Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

It’s okay to meditate, do yoga, etc., while fighting for social justice. In fact, it’s necessary.

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Four years ago, I left a cushy tech industry job to work alongside teachers, bus drivers, and other workers in the labor movement. Burying my head in the sand and looking out for myself hadn’t been enough.

Our society is so violent, backwards, and corrupt. I had to starting helping change it.

But sometimes I struggle to square my politics with my meditation practice. How can I sit in silence as corporations exploit workers, white supremacists march in the streets, misogynists fill the White House, and the rainforests burn?

That’s why I love this metaphor from the spiritual teacher David Deida.

It reminds me that there’s room for many approaches to dealing with life’s problems, that I don’t have to choose one approach over another, and that integrating so-called “self-care” with social justice is actually the healthiest approach of all.

Imagine yourself as a stained-glass window.

“You look at yourself and notice there are pieces broken out of you,” Deida says. “There are hunks of glass missing. You’re battered, abused, chipped, wounded, rejected.”

The first approach, therapy, is like fixing or replacing altogether the broken pieces of glass. It helps you function better by healing dysfunction.

Say, you aren’t getting along with your father. Your therapist could help you forgive him for how he treated when you were young, and over time the relationship might improve.

Meditation, yoga, and other similar practices are like wiping the dust from the stained glass so the light shines through. They increase the flow of life in the present moment.

Our minds are constantly stopping the flow by following thoughts into the past or the future. Meditation is practicing letting go of thinking and observing the flow (of thoughts, bodily sensations, emotions, sounds, all of experience), over and over again.

Doing meditation (or yoga) isn’t the same as therapy. Sure, it can feel therapeutic, but it’s not meant for investigating the causes of emotional problems. It’s about being here, right now.

“You can be broken as fuck, and still do good yoga,” Deida says. “You can be entirely dysfunctional therapeutically, psychologically, emotionally, you can be a wreck, and still be a master yogi. Yoga doesn’t fix the parts of you that are broken. It just takes the dust off.”

The third approach, spirituality, isn’t about fixing the broken pieces or wiping away the dust. It’s about realizing that you’re the light itself, whether you’ve meditated, or you’re broken, or whatever’s happening. It’s realizing you are “one with everything”—there’s no separation between you and everything else.

Prayer, looking at the night sky, being in nature, and taking psychedelics are examples of spiritual experiences.

Let’s make this concrete. Say, you don’t like your job. A therapist might help you manage the stress it’s causing you. Meditation, yoga, etc., might help you feel a little better for short periods of time. Spirituality might make you realize a job is nothing relative to the 93-billion-light-years-wide universe.

You’re probably wondering, what about quitting or getting a new job?

There’s a fourth approach missing from Deida’s metaphor, which I call “political economy.” This would be like trimming the trees outside the window, i.e., changing the environment around the window so more light shines through.

As the label suggests, this is the realm of politics and economics, i.e., addressing the dysfunction outside of oneself, in society. Examples: leaving your job, starting a union with your coworkers, protesting, running for elected office, voting, starting a business, hiring a career coach, etc.

In other words, therapy helps you function better within dysfunctional conditions. Meditation helps you flow with the conditions, whatever they are. Spirituality is unconditional, i.e., finding peace and freedom no matter what. Political economy helps you change the conditions.

Meditation, therapy, and spirituality, by themselves or even all together, aren’t enough. They aren’t going to end capitalism or white supremacy or patriarchy or [insert oppressive system here.]

We also need societal change, specifically, what Martin Luther King Jr. called a “radical redistribution of economic and political power.”

Yet, raising taxes on corporations, restructuring the economy, or ending racism—which are easier said than done—won’t be enough either.

We also need to work on ourselves. It’s not one or the other.

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How meditation, yoga, and other spiritual practices can blind you from inequality

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You may have not encountered the term “spiritual bypassing,” but you’ve definitely experienced someone doing just that.

Coined in the 1980s by psychologist John Welwood, it means the “use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs.” In other words, it’s pretending — often unconsciously — that our spirituality and beliefs about universal truth mean that we don’t have to work with our own particular, relative neuroses.

You might be a serious yoga student or meditation teacher, with all the poses and sutras memorized, but you might also repress feelings and concerns in your everyday life. If you aren’t consciously using resources, like therapy and willing friends, to address those feelings and concerns, you undoubtedly burden or even hurt others with your patterns of avoidance or reactivity. Just because you learned from the Heart Sutra that everything is actually empty doesn’t mean you can communicate in a healthy way with your girlfriend.

Many a spiritual leader has fallen in this trap — and hurt others along the way. Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa passed away at the age of 48 after years of heavy drinking. He also allegedly took advantage of his superior position by having sex with a number of his female students — as have undoubtedly countless other male leaders, such as Zen monk Katagiri Roshi.

As spiritual teacher David Deida says, “You can be a wreck and still be a master yogi.”

Fortunately, what’s often called “American Buddhism” is steeped in a healthy dose of Western psychology, which helps limit spiritual bypassing. Well-known teachers such as Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach combine meditation practice with aspects of therapy to heal trauma and work with difficult emotions. But, maybe even because of this focus on individual psychology, most of the American Buddhist community continues to bypass related but altogether different unresolved wounds, our particular, relative conditions.

By “conditions” I mean society, how we are treated by others because of our skin color, how much or how little property we own, what we do for a living, how our body looks, and so on. There is no “self” that is separate from these forces, yet it’s tempting to use spirituality, particularly when it’s combined with psychology, to try to discount them. Simply put, we can use spiritual beliefs and practices to not only avoid seeing a therapist but also to deny the fact that we live in an unjust society.

When your spirituality involves navel-gazing about “growth” and “self-improvement,” you shouldn’t pretend that you’re doing it for everyone else, that you’re “being the change you want to see in the world.” You’re actually sidestepping the fact that many of the positive aspects of modern life were won by groups of people coming together to fight and struggle. The five-day workweek, the eight-hour workday, Social Security, and more were won by unions of working people. The right to vote, by women and black Americans. Progress is not automatic or guaranteed — it must be taken from the hands of the powerful. At least it has to be that way in our society, where freedom is bought with money and property, which many of us don’t have much of.

Sure, meditation and other spiritual practices can free your mind, but they can’t change the fact that black Americans own approximately one-tenth of the wealth of white Americans.

You can pretend that you don’t see differences, that you’re colorblind, that you treat everyone the same regardless of their gender or sexuality, but that’s delusion. Or, more precisely, that’s missing the point. Racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression are systemic, meaning they exist because entire groups of people have little political and economic power relative to other groups. Your colorblindness, while well-meaning, isn’t going to close the racial wealth gap or stop police from killing poor and black Americans.

Yet, how you, individually, treat others does matter. Systemic oppression plays out in our communities, both spiritual and not, in unconscious ways. Just as we are shaped by our experiences early in life, especially how our parents cared for us, we are deeply conditioned by our skin color, gender, and class. The “self-improvement” that matters is taking responsibility for how we show up in our workplaces, yoga rooms, and meditation centers. We must be responsible for the aspect of ourselves that is socially constructed. Trungpa not only took advantage of his superior position as teacher, he also took advantage of being a man in a religion (Buddhism) and society that have long given more power to men than women. Conscious of his choice or not, he wasn’t being responsible with the power automatically granted to men in patriarchal society. Buddhist teachings of non-duality can help us here: your race and gender are both part of you and not part of you. There are no such things as “being a man” or being “white,” but both are parts of the mask that others see. Borrowing a phrase from Tibetan Buddhist Tsoknyi Rinpoche, they are “real but not true.”

To be clear, individual work, both spiritual and therapeutic is necessary. Your relationship with yourself shapes how you relate to others. Your physical body needs to be taken care of with regular rest and solitude. Unfortunately, but understandably, a sort of “political bypassing” dominates many left-leaning activist circles. Any notion of taking care of yourself is snuffed out as “individualistic” or “bourgeois.” Journalist Laurie Penny summed it up in an essay in The Baffler: “I’m sick and tired of seeing the most brilliant people I know, the fighters and artists and mad radical thinkers whose lives’ work might actually improve the world, treat themselves and each other in ludicrously awful ways with the excuse, implicit or explicit, that any other approach to life is counterrevolutionary.”

Go figure that even in groups struggling together to change society the bypassing is gendered. Again, Laurie Penny: “I’ve heard men on the left write off anti-sexist, anti-racist politics as hopelessly individualistic, whilst also refusing to do the basic work of self-care and mutual care that keeps hope alive and health possible, because that work is women’s work, undignified in comparison to watching your life fall apart while you wait for the revolution or for some girl to pick up the pieces, whichever comes first.”

What to do once we realize we’re using spirituality (or politics) to bypass working with difficult emotions and conditions is another matter altogether. But that we notice is a huge first step. I suspect the next step, like anything that makes a real difference, takes a great deal of compassion.

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