22/04/2024
One of my teachers wrote this:
“For practices such as yoga to be grounded in ethics requires conscious social engagement and a willingness to challenge accepted attitudes by more than petitions and posts. Practices need the ballast of more awakeness and more solidarity, more co-operation and more peace.
Prioritising only individual paths and neglecting social structures (which incorporate class, gender, race and more) can be the embodiment of narcissism. Failing to realise changing climates and what humans are doing to the ecosystem can mean that practice is predominantly about self-comfort rather than social transformation.
By being aware of what is going on means that we do not use these valuable practices as ways of deluding ourselves. These are some of the difficult and uncomfortable realities that many are now facing.
In the killing fields of Gaza genocide has been happening: through bombs, bullets and a deliberately imposed famine that is causing mass starvation.
The Israeli state is highly dependent on support from the US and other western countries. The US gives Israel $3.8 billion in military assistance every year; since the 7 October, the US has given an additional $2.5 billion in armaments and weapons to Israel.
An Israeli soldier said last month: “In practice, a terrorist is anyone the IDF has killed in the areas in which its forces operate.”
In the UK, real wages in 2023 were lower than they were in 2008 – and about three million people regularly use food banks.
In the world there are about 2,780 billionaires with a combined total wealth of more than £11 trillion (this is greater than the GDP of every country apart from the US and China). In 1980, there were about 130 billionaires.
We are being faced by a climate crisis that clearly shows capitalism’s model of consumption and competition is neither sensible nor sustainable.
Aaron Bushnell was an incredibly brave young man. Before his death he wrote: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.””
