’s moment of vulnerability — one of the sharing circle rules is no cross-talk — launches into a diatribe after I speak, sharing that she has just gone to a protest with her “African-American fiancé” and her “mixed stepdaughter,” how she’s been going to protests since she was sixteen, and the difference between then and now is that now there is more youth at protests, and things are changing. She says that she once had a cynical view, much like Emma’s [mine], but she feels differently now, and we always have to be hopeful. Then she asks if I have anything more to say.
I shake my head. I am done. I am done speaking, I am done sharing. I am done. This woman — dangerous in her naïve convictions, satisfied in her belief that having intimate relationships with Black people makes her an expert on race, leading a group of malleable minds — silences me. Though each person’s share has been standalone, their words complete after they leave their mouths, mine needs a disclaimer, a light-washed addendum. She has erased my experience. My view as a Black woman living in America? It is cynical. Not fit for white consumption. Too negative for a yoga teacher training.
The night is not over. A fellow trainee is now compelled to share again, sobbing, dumping her white guilt in my lap. She wants me, personally, to know that she has “heard me,” that she is sorry. Another white woman (who had been sure to tell me the second day of training that she has a mixed daughter who looks like me), tells me, Sister, I am feeling you. Only moments before she said that though everyone is saying to get out and do something, she believes more in the power of prayer.
My heart racing, my video muted, staring at these white faces crying and seeking to absolve their guilt, I shut down. This is not a safe space for me. It never has been, and I am finally waking up.
After the circle ends I close my laptop and start gathering my things. Though I am shaky and numb, swallowing down the tenderness in my throat, I am still preparing to see the group in person the next day. In addition to the teacher’s negligence towards me, she is also negligent regarding the county’s health protocols and has scheduled our weekend to be in person. She assures us that we will be outdoors and socially distanced, but the previous weekend she promises the same and, from the vantage point of my Zoom screen, I and the few others who opt to follow county protocols can see that this is not the case. The weekend before, she takes training time, time that we have paid for to learn about yoga, to show us a video about the Coronavirus; a doctor says it is like the common flu and the world is overreacting. I’m sorry, but we can’t love and light our way out of a global pandemic.
I take a break from gathering my things to talk to my wife. She listens to my frustration and sadness and rage and says, “You don’t have to go. You don’t have to do this.”
I pride myself on seeing things through, on finishing what I start, but at what cost? I think about the time and money I’ve already spent on this training, I convince myself I can soldier through. I am so close to the end. I can do this. Then, the TA texts me.
I have known the TA, a woman I used to work with, for years. Though we aren’t very close these days, I’ve always considered her a friend. We have reconnected during the training, and before the pandemic, we had often taken the lunch break together to walk around town and catch up.
Yet she had remained silent during the onslaught of white erasure and guilt, and though that disappoints me, it doesn’t surprise me. Now she is texting me to say, while she doesn’t want to assume what I am going through, she wants to acknowledge that there had been problematic shares during the circle, that I had to bear a lot of emotional labor. The wall I’ve erected crumbles. What I know in my bones is now written down in a little blue text bubble. If a white woman feels this way, how can it not be true?
White supremacist culture runs deep. It doesn’t just poison white people, it poisons us; no one makes it out unscathed. Though I’ve spoken “truth to power,” it isn’t until the TA acknowledges what has just happened that it becomes clear. I will not go tomorrow. Or the next day. Or any day after that. I quit.
I am tired. I am raw and disappointed, embarrassed that I allowed them to surprise me. That I opened myself up to this. I want to blame myself for entering a white-dominant space and thinking it would go differently. But the blame is not on me. And this weight is not going to fall on my shoulders.
Though I wish otherwise, what happened to me is not an isolated incident. The yoga community in America is overwhelmingly white and has been relatively silent when it comes to collectively denounce racism, aside from the bandwagoning approach after George Floyd’s murder. Why do we have to die for people to see our humanity?
Yoga is more than postures and breathing, more than self-care or getting a toned body. Yoga is remembering who we are, living ethically — it is social justice, and for this foundational truth of yoga philosophy to be realized, there needs to be a major overhaul of the Americanized institution of yoga.
What if white practitioners and teachers spoke up? Not for us, but in solidarity with us?
Too often this work for racial justice falls on our shoulders; we are tasked with absorbing microaggressions quietly, lest we be categorized as “angry” or “negative,” or to meditate and achieve equanimity in the face of harm. We are tasked with standing up for ourselves, because who else is going to do it, but our concerns fall on deaf ears or are twisted into attacks, or we are gaslit or told to spiritually bypass our lived experiences. What would it look like if white people spoke up to other white people, both in the moment and beyond these moments? Many of us are tired of screaming into the void.
The racial indifference I experienced isn’t new within the context of the yoga community or the greater world, but what happened next was unprecedented. On Saturday morning, the group gathered at the beach to practice, and it did not go as planned.
After receiving cryptic messages over the weekend from the cohort group thread — ___ lost it; Please DELETE this text thread — at first, I am curious, and then I become increasingly concerned. Has something happened? I reach out to the TA to find out; what she tells me is beyond comprehension. I look online — she says the story has been picked up by numerous outlets — and find articles detailing what happened.
I discover that one of the two male trainees in the program has assaulted two men, spraying their faces with bear mace. These men, who happen to be at the beach at the same time as the rest of the training cohort, are not the first of his targets. They are simply the most recent. A week prior, he had bear-sprayed a man working at a convenience store. A common thread among the men who have been attacked? All are men of color. These are hate crimes.
Reading article after article, the pattern comes to light. I find out that he has schizophrenia, and that he became increasingly agitated after the pandemic caused him to lose his job. He has recently been released from a mental health facility, though his girlfriend, a social worker, says he has been obsessively watching news footage of the protests and is paranoid that people are “coming to get us.” I also learn that he is recently released from prison, where he served thirteen years for attempted murder.
I was not comfortable around him from the beginning. The first day of class, before the pandemic, as we gathered in a circle introducing ourselves, he “comforted” a crying trainee by rolling across the wooden floor to touch her knee, then rolled back to his place. Odd, yes. But had I ever thought he was dangerous?
A couple of months before I leave the program, I notice he seems out of sorts during our Zoom meeting, unusually quiet and dazed-looking. It is concerning, but we are on Zoom and I am, for once, grateful for the distance. Randomly, I wonder if it was a poor decision for the instructor to have us all over to her home — he knows where she lives.
Though I was wary of him and his behavior, I never thought this would happen. Over a year later, I keep wondering what might have happened to me if I had decided to go on Saturday after all. What if I had been there? Would I have been harmed? I don’t want to demonize him, or anyone, for mental illness, but couldn’t the assaults have been avoided? If not by pre-screening applicants, then at least by following county protocols and continuing to hold the training online?
I am lucky I didn’t go. Even if he hadn’t targeted me, bearing witness to the violence he committed, seeing him attack a man exiting the bathroom at the beach, would have been traumatizing. Though I was not there, I am haunted by what happened.
The moment of clarity I had when I decided I would not go to training the next day or any day after that is not so dissimilar to the moment of clarity I had when I took my last drink. Why am I doing this? Don’t I deserve more?
These moments of clarity have been few in my life, but I have never regretted them. I didn’t know where these small actions would lead me, but I trusted them, and they have always taken me where I need to go.
The Sunday after it happened, before I even knew what occurred at the beach, I sent an email to the studio to say: I want to cancel my automatic payments and speak to the studio owner about receiving a refund. Days passed. No response.
On Tuesday, I heard back. Not from the studio. From the teacher.
Once I discovered what had happened over the weekend, it made sense that I hadn’t received a reply to the email I sent to the center on Sunday. I realized they probably thought I wanted to withdraw due to the violence that had occurred during training hours; though unrelated, it also wasn’t unrelated. But I needed to ensure that my own experience as the sole Black person in the class didn’t go unheard — to be sure, the trainee’s attacks on innocent men at the beach were reason enough to withdraw, but I had made my decision, miraculously, before any knowledge about what happened at the beach.
The email I receive from the training instructor is inappropriate, a vague acknowledgment of her inability to “lead discussions about race,” never an acknowledgment of the racial indifference she perpetuated in a group setting. I write to the center, again, this time to express my disappointment and tell my side of the story. I say that it is ironic for the center to be posting on social media about being an ally to POC, when no one has reached out to me, a POC, to find out why I wanted to withdraw from the program.
The response I receive is swift and riddled with excuses. Now that I have expressed my disappointment with the center at large, not just the program itself — though the two are not mutually exclusive — I am deemed worthy of an answer. When I read that the studio owner wants to hear more of my “well-articulated words,” I resolve that I will not grant her that opportunity. Would she say that to a white practitioner? I doubt it.
I got my money back, but it’s not just about the money. It’s about the constructs of racism permeating the fabric of our existence. It’s about institutions of wellness disregarding or attempting to silence Black and Brown voices as a result of this unexamined or denied white supremacy. It’s about the dismissal of our collective experiences as negative or unrelated to yoga. Yoga means “to yoke,” to bring together, to make whole. The yoga community and the larger world will never realize this wholeness if our experiences are deemed unpalatable or unrelated to white-dominant culture.
I may not have learned how to sequence a class, how to offer non-physical assists or how to lead a group, but the yoga teacher training program I withdrew from did enlighten me in ways that are perhaps more valuable. I know now, more than ever, what I will and will not stand for. Shortly after I left, I found an online training specifically by-and-for POC. I became a certified yoga teacher in October 2020.
What happened that Friday night on Zoom, what occurred at the beach the following morning, and what is happening — has been happening — in our country, this centuries-old turmoil, all point to this: we are together but apart. Much like our pandemic era, sequestered in our homes and connecting online instead of face-to-face, we are together on this planet, but we are living separately. It’s designed that way.
You think that what’s happening to Black bodies isn’t connected to you, to how our country is governed, to our history. We stigmatize mental illness as the fault of the person who exhibits it, rather than recognizing the lack of accessible mental health care. We turn away from what we don’t understand, what makes us uncomfortable, what makes us feel unsafe. We otherize and dehumanize each other.
A year has passed since George Floyd’s murder, and I’m concerned that the momentum of our movement is waning. White people are fatigued from learning and sharing, protesting, chanting “Black Lives Matter.” But you need to keep paying attention. And not just to the overt instances of racism, but to the insidiousness of racism itself, and how it stains everything — including the spaces that are designated as healing. The fire is still burning.
We can’t turn away. We are all interconnected. Yes, we experience life on a spectrum of difference — due to the social constructs of race, class, and gender that impact us on a real scale — and simply saying that we are all interconnected does not catalyze the transformation that we as people and as a country, a world, must undergo. We can’t spiritually bypass racism. And to eradicate racism, yes, we do need love and light; but along with love, and in the light, we need collective action.
