9: Ableism in Conspiracy Theories (w/Jivana Heyman)
Percolating alongside racism and classism, one of the most pernicious subtexts of conspirituality propaganda is ableism. Proponents spout accusatory mantras like: “You have an immune system!,” “You’d have nothing to worry about if you were vegan!,” and, of course, “Living in fear is the real cause of disease.”
Not only do these ideas have nothing to do with virology, they also condemn everyone who is immuno-compromised, living in a food desert, or managing trauma to the margins. COVID-19 has exposed the ugliest secret of wellness culture: the glorification of the self over concern about the community.
None of this is news for disability activists. In this episode, Matthew interviews Jivana Heyman, founder of Accessible Yoga and longtime AIDS activist, about walking the anti-conspirituality line between yoga and public health. Heyman also reveals how the past and present intersect in Tony Fauci, a leading figure in AIDS research during Reagan’s tenure who is now being muzzled by Trump.
In This Week in Conspirituality, Julian looks at the fear of death through the lens of Ernest Becker and Joseph Campbell, Derek discusses free speech after Twitter removes 7,000 QAnon accounts, and Matthew tries to empathize with the “awakened” aspect of conspirituality, i.e., What have they woken up to?
Show Notes
A Force In The Universe: Brad Ramsey
Advanced Asthanga practice video with Pattabhi Jois
The Prophecies of Q
Twitter Removes Thousands Of QAnon Accounts, Promises Sweeping Ban On The Conspiracy
What Does Free Speech Mean?
As Predicted: Parler Is Banning Users It Doesn’t Like
Statistics & Information on Childhood Sexual Abuse
Matthew’s tribute to Jivana Heyman
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Our topic this week, Ableism in Conspiracy Theories with Giovanna Heyman.
Percolating alongside racism and classism, one of the most pernicious subtexts of conspirituality propaganda is ableism.
Proponents spout accusatory mantras like, you have an immune system, You'd have nothing to worry about if you were just vegan.
And of course, living in fear is the real cause of disease.
Not only do these ideas have nothing to do with virology, they also condemn everyone who is immunocompromised, living in a food desert, or managing trauma to the margins.
COVID-19 has exposed the ugliest secret of wellness culture, the glorification of the self over concern about the community.
None of this is news for disability activists.
In this episode, Matthew interviews Giovanna Heyman, founder of Accessible Yoga and longtime AIDS activist, about walking the anti-conspiratuality line between yoga and public health.
Heyman also reveals how the past and present intersect in Tony Fauci, wouldn't you know it, a leading figure in AIDS research during Reagan's tenure, who is now being muzzled by Trump.
In our This Week in Conspirituality segments, Julian, that's me, looks at the fear of death through the lens of Ernest Becker and Joseph Campbell.
Derek discusses free speech after Twitter removes 7,000 QAnon accounts.
And Matthew tries to empathize with the awakened aspect of conspirituality.
In other words, what have they woken up to?
This week in Conspirituality, there are so many news items And as I did last week, I'm going to focus on a theme instead, and kind of like the ongoing theme of how we think to and think about and talk to conspiritualists.
And there's also some ableism overlaps reflective of the interview that I did with my friend Jivana Heyman.
Matthew, I'm sorry, but can you define ableism, just in case some listeners might not know what that is?
I think that would be a good way to start.
Yeah, sure.
As far as I understand, ableism would be the series of beliefs about normalcy in physical Emotional and mental abilities that allows people who do not share those privileges to become invisible to the society in general.
So ableism would be a particular form of privilege blindness that assumes that your particular way of moving through the world is just normal, it's the way it should be, and that everybody should Um, be able to, uh, accommodate themselves to it and, and therefore no accommodation for other abilities is needed.
So, um, you know, for instance, uh, the, the, like a primary mantra that I understand to be at the heart of disability studies is, you know, we have to understand that this world is not made for everyone.
It is made for people, uh, who are able-bodied, but in particular ways.
And I would say that the way that this intersects with wellness disciplines and discourse for the last 40 years is really that there's an expectation that everybody should be able to do a particular type of yoga class and yoga being able to do a yoga class, for instance, would signify a kind of wellness and a kind of moral virtue as well.
So there's also this sort of principle by which ableism enforces this biopolitics that suggests that your ability to do certain things is equivalent with your social value.
But of course, the people who have that privilege are blind to it, and so they don't seek to open up their world to people who don't share those same abilities.
How's that?
Very good.
Oxford needs to call you.
Okay.
Well, no, that's pretty rough and I'm sure I'll get some corrections and feedback and I hope that I do because it's something that I'm really just starting to try to understand.
Okay, so...
This week in conspirituality, when things move brutally fast, I can really feel that every, like personally, I can feel that every absurd anti-mask meme or anti-vax bit of disinformation is literally crippling public safety and threatening the health of my family members.
And my impulse is to shout back.
And the problem is that even in defense, that can mirror or it can be perceived as mirroring the aggression of really bad ideas.
Now, of course, some of those ideas are put out there in bad faith.
So, you know, I'm looking at you, Andy Wakefield.
But some people are also earnest in these ideas.
We have to assume that some of these bad ideas are offered in good faith.
And so what do we do with that?
We had Steve Hassan on the show a few weeks back, and his advice for dialoguing with those who have been recruited into conspirituality can be summed up in one sentence.
He basically said, don't call them stupid.
It doesn't work emotionally, because if you're talking to people who are under undue influence, they've already been emotionally coerced and run over.
It also doesn't work politically, strategically.
We can just think about what the Democrats have done with economic policy since Clinton and even before.
You know, they globalize labor for the benefit of the banking class, and then they marginalize and even make fun of white guys in the Rust Belt who lose their jobs.
Like, don't call them stupid is a really powerful lesson.
I'm also, you know, we had Professor Antonovich on last week, and she said something really profound, which is, you know, when we're thinking about somebody like Christiane Northrup, we really have to take her seriously as a historical agent, that she comes from a certain place.
You know, there are real concerns and real efforts and real motivations behind what she does, and they have to be taken seriously to be understood.
And in that word seriously, I also hear the word empathetically.
Now, as I said, it's hard when things move so fast and when everyone can see that standing behind an anti-science president is You know, a bunch of federal stormtroopers who assault citizens every night in Portland, probably tonight they're going to be in Chicago.
And it just doesn't feel like there's time to develop an empathetic view.
But I'm just going to pretend for this segment that we do have time.
So, can spiritualists speak about being awake to the truth of things?
And I think that's part of the reason why it's so hard to argue data and facts with them, because you can't argue data and facts with someone who's having a transcendent or religious experience.
That's akin to calling them stupid.
So, what happens if you recognize that transcendence?
What happens if you even honor it?
What does it do to your own internal process and the conversation you might be able to have if there's time, if you have the tolerance, if you have the resilience for it?
And to answer that question, I've had like a very strong personal experience about this, you know, around this kind of pivot and it's instructive for me.
And so I'd like to share it.
And it centers on the research that I've done over the past six years into abuse in the yoga and Buddhism worlds.
And in the thick of that, I came across this passage in a book of interviews given by senior students of Potabi Joyce, who, like, I went on to prove by, through the powerful testimonials of a bunch of different people, that he was a serial, physical, and sex assaulter, and that he was enabled by the cultic dynamics that surrounded him.
But this book of interviews is a piece of propaganda in his favor.
It's like a hagiography and it was published about 20 years after one of the main editors knew that Joyce was engaged in criminal activity.
So the passage in question, and we'll put it into the show notes, it comes in an interview with a guy named Brad Ramsey.
Now, Ramsey was an early U.S.
Joyce student, started sometime in the 1970s, and he actually helped run the first Ashtanga Yogashala outside of India, and that studio was in Encinitas, California.
Now, the passage in Ramsey's interview haunted me for years, but in two different ways.
And years is really important here because There's something, I think, in how this was allowed to sink in that I believe holds a clue to how I want to act towards the anti-mask crowd.
Time notwithstanding, I'm not really solving that problem.
Okay, so here's the passage.
Ramzi is talking about practicing yoga in Mysore, India while Joyce adjusts him.
And if you don't know what that looks like, we'll link to a video so you can see him basically brutalize Ramzi.
And this is what Ramzi says.
I felt like I was being dismembered.
My body was changed.
When it hurts, put your mind on God instead of your pain.
Whatever your concept of God is, whether he was the great architect or the basic element of the universe which everything is made out of, the series is just a mold towards a body that meets the requirements for spiritual advancement, I believe.
I don't think you can get there without pain.
I never met anyone who did.
For me, it hurt from the first day to the last, at least something.
There's always something.
Sometimes even to make the effort is painful.
It's the nature of the beast.
It's a birth process, really.
Okay, so when I first read this, I was like horrified.
The ex-Catholic in me especially was horrified.
I thought this guy is a masochist.
He obviously needs pain and he's rationalizing it through spirituality.
And he's going to teach it to younger people.
And what kind of fucked up relationship to their bodies will they pick up from it?
And there's also this part about him ignoring that Joyce himself is physically assaulting him and is the direct cause of the sensation of dismemberment.
And so in Ramsay's own interactions with his students, he might do the same thing to them, thinking that he's God or something.
So about a year after I first read that passage, I found out that Ramsey died by suicide, not long after the interview was given.
I found out that he'd struggled with depression and substance abuse.
Two super credible sources told me that he committed domestic violence.
And here's the thing.
I had this initial impression of that passage and these details validated my view that this guy's spirituality obviously didn't help him, that it was covering something over, he was bypassing.
And I'm really ashamed to say this next thing, which is that I almost gloated inside.
I remember thinking, yeah, see what your stupid religion led you to.
And it was totally inappropriate.
And I think it's echoed by that response we are seeing in some places on social media that fantasizes that, like, all of the folks at Trump's Tulsa rally will get COVID and die, and good riddance.
And I understand the rage behind that view, but it's not something that I want to aspire to.
So here's where time comes in.
After about two years of reading that passage and massaging my own first interpretation of it and then spreading that around in the yoga training courses I taught, I had some kind of shift.
There are psychotherapists in my family, and it was probably over dinner that one of them mentioned how common it is that we can focus our criticism on something that's actually really attractive to us, something that we can't accept in ourselves.
It's one of the many forms of projection.
And so the next time I looked at the Ramsey quote, I saw something different.
I saw another view.
I'm not saying that either one is right, but it was just another side.
That Ramsay was a guy who went all in on his body.
He used physical yoga and pain to connect with something ultimate for him.
He took his body so seriously that it could become a vehicle for his entire sense of meaning.
And so he spoke a language of transcendence, but the material of that was his body.
So he left it all on the mat, as they say.
And there's something about that that speaks to me, actually, on an existential level.
He did something to the edge of his possibility.
And it appeals to that part of me that is distanced or dissociated.
I remember this time in my 20s when I was with a friend of mine in Vermont and he had this swimming hole up in the mountains.
I'm standing on the edge of it, and I'm psyching myself up to jump in.
And I know it's going to be cold, and I'm afraid of jumping in.
And this friend of mine is a Course in Miracles guy.
That's how I got into that stuff.
But I was shivering there, and I asked him, I said, why am I afraid of just a little bit of cold water?
And he said, you know, fear is the absence of love.
And then he jumped right in and he like did a war cry and stuff.
So he proved it, right?
And I jumped in too.
And I realized how my body could so easily become a conductor of some sort of primal fear that was unreasonable or unnecessary.
And Ramsey is doing way more than that by jumping into Way more than jumping into a cold pond.
The confrontation that he's having is with a kind of bodily fear.
And that confrontation, I think, feels exhilarating and wakeful.
And the other thing that I realized about Ramsey after I shifted this point of view was, and this ties in with the ableism material with Jeevan Heyman, Let's just say Ramsey's attraction to pain had a history to it.
Because of course it did.
Maybe he was a trauma survivor.
Maybe he was neuroatypical.
Maybe we could consider his substance issues as a disability.
And so who am I to say that his fascination with pain was unhealthy for him?
How can I possibly know whether his obsession with painful yoga wasn't therapeutic in the sense that it kept him away from worse things?
Who am I to say that he didn't do the best with what he had?
Now, the real problem is that he's a teacher.
Like, you know, it would not be okay for him to unconsciously pass these attitudes along like a virus.
But for him personally, it might have worked out in ways that were truly helpful.
And to think that he should have just been more like me is actually an ableist assumption.
It takes my experience of my body as being normal and healthy, and then it accuses him for not being that way.
All right, so what does this have to do with anti-mask activists and anti-vaxxers?
I have the same reaction of disgust to their memes and their propaganda as I did to that quote from Brad Ramsey.
And I think, you know, many of us share that disgust and it's reasonable, but it's just not effective.
And I think if that we can let it sink in that, you know, whether or not they're mistaken about the facts, these are people who are taking the minutiae of their bodies extremely seriously.
That's a new point of view.
They're worried about their oxygen levels.
They're obsessing over their immune systems.
They're drawing a line in the sand around their bodies so that they define space as sacred and that it should be beyond the reach of the state or the medical system or anything else except their internal subjectivity.
And why are they so passionate?
Like, could it be that they're expressing themselves through the only portal of meaning that they have found in our dreary techno-industrial landscape?
Could it be that their fascination with the glory of their bodies is part of a desire to re-enchant the world?
Is it really a mistake that anti-vaxxers are also big in the homeschool movement where parents are restricting screen time and advocating for more outside play?
When anti-vaxxers send their kids to Waldorf school, they're expressing a kind of rebellion against the modern desecration of the environment and the body altogether.
And that's why I think listening to Zach Bush bust out these 19th century sermons, they're like totally in heaven.
It's like catnip for them.
And so my point is that conspiritualists really have woken up to something.
It might be on the wrong side of the bed, but that awakening, it's half like disenchantment with techno-industrialism and half a kind of romanticization of the natural body.
It's a spiritual experience for them.
It's like they woke up to William Blake in the 19th century, and Brad Ramsey woke up to medieval yoga, and it worked for him to some extent.
So like as with Brad Ramsey, the conspiritualists might be doing the best they can do against boredom and ennui.
Also like Brad Ramsey, they might be heavily influenced by forms of coercion.
And for both of them, it's not okay that they spread around personal revelations as though they're public health advice.
But don't call them stupid, I don't think.
I don't think it's going to work, because that attacks something that's personal, that's private, that's precious.
So when I hear now things like, I have a miraculous immune system, or our bodies need to communicate with each other and be close to each other to be healthy, I'm going to try to not immediately jump to the implication that is actually beyond that or beyond them at that point, that these are actually selfish statements.
I'm going to try to do what I didn't manage to do at first with Brad Ramsey.
I'm going to try to stand in their shoes a little bit.
So, I mean, maybe some answer is, yeah, it's amazing what we can do, how smart our bodies can be, or how much innate sense we have.
I feel really empowered by that idea, but Hey, why do you think that some people don't have access to that?
And how do you think public health can help them out until they do?
And then going back to what Hassan suggests, maybe I'm just going to wait, like just wait for them to answer.
And if they answer with more propaganda, Maybe I'll just ask again, and maybe at some point the propaganda runs out and they have to say something new.
And because I'm listening, maybe they won't be scared to do that.
You know, first off, I just have to say the fact that in this environment of social media with Twitter, and let me just brain fart as quickly as possible and then move on to the next thing, to spend years with a passage And let it turn over in your mind.
You know, every year I go back and I reread the Tao Te Ching because that was my favorite book out of my studies of religion.
And every year I find something new in it.
Yeah.
And I think that in terms of an educational process, that is of such value to actually go back to your previous beliefs and to actually just turn it over in your mind over and over again.
That's something I would hope more people would aspire to.
Yeah, I mean, it has to do with, I mean, sometimes things sear themselves into you that they just never leave, and I don't think it's because they're going to be true for you always, forever, in the same way.
They're not leaving because they've got to change somehow within you, or they've got to keep helping you just see more, yeah.
Well, I think you have a fabulous immune system.
Thank you.
You too, Julian.
Really, really top-notch.
I'm just playing.
Okay, so for my This Week in Conspiratuality, I'm looking at Twitter, which took down 7,000 QAnon-associated accounts this week, and they have put another 150,000 on notice.
What that means, I'm not quite sure, but that was their statement.
The entire spectacle is slightly confusing given that David Hayes, aka Praying Medic, one of the most notable QAnon devotees, and in fact some people think he might be Q, is back up already.
He came up the day after with the same handle, but without all of the followers.
And he's advocating for people to get off of Twitter while he's on Twitter.
Now, this is not new.
I spent a good portion of yesterday browsing through QAnon profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
And while I somehow made it through the day with decent mental health, many QAnon devotees advocate for getting off of social media and over to Parler, which is a social media platform.
So the outcry, which was expectable, is about freedom of speech, and people are quick to invoke the First Amendment.
The irony is that the underlying ideas of QAnon are rooted in millenarism and apocalyptism, which, while not necessarily religious, very much have roots in Christian theology.
And the distance between a lot of QAnon's base and Christian thought, though not necessarily based in devotion, is not far off from the actual ideological framework.
If you were to read the First Amendment, you might get the sense that criticism against Twitter has standing.
But freedom of speech is actually a living concept, one that has been debated in the courts for a long time.
So if you look at the judicial rights upheld under the First Amendment, they include the freedom not to speak legally.
I don't have to stand up during the Pledge of Allegiance.
The freedom to use speech to criticize political parties, the freedom to use symbolic speech, such as burning a flag, and the freedom to contribute money to political campaigns.
In 1976, Buckley v. Vallejo was argued under the First Amendment.
But there are also instances where the First Amendment was used to say, no, you actually cannot say those things and be protected under the law.
For example, I cannot advocate for illegal drug use at a school-sponsored event, nor can I make an obscene speech at such an event.
I can't burn my draft card as an anti-war protest.
And specific to this story, I cannot make or distribute obscene materials, nor can I incite actions that can harm others.
Those are not protected under freedom of speech.
And so traveling around the world of QAnon, you'll find out that Michelle Obama is a man That Hillary Clinton had JFK Jr.
assassinated, or that he's actually alive and will be Donald Trump's VP pick in 2020, and that Adam Schiff raped a dead boy at Chateau Marmont.
And these are some of the lesser theories ping-ponging around the internet, which of course brings us to comment ping-pong.
It's this strange obsession with pedophilia that's the most troubling aspect of all of this.
QAnon was spun out of the Pizzagate conspiracy, which had real-world consequences when Edgar Welch drove from North Carolina to the DC pizzeria, armed with three guns, and fired shots inside of the restaurants, thinking he had found the secret vault where the children were held, which was actually just where their computer system was stored.
Comet Ping Pong is where the secretive child sex trafficking ring run by Hillary Clinton was supposedly being run.
And we all know how that turned out.
Freedom of speech on the internet has real-world consequences.
And there are many others, but I don't think you want to hear a 10-hour podcast, so we'll move on.
What's worse about all this is while pedophilia is an actual problem, an estimated 1 in 3 girls and 1 in 7 boys are sexually abused by age 18, but only 1 in 10 of them will ever say anything.
It's not Chrissy Teigen behind it.
She had to delete 60,000 tweets and block 1 million Twitter follower accounts because of accusations that she's engaging in pedophilia.
Now, meanwhile, in the middle of the worst pandemic in a century, our president, known in the QAnon world as Q Plus, the savior, he wished the world's most notorious pedophile's handler the best earlier this week.
Now add to all of this that Parler, the social media site where all of these Q devotees and other right-wing trolls are running to under the guise of freedom of speech and the First Amendment, has been blocking liberals that sign up when they challenge anything the followers of this new religion are trafficking.
And if you think this isn't a new religion forming right before your eyes, let me take you for a ride with the Sea Org.
And I think that's something we have to grapple with, seriously, is that religions adapt to the circumstances.
We've talked before about Christian science and the ways that in the 18th and 19th centuries, religion has kept up with times.
Scientology became an official religion by, through the law, through the courts, by lawsuits.
That's how they actually became denoted that.
So we're actually watching the potential formation of a spiritual religious practice unfolding with QAnon right now.
And that's one thing I think we really need to take a little more seriously.
Freedom of speech, first and foremost, requires taking responsibility for your words.
And while a popular refrain among QAnon devotees is to do the research, very few of them seem to abide by their own rules.
I didn't realize the numbers on the Chrissy Teigen thing.
I hadn't followed it that closely.
Yeah, I didn't know that either.
I can just, I mean, I just can't even imagine what she has to go through.
I mean, just in, you know, her and John, I'm not a huge fan of their work per se, but as people, they do a lot of great public facing work.
And for them to have to deal with such nonsense, it's like they take their time out of their day and deal with the emotional baggage that comes with seeing stuff like that.
I can't even imagine.
Yeah, an incredible example, too, even though it's at this point just online, right?
But it's mobilizing that many people to take action based on completely dishonest slander.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Unbelievable.
Wow.
Well, this week, guys, I've been thinking about Ernest Becker, who you may or may not be familiar with, listeners.
He's the cultural anthropologist who in 1973 published the book The Denial of Death.
He would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for this book, perhaps ironically, two months after his own untimely demise at 49 from colon cancer.
The book's premise is that human civilization has at its core a defensive denial of our own mortality.
Becker postulates a split within the human mind between our physical existence and our symbolic existence, leading to a conflicted perception of a physical self versus a symbolic self.
Now, personally, as someone fascinated with religion, philosophy, and neuroscience, I've long noticed the dualism between mind and body that seems to be a key intuitive mistake that all humans are prone to.
Our sense of mind-body dualism is perhaps an indirect side effect of how consciousness evolved, in that we experience a mental self that seems somehow to be radically different than our physical self.
The behind-the-scenes brain processes that give rise to mental life happen in a kind of black box, inaccessible, forever separated from our experiencing awareness, as if by an impenetrable curtain.
No mistake, then, that religious or spiritual beliefs can set up shop very effectively on the foundational architecture of this faulty intuition.
You are not your body.
but a soul that briefly inhabits this body under the illusion of time, which is less real than the eternal and immortal immaterial domain of spirit.
Very familiar, right?
Turns out this definitional human intuition goes back quite far.
I learned from friend of the podcast, Joseph Campbell, the singular mythology scholar, that humans began burying their dead around 100 to 110,000 years ago.
Accompanying these burial rituals are early forms of mythology about what happens after death, both to us and to the animals we kill to eat.
The cave bear cults of the same period, like those found at Drachenloch in the Swiss Alps, appear to be organized around belief in a great bear spirit, to whom the Neanderthals made offerings both in gratitude, but also to ask forgiveness for killing his children.
Perhaps our brain's evolving self-awareness, empathy, and growing capacity to remember the past and imagine the future created guilt and survival anxiety that needed this early form of ritual soothing.
We honored the animals we killed to survive in the hopes that this would mean they continued showing up from their mysterious immaterial source.
We're sorry we killed your kids.
Please send more.
We're hungry.
So too, in burying our own, we could honor our fallen comrades, both experientially convinced and emotionally reassured that some essential spirit essence lives on after the body has fallen.
Now you may wonder, what does this have to do with ableism and conspirituality?
Well, one recurrent theme from the earliest forms of myth and ritual down through the monotheistic transaction of worshipful faith and goodness in exchange for eternal life, expressed also in the karmic calculus of the traditional Hindu caste system and all the way up through the New Age stew of magical thinking, natural cures, and metaphysical claims about illness,
is that the good and bad fortune that befalls us reflects some kind of spiritual justice.
And that that same justice can be influenced, perhaps for a price.
The promise of health, wealth, and well-being via positive thinking, supplements, and diet is at the heart of how New Age spirituality capitalizes on the dread so intimately associated with our fear of death.
That of sickness, being infirm, disabled, helpless in the face of a deeply unfair and even random bodily vulnerability.
Writer and breast cancer survivor Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in her 2009 book, Bright Sided, how the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world.
And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.
Perhaps it is the New Age version of praying to a giant bear skull on a stone altar to intone that fear is the real virus and the actual virus is an illusion.
As Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy and her descendants have assured us, resting in the divine perfection of the mind of God, no disease can touch us.
Lives Christiane Northrup's conviction that masks are merely to muzzle us and freedom from life-saving vaccines is the single issue that spiritually awakened voters should care about.
No need for fact-based fear or the kind of compassionate concern for others that should be at the heart of sincere awareness practice.
Woven through all of the COVID denial posturing around being spiritually sovereign is the ugliness of privilege.
Better still, entitlement to some kind of superior survival of the fittest spiritual inheritance.
This inevitably means that those already sick, immunocompromised, suffering from anxiety, trauma responses, depression, or indeed appropriate fear of COVID-19 are less than.
Let's just call them Lower Vibration People.
Scratch the surface on this victim-blaming attitude and we find a caste system that locates the signs of spiritual accomplishment in wealth, beauty, fitness, being thin, and exhibiting a youthful, able-bodiedness that can shrug off anything that would make a Lower Vibe person sick.
When Mickey Willis says in a social media video after the release of Plandemic, looking into the camera with steely, earnest eyes, I am ready to die, we could mistake this for being okay with death and embodied vulnerability.
But this is not that.
In Ernest Becker's Denial of Death, there's a chapter titled The Spell Cast by Persons about group psychology that unpacks how charismatic leaders persuade followers to cross previously taboo lines.
He says, there are leaders who seduce us through the infectiousness of the unconflicted person.
We admire their equanimity where we feel shame and humiliation.
The leader wipes out fear and permits everyone to feel omnipotent.
Here too, Becker's observation about a heroic, symbolic self that can participate in an immortality project fits.
This uber-self that is defiant and brave in the face of an abstract enemy has always been a motif of propaganda that dissociates us from appropriate fear, empathy, and sober existential honesty.
Of course, This abstract idealized self is an attempt to hide our physical selves who always live in the same reality as viruses, genetics, trauma, cancer, autoimmune conditions, and disability.
As a friend of mine, a yogi and activist named Laura Sharkey recently wrote, I, along with many others, am more vulnerable to the potential for great harm or even death from this disease than the average person is.
For a variety of reasons, including underlying health conditions, lack of access to health care, or because of employment that requires exposure to the public.
Knowing how vulnerable so many of us are, many of you still choose not to wear masks anyway.
How can I possibly accept this without feeling that my very life is less important to you than your personal preference or convenience?
I'll let her have that last word.
Oh, I'm so great that you brought Becker in, but also that you brought Mickey Willis in as the kind of faux prophet of being fearless in the face of death.
I was, I was, I had written down in my notebook here, I was going to ask you, how are we going to square the fact that Willis is somebody who would probably say, well, you know, Becker was right.
And we do, we, we, we do carry this, we do carry this fear, but I think what I'm getting from Your your reflections there is that is Willis isn't actually doing it He's saying I'm not afraid to die because I know that I'm actually the ubermensch I'm not afraid to die because I don't I don't this because my body isn't real and you should realize that as well and that is inevitably some sort of like dodging of the real issue Which is you know?
Let's get honest about what it actually feels like to be completely uncertain and to feel utter vulnerability.
Yeah, it stands in stark contrast with a moment that you had with with Jimena in your interview that we'll hear in a minute.
To me, it's really the difference between I am facing death with a kind of existential honesty and vulnerability and humility versus the heroic
Participation in a grand narrative that I'm willing to die for as a heroic, you know kind of inflation Yeah, because like you can't I mean I'm trying to imagine somewhere in my in my body or Anywhere in a dream even where I'd be able to look into a camera and say I'm not afraid to die and whatever it is he's whatever incredible thing he said
Because because when I when I contemplate my own death, it's just kind of like there's a Like a gap that is like overflowing with melancholy and hope and and and fear for the people that I support and and loneliness and regret and also a sense of Okay, well, that was okay.
And, you know, like, there's just a riot of emotions that I couldn't possibly say that I was prepared for.
So what it would take for somebody to look into the camera lens and actually lie like that, like, it's got to be a lie.
It has to be a lie.
I can't imagine it feeling like it's a real statement.
Well, again, as I think we've talked about when we discussed Plandemic initially, there's a kind of perfect, organic, intuitive feedback loop that I think begins to happen in these dynamics.
And Becker, this chapter about cults really had an impact on me when I read the book about 15 years ago.
And just the idea that the leader, part of the charismatic power and seductive power of the leader lies in these moments of breaking taboos and appearing to have transcended things that we are afraid to do.
And therefore it gives us, as the followers, a sense of inspiration and permission to break those same taboos.
And it's almost as if he takes on the responsibility.
Yeah, you know, yeah, wow.
I mean, it really makes me need to read the book again because I think I also read it about 15 years ago, but I've missed that sort of like endgame logical outcome of what the charismatic personality actually does, which is, yeah, he pretends as though the problems are solved in his own body.
Yeah.
Well, which isn't really a body because he's beyond that or whatever.
One word that comes up is vulnerability and there's a through line between Matthew, your experience with the Ramsey quote, and then remembering when I read Becker.
How deeply he grappled with Freud, because if I remember correctly in that book, it starts off with him being like, I denied Freud on every level and then I went back and started looking into his work and here's what I found from his theories and that's where the book originates.
And it just points to the ability of being able, which I think is so valuable as well, of expressing the fact that I was wrong, let me reinvestigate.
And I think that is also something, you know, that we've talked about humility before, but that's a quality that I see running throughout today's episode, at least, this need for reflection.
And then when you are wrong or misguided the vulnerability and humility to go and say, Oh, you know what?
"I'm rethinking this and here is what I'm thinking now." - So I'm really happy to call Jeevanah Heyman a friend of mine.
Here's what his bio says on the Accessible Yoga website.
Jeevana is the founder of Accessible Yoga, former co-owner of the Santa Barbara Yoga Center, and an integral yoga minister.
Hey Jeevana, thank you so much for taking the time.
It's really great to see you.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Jivana has specialized in teaching the subtle practices of yoga, pranayama, meditation, as well as sharing yoga philosophy.
His passion is making yoga accessible to everyone.
So here's our interview.
Hey, Jivana, thank you so much for taking the time.
It's really great to see you.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Great to see you too.
Okay, so there's a lot of yoga people who I think think they are activists, but I think you're kind of the real deal.
And I know a little bit about your history, like going right back to the 1980s, you've had one foot really squarely planted in the activist world through your work during the AIDS pandemic.
But you've also been deeply committed to yoga through your involvement in the Integral Yoga School.
And so you've done these like, I mean, you've done more than two things, obviously, but like these very two strong commitments in your life.
How has that played out for you?
Has that been a balancing act?
Well, I mean, I'm so glad that you're asking me because no one ever asked me that question.
I get to talk about yoga all the time, but... Right.
People rarely ask me about ACT UP and it's such an important part of my life.
I mean, it feels like a long time ago on the one hand, you know, but it also was so formative for me just to be involved with them from, yeah, it was in the 80s.
I mean, I think, you know, my role in ACT UP was I wasn't a leader in the group.
I mean, I want to say for sure that I was on the younger side.
So, like, I was really learning from them and Um, definitely all in and participating as best I could, but it was such a, it was such a strange time, you know, um, and I would say, cause I had just graduated from high school in 1985.
So you're like 19 or 18 years old.
Yeah.
And I was born in 67.
Yeah.
So, and I was just, um, and then I actually went to college, Well, I grew up in Connecticut and New York, and my dad lived in New York, and I went to college in Ohio.
And every time I came back for every break during university, I would go to ACT UP meetings in New York.
And that was like the hotspot.
Those were like the leaders who were organizing everything.
They were absolutely amazing.
I was mesmerized by them and just like really learned a lot.
And, and also, you know, my, I mean, the yoga piece is just that I had, my grandmother had taught me yoga actually as a small child.
So I had yoga in my brain.
She was like an older hippie.
Right.
She wasn't really connected to any school, but she was a real character and just really, really interested in, you know, yoga and she was really interested in Reincarnation.
I read everything and studied with everyone.
And I kind of had that in my head, too.
So then, actually, after college, I moved to San Francisco and, you know, it was like I was coming out and it was all everyone I knew was dealing with AIDS.
I mean, it was like coming out in the middle of, you know, an epidemic, actually, is what it was.
Right.
So, like, I've written about that part before, that it was like I was ready to, like, go have fun.
And, you know, like meet people and socialize.
And that our whole community was dealing with this unbelievable, I don't know, just horrible situation of illness and death.
And mystery and uncertainty and lack of public health support.
And yes.
Right.
Right.
And exactly.
I mean, so much homophobia and Fear and lack of support.
And I actually do think that's exactly what was ACT UP was doing, was trying to confront, was trying to respond to.
And I was just so, I'm kind of, I don't know if the word is naive or kind of like hopeful, that I just was like shocked and hurt and angry.
And it was like, you know, I mean, I just not what I expected.
I was young and I thought, oh, well, if someone's sick, you could take care of them.
If there's a problem, you fix it.
You know, like I just had expectations that.
Right.
Not neat at all.
I mean, it was horrific.
You know, I heard my ACT UP and AIDS epidemic history is really, really thin.
But I did listen to an amazing podcast with a couple of the founding members.
You're probably referring to them already, Peter Staley and Mark Harrington.
And they were talking about how Because they couldn't get any answers from the medical personnel that they were seeing, that they formed like a reading group where they got the best biochemistry textbook they could get, and they taught themselves as much science as they could.
Were you in that position as well, where you were trying to educate yourself scientifically?
Well, yes and no.
I mean, ACT UP was a very Diverse group, actually.
Right.
There was many factions, if that's a word, you know.
So that was in New York.
They were, they were like the leaders of, I would say, the more, the more conservative arm of ACT UP.
And they actually ended up splitting off and creating another group, TAG, T-A-G.
Right.
And they, they were like, they, they, they made all these inroads with testing and finding medicine.
And it was really remarkable what they did.
But I personally was more interested in the The more political side and the social justice piece.
And I ended up doing some research around alternative treatments, and I actually got a job working for AIDS Treatment News, which was when I was in San Francisco.
It was an AIDS newsletter, and I was writing about alternative treatments, which is what that newsletter was about.
Well, I'm wondering because in the absence of real public health initiatives, I would imagine that alternative, you know, medicine and herbal medicine and homeopathy and perhaps even your own yoga interests, in a therapeutic sense, became even more urgently interesting.
That's true.
That is true.
And I think, well, actually, that's part of how the Accessible yoga came to be because I was really interested in yoga therapy and I had, well, I had started practicing again, you know, right after university for myself.
I just really wanted to, I needed that.
I just needed that like support in my life.
And also I was dealing with, um, kind of like these, this crisis of illness and death, and I didn't really know how to respond.
And so like the yoga teaching seemed like a, you know, I wanted spiritual answers basically.
Right.
But then I also saw kind of the beginning of yoga therapy and I actually studied in integral yoga.
I ended up working with some of the leaders in yoga therapy, which is Dean Ornish and Nischilla Davey.
I don't know if you know her.
I do actually.
I took, I remember she, she was one of the trainers of my own yoga therapy course years ago.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So she was like really one of my first teachers.
I mean, I, I started with a woman named Kazuko Onodera actually.
So I had an opportunity.
So, Once I moved to San Francisco, it was really amazing.
Cause I, I was like dealing with all this ACT UP stuff, but I had met this amazing teacher and she took me under her wing.
Right.
And I became like her apprentice.
And so I really got, like, I feel like I got my yoga education there, but then I saw that the work that was happening with Nishala was doing with Dean Ornish, which was basically bringing yoga into this therapeutic setting and proving that you could reverse heart disease with yoga, which is like, I don't know, like seemed amazing.
So I actually did, I did try.
I mean, I decided I would teach yoga because I wanted to share it with people with HIV and AIDS.
And I immediately started classes for people with HIV and AIDS.
And I tried to do research.
It was kind of pathetic, but I wanted to do it.
I started teaching in a hospital and I convinced them to track the students and all that.
And it was, but you know, I was, that wasn't my, that wasn't my thing, the research, but Yeah, that was definitely compelling.
But it does sound like that yoga therapy angle that's trying to legitimize itself within a hospital setting.
Was your reach towards alternative medicine, did it come out of any kind of antipathy towards biomedicine or towards conventional health care?
No, it was desperation, I think.
Also, my friends were suffering, like I just saw, you know, nothing was helping them.
And then I felt that, you know, yoga had helped me in so many ways, just through the kind of calming stress reduction part.
And so that's what really motivated me, was just like, I would I would share that.
And I think I wrote about, I wrote about that in my book, but I definitely, there was like a moment where I realized, you know, I had been doing this like protesting with ACT UP.
And it was more than a moment, but it was really, I realized like I could actually do more good by just teaching classes and really just supporting my community that way by sharing yoga.
Right.
It was really just like trying to care for them.
I think that was my goal.
Right.
I mean, I wasn't interested in yoga therapy, but I don't, I mean, I don't feel, I guess maybe it's hard to know.
It's hard to know now because I've thought about yoga therapy so much.
Like, it's hard to remember like how I perceived it, but Right.
Never felt like a cure or anything.
Right.
Well, I almost, I kind of want to put a pin in this, but then also like flash forward, because as you're speaking, I'm wondering about this incredible oppositional divide that we see in so many wellness circles right now, pitting themselves against public health officials.
And like, but what you're describing, and there always seems to be this kind of reality gap in the discourse, where when I'm listening to somebody talk about how, you know, Tony Fauci doesn't know what he's talking about, or, you know, the public health officials are all, or the epidemiologists are getting it wrong, or whatever.
When I hear that discourse coming from somebody who practices in alternative health It feels abstract.
It doesn't feel like they're talking about people that they actually know who are suffering with this.
What I'm hearing from you is that when you actually recognize that people are dying all around you, You do anything you can to help, and you don't knock the other person for what they're doing, because obviously everybody's in it together.
So anyway, it's just standing out to me.
Yeah, I mean, that's... Well, it's funny you mentioned Fauci, because that definitely was like...
Back to the Future or something.
I mean, seeing him up on stage, you know, the last... Right!
I mean, he was kind of like the lead figure in, like the governmental representative interfacing with ACT UP.
Am I right about that?
Yeah.
I mean, it's funny because in the beginning, when I first got involved with ACT UP, he was like, he was hated.
I mean, because he, exactly.
I mean, he represented a complete lack of response from the government.
You know, he was working under Reagan, who basically didn't say the word AIDS until 1986, you know, like six years into the pandemic.
Can you imagine like six years?
I kind of can imagine, actually, to be honest, like, there's a lot of parallel with Trump right now, I think, and what Reagan was doing.
But But you see, it was so pointed with Reagan, because it was like a specifically, like, at that point, a gay male disease.
So it was very much about that community.
And I still think we'd see a lot of that now.
But anyway, Trump would let it go for six years if he was in the same media environment that Reagan was in, for sure.
I mean, yeah, I mean, go ahead.
You're right.
Yeah, so Fauci was hated, but then there was like this faction of ACT UP, actually those guys you mentioned, who ended up working with him.
And I mean, I think that's incredible.
And I thought that was, I thought it was a beautiful thing to see in ACT UP, that like an activist group could kind of like take both, take different routes to the same response.
Like one group could go on the inside.
Right.
You know, actually work with them.
And the other group could stay outside, really addressing social justice.
And like the homophobia, I think, was really one of the main messages that we were trying to get across.
Like Homophobia is keeping us from treating people and from addressing this in a logical, compassionate way.
Yeah.
And I think that was the message of us screaming in the streets, just like to get attention.
And I feel like that's what I was trying to do is just get attention for what was happening, rather than just like Ignore and deny.
Right.
You know, and, and when you talk about those, those, that branch being able to go inside, I mean, they went really inside in the sense that they're talking about having dinner parties with him and extended like back and forth, sometimes acrimonious debate, but like they stuck it out together, really.
And, and there was a, it gave me a sense that It was possible that somebody within public health could pay attention, could acknowledge homophobia to some extent?
I mean, it took years, though.
And it wasn't, I guess, it's funny, because I was like Ors on the other group.
So I saw them as kind of selling out.
But yeah, I mean, in the end, looking back now, it is great that they did.
But I think there were those of us that were a little more, like, we had bigger Concerns like it was like look at the whole structure.
Look at the system like can't you know, it's Meeting with Fauci individually or having dinner with him.
Like I don't feel like that addressed the larger issues, right?
No, it's like that's what really like, you know the kind of More extreme side of act up was just like focusing on that like addressing right and the larger social justice problems, right Yeah, I mean The parallels are incredible.
And I mean, maybe the next thing to ask about is, I think it sounds like you're also telling the story of a gradual building of trust that it's possible to To gain a reasonable public health response.
It's possible.
And that, well, maybe let me ask it this way.
Did you have the sense that researchers and doctors like Fauci, at least when they turned their attention to the problem, that they knew what they were talking about?
Yeah.
I think that's a good question.
I think so.
I think they did, you know, but I think they were very isolated, looking at it really in a very, like, Fauci is a researcher, like a doctor.
He is in public health, but politics is in his world.
Right.
Clearly.
But that's not really his politics isn't in his world.
Right.
So it's almost like.
Clearly.
Yeah.
But I mean, it's just like they were the victims, like the whole system was set up to not work.
I mean, it's kind of like, like the parallel I see right now is like Black Lives Matter.
Like, I actually, I think that there is a parallel between ACT UP and the response to AIDS and Black Lives Matter and the response to this pandemic.
Because I think that what we've seen is the pandemic kind of Exposed the inequities that were there.
And I think Black Lives Matter is a much broader issue that's been going on longer, right?
Right.
The ACT UP AIDS and ACT UP was a more, like, I think a more specific issue, but still related to like this ongoing problem.
I mean, where it was illegal to be gay.
I mean, literally, like, even when I came out, even when I came out, it was literally illegal to be, to have gay sex.
Like it was, and I think people now, like young people, Young gay people don't even know that.
Like, I came out in a climate that was so different.
It was just like a world that was not there for me.
I mean, it was like I was a criminal for being gay.
So, and that's how it was for a long, long time.
time.
So I think the crisis of AIDS allowed I mean, unfortunately, at such a huge expense, but allowed at least the gay male community.
And I have to say, maybe the queer community in general to come together, because the other thing that gets ignored is actually the role of lesbians, to be honest, in ACT UP, which many, I think most of the leadership that I followed were women and were just so strong and really like stepped up to lead when I think so many gay men were just either Literally sick and dying or just overwhelmed.
Wow.
And that was, I don't hear that part of the story.
Like, I don't hear that about the women that led ACT UP.
You know, I don't.
Why, why is that lost?
Why do you think that's, that's not on?
I mean, I haven't really heard it either.
I mean, like Anne Northrup, I remember in New York, just blew my mind.
Like she, I mean, just some of these women, what's the other one?
There's a few of them.
And then in San Francisco, where I So like New York is where I kind of got exposed to these people.
I was kind of like learning from them.
But then in San Francisco, I was like doing it.
I was really involved.
And they're just amazing people that, I don't know, I just saw it as a political movement and really got connected and supported straight women too, actually.
Supported gay men who were in crisis, honestly.
Right.
So you're really talking about a solidarity movement too.
I think so.
I mean, it was extreme, and I see that now.
At the time, it seemed just like those are my friends, you know, but I realized that we were kind of On the edge.
Right.
All right.
Well, you know, I think you've noticed this trend that we on this podcast are calling conspirituality.
And it's this weird cocktail of right wing Doomer conspiracy theories about world domination and horrible things happening.
Sort of like, and there are anti-Semitic streams, there are white nationalist strains of it, but all of this stuff gets kind of like taken up or co-opted by New Age, alternative health, utopian type folks who crave a totally organic world and some form of transformation.
And, you know, some of the things that will be commonly said within this demographic is that, you know, the only virus is fear.
You know, these are folks that will reject masks and the dangers of vaccines, but they'll also say, you know, we have to collectively transcend this fear in order to raise consciousness.
So, like, what do you make of this stuff?
What do you feel when you hear this stuff?
And are you surprised at who it's coming from?
Yeah, I mean, yes, I'm surprised, but I'm not because I think It's kind of the, what do you call it, it's like the spiritual bypass on a grand scale, you know, like where you just want to, it's like you want to use spirituality to like create a world that you imagine in your mind or something or that you're, you know.
I think something that I'm pretty interested in is like what we're talking about, this intersection of real life And spirituality.
And that's like the opposite side.
You know, that's like where you have this fantasy world.
And I often think about the part that gets me is around karma.
You know, and it's like when someone has a disability or a chronic illness and people say, well, that's your karma that you created that.
Right.
It's like blaming someone for their own situation.
Well, going back into the AIDS crisis, that would have been the crudest, most horrible persecution.
Persecution of the AIDS sufferer would be to blame it on their sexuality or their behavior.
I don't know if you know what happened with Louise Hay.
So Louise Hay, who is that?
Do you know her?
I do.
I do know Louise Hay.
I do.
What are you going to tell me about Louise Hay?
Well, just that... She's like the Phyllis Schlafly of wellness, right?
Yeah, just that she got... I don't know what the word is.
highly criticized because she basically blamed AIDS on people with AIDS.
She basically said, "You have to think better.
You have to use positive thinking to cure yourselves." And it was just horrendous what she was saying.
Did they-- was there-- yeah.
I'm sorry that you had to hear that.
Like, but was there also, were there also weird metaphors around, you know, what you must be like if you have a compromised immune system and shit like that?
Like, what was there?
Yeah, I mean, she was, it's so funny because, like, the context was her, like, healing message.
Like, it was like she was trying to offer her, like, this is my, The way to heal from AIDS is to realize that it's all in your head.
And then you just have to think yourself out of it.
That's awesome.
Was this in a book or did she phone people up or was it at a conference?
I think it was at least in a talk she gave.
It may have been in a book as well.
It was a hot topic at the time because I was really working a lot in the yoga world Actually, Swami Satchidananda did almost the same thing.
So he was my teacher, and he gave a talk just during that time, and he said something like, you just need to have hope.
You just need to have hope.
But I mean, in the end, it was a little less poisonous message, because I think he's saying, you know, don't give up, you know, have hope, fine.
Like, that's not going to really hurt anyone to have hope.
But I think he wasn't telling people like, It's your fault, which is what Louise Hay was basically saying.
I was interested in those messages.
And hers was kind of the most famous one.
There were others too.
I mean, it was actually that time was really like the new age moment.
You know, that was... So were you, do you have a year for that, for Louise Hay's statement?
Are you talking mid 80s at this point?
Yeah.
And I'm just guessing.
I would say probably late 80s.
So this is also when her whole empire is actually taking off too, right?
Yeah, she was big.
Oh yeah, she was really big.
So people were asking her, I think.
Asking her for her advice, for her wisdom on it.
Okay, well here's the thing.
I suppose people were also asking Swami Satchidananda for his advice.
What is it about asking Celebrities are charismatics about whatever.
That seems to happen all the time.
Yeah.
And then we wind up in a world where, you know, the president is, I don't know, talking about drinking bleach or whatever, you know?
That's a good question.
Like, why do we even ask the president what he thinks?
Why is that even an issue?
Not just him, but I mean, generally, why do we ask any president what they think about treatments for COVID?
I mean, we should be asking them about policy and funding and, you know, and equality and so on.
Yeah, I don't know why.
I don't know what it is that we do.
But yeah, I think there was a lot of missteps with AIDS, to be honest.
Now, when you heard, when you and your friends heard the Hays message, what did you do?
Like, did you roll your eyes?
Did you curse at the radio?
Like, were you able to push back against that?
Did anybody address that in a newspaper, like in San Francisco kind of thing?
Probably.
I mean, honestly, I haven't thought about it in a long time, but I should probably look it up because I, I think in the end she, I think she actually, I could be wrong, but I think she really evolved.
Like I actually do think I should give her some credit.
I think she ended up working a lot with AIDS around the topic and teaching about it more.
Right.
But I believe there was a, quite a few years there was like this confusion.
Right.
I think it also, to me, what it felt like, I think at the time was just like, You know, not shocking at all, to be honest.
Like, literally, like, we're like, it was like living in a parallel universe.
Like, the experience I was having, because I was also volunteering at an AIDS hospice, and I was like, just, my life was surrounded by AIDS.
And then it would seem like there was this complete denial happening.
Right.
Barely mentioning it, barely talking about it.
When it was mentioned at all, it was just in this ridiculous, useless way.
Right.
And I suppose there can be an expectation what Hayes is saying in that moment isn't that far off from what you would hear from, you know, an evangelical Christian or anybody else who's, you know, perhaps she's not blaming the Sexual activity, but she's blaming something internal to the person.
You know, there's something wrong with the soul or one's, you know, capacity to, I don't know, to embody grace or whatever, however she would feel.
But it's really, it's a conservative message.
It is.
And I think it's kind of insidious, actually, because I think that Yeah, you're right.
The more religious conservatives were literally just saying, you're going to go to hell because you're gay, and this is your karma, basically.
In fact, literally, people were happy that AIDS was happening.
I mean, that was the environment we were living in.
It was like a question.
It wasn't even like, should we help people with AIDS?
It wasn't even like, we should let them die because they're sinners.
That's the environment this was all happening in.
Her message, I think, was much more palatable in a sense, but I think insidious because it does lead to kind of like this internal... Yeah, and it lets people who otherwise identify themselves as progressives off the hook, right?
Yeah, there you go.
Wow, that's an important thing you just said, because I think that's what all of this stuff kind of does.
I think that's what, to me, the people that are talking about that stuff, I think that's what they're trying to do.
Right.
It's like let people off the hook and not have to take responsibility for the society.
For death and dying all around them and racial inequality.
Yeah.
And I think that's it.
Exactly.
It's actually and that's what I feel really strongly about that spirituality is often used to insulate oneself.
Right.
Rather than to actually engage.
And I honestly, I think it's like the The death of yoga, you know, and the death of spirituality for me comes from that, that kind of like constant self-interest.
I mean, but you're so, you're such an interesting person because you didn't give up on yoga and you have your own guru giving you kind of a meh answer and then you have
The new age crowd that's actually the primary consumer base for yoga giving you total BS, which by the way is echoed into the present day because, you know, if Hayes says, you know, you just have to think more positively or something like that, it's no different from, you know, the wellness influencer today saying, you know, you're not going to get COVID if you actually take care of your immune system like you're supposed to, right?
So, so there's a, there's a, there's a continuity there, but.
Oh, it's infuriating.
Yeah.
But you know what?
I think, I mean, I think you're asking me like, how could I still be so invested in yoga considering how it's been used as a way of Like keeping people down.
Or at least it's proximal, it's mixed up with a whole bunch of like very individualistic and selfish agendas.
And I mean like I also just know you as a critic of yoga culture and but somehow you still make your, like me, you somehow you still make a living in it.
Yeah.
But yeah, how'd you stick it out?
Because I think, I mean, I don't teach yoga anymore in terms of classes or meditations.
You know, you do do that and you do great work there.
So how'd you stick it out?
I mean, that's a good question.
I don't know.
I think I actually I'm an activist, you know, so I think that in my heart, I'm still doing that.
I'm trying to make change.
Now, I guess it's more from the inside.
Right.
Kind of like we talked about with ACT UP, like there were people on the inside.
I do feel like I'm more on the inside of yoga now in some ways, but there's so much to do, like there's so much incorrect information and more than that, manipulation, I would say, in that Name of yoga and spirituality that just makes me crazy.
I think my work is, I'm trying to reframe the teachings and offer them in a different way.
And actually, I think in a way that's more authentic back to the tradition, whatever that is, the traditions.
I mean, there's a lot, but I think we could find, I mean, I'd say my passion is currently is like trying to prove people wrong by showing them another Another way of interpreting these teachings that is more oriented toward other, you know, and service.
Right.
Which I think is true.
I mean, I really believe that.
So I think I'm just...
I'm very passionate about it.
It's also oriented towards, like, what I would say from my experience of, you know, I've been to a little bit of your programming, is that it's oriented towards the public body instead of the private body.
Yeah.
And I mean, like, the little bit I know about disability politics and accessibility politics The mantra seems to be, this world we have to design for everybody.
And it's not like that right now.
And it's actually never been like that.
And so one of the things that your work has shown me is that without that understanding or without those politics, You know, yoga is profoundly ableist.
It's for people who are, it's for, it's for people who are already well.
And that is so not, that's so, that has so nothing to do, say it that way, with, with like public health or the common good.
So, so I don't know.
I mean, yeah.
I mean, well, you're welcome.
I mean, you just said it because it's like, I don't know.
Nowadays we can talk about white supremacy more, you know, we can talk openly about it and people know what that is and I think there's more awareness of it and how like racism is an obvious example but also ableism is another one.
Right.
And I feel like, to be honest, I think ableism is actually a worse or more dangerous component of modern yoga even than racism.
I mean, Not that you have to compare them, but I just think that ableism is at the core of the teaching that we're sharing right now.
Well, yeah.
I mean, I think I had a mind blowing moment a couple of years ago when I, when I just in a, just a little bit of your programming, I kind of saw that was that, was that like an entire wellness practice that's based upon the appearances of the body in particular, in particular shapes was that like an entire wellness practice that's based upon the appearances of the body in particular, in
And, and, and, and then you understand another angle of how modern postural yoga has always run hand in hand with, with various fascist ideas of the body and how, how one must be in order to be worthy or in order to be able to work or to how one must be in order to be worthy or in order to be able to work or to So yeah.
It's totally clear.
You walk into any yoga studio and you can absolutely see that there are racial disparities.
You can see that it's a white practice.
But it's actually harder to see that it's an ableist practice because that's what it is.
Because that's the basic thing.
Exactly.
That's what I was trying to get at.
I think the racism is more obvious.
The ableism is less so, and yet is so much a part of the way it's taught, and not yoga to me.
I mean, I think it's just not, you know, I think most of what's being taught as yoga isn't yoga.
It's just like, yeah, like you said, it's some body fascism or something.
I don't know what you said, but... Something like that.
Yeah, that sounds good.
Yeah, I mean, and health in general.
The concept of what is health, I mean, that's built on ableism, that we are working to some, like, idealized form.
And that comes out of my AIDS activism, because I just, being around people who were sick and losing so many people in my life at an early age, like, death is a great teacher.
And by the way, death is the connector for me between these two things, between Act Up and yoga.
I would just say that is the thread because Act Up taught me about death at a very young age.
I mean, in my early 20s, I was being confronted with death on a large scale.
And I was looking for an answer.
And, you know, honestly, yoga, I think the teachings really address it beautifully, you know, really look at not just reincarnation, but just The purpose of life and what does death really mean and the idea of some kind of essential self that is just very comforting, you know, when you're, when you're dealing with that stuff.
So it's like religion can never do that for me.
It was always homophobic or just, I don't know, it just seemed too conservative, but yoga came into my life in a way that was more, I could absorb those teachings.
Right.
You know, I mean, as you were speaking, I flashed on this.
You said something about health as being conceived within an ableist framework as almost transcendent or perfectible.
And I guess, you know, and you're also speaking about death, but I can hear in the story that you're telling that there's this entire other area of People who are ill, but they're okay, and they should be valued, or they are suffering, but that is their life and that is valuable.
And what I feel in the language of conspirituality is this utter contempt for people who get sick and it's psychologically projective in the sense that well that's not going to happen to me because you know I have I eat goji berries or whatever or I'm on a paleo diet but also it's like
The goal is some sort of radiance, instead of just being fucking okay, and being with other people who are also okay, but conjoined by suffering in a way.
Yeah, and not just okay, but being okay with the fact that the body is going to get sick and die, or maybe get sick, it might just die Without getting sick, but probably you'll get sick along the way.
And I think it's such a, it's such a denial of the reality of human life, you know, and, and being able to actually embrace the spectrum of human experience, which is illness.
Right.
And it's actually a basic tenet, even like in Buddhism, you know, how the Buddha like went out and saw like, he saw a sick person and an old person and a dead body.
And, you know, it's just like, that's his first like realization.
Right.
I think it's like, These people are denying that most basic realization of spirituality.
Right.
But the strange thing is, is many will say that they're not.
Many will say, many will say that, that, well, because, you know, we are, public health officials are, You know, are fraudulently imposing a lockdown, not only because they want to invoke social control, but also because they want us to be afraid.
And if we can transcend our fear of death, then we'll realize that we don't have to wear masks and we can have our green shakes forever.
So, there's a language of existential acceptance that doesn't ring true because it's not about caring for everybody, I guess.
Maybe that's what it is.
Well, there's also using fear.
It's about saying that that's something to be feared.
Right.
is fearful, and death is fearful.
And yes, it is.
That's true for most of us.
We have fear around it.
But I think, to be honest, I think that's what yoga and spiritual practice does, is it actually gets us more comfortable with that reality, more comfortable with the reality of illness, with disability, and with death.
And I mean, it's not like I don't struggle with those things myself.
Like, These days, you know, the last few months has been so interesting.
Like, oh, wait, am I getting sick?
Do I have COVID?
You know, like my, I go through this whole like paranoia, anxiety, and then I have to come back to, well, okay.
You know, that's, that's part of this human experience.
Like I need to just allow my body to be where it is right now.
And I think people are easily manipulated from that fear of illness, fear of disability and fear of death, because it's so Deep within us.
My point is that I think these teachings are there as a bomb for that, instead of we're manipulating people through it.
Now maybe, this might not be a comfortable question, so you can let me know, but I'm wondering if in your particular sector of the yoga world, if you're seeing conspiracy theories start to create social discord. - I've if you're seeing conspiracy theories start to create social discord. - I've seen it more around race Okay.
I think there is.
And of course, I've, you know, been more selective about who I follow and who I even listen to these days.
So I'm really not paying attention to so many people in the yoga world.
But I would say in the accessible yoga world, the issue is race, which is good.
I'm glad.
And that's exactly what we need to be talking about.
But within there, I see a lot of tension.
You know, a lot of white people who are just Struggling to just like, you know, get over themselves and admit to their racist tendencies and the fact that they are supporting a, you know, racist system.
Right.
And so much denial, which is a conspiracy, honestly.
You know what I mean?
Just like falling back into complacency and allowing that, those racist systems to continue to exist.
Is there, I mean, I'm thinking that because the demographic that you serve is perhaps more familiar with, you know, medical systems, public health, therapeutic needs, and all of that, that I'm wondering whether
The issue of confronting white supremacy becomes more sensible to folks when they realize that within the pandemic, or that the pandemic itself has exposed structural racism in stark terms.
Is that a doorway that you're seeing people walk through?
Is that, oh, I can see racism through medical healthcare now.
Yeah, I do.
I think there's been a lot of awareness around that.
I think the conspiracies around COVID take less of a hold in the accessible yoga world.
People with disabilities, many of them have been on lockdown for years already.
I know a bunch of people who don't leave their house anyway because of their disability or their chronic illness.
And that's the way their life is.
And they're totally adjusted to it.
They work from home or they don't work or whatever.
And everyone else is freaking out.
It's like, well, actually, we could learn from these people.
I've been doing it for a long time.
You know, I've seen a fair amount of social media commentary in that vein, and I find it really illuminating that, hey, we've actually been doing this for a long time, and we have good and valuable lives, and freedom does not mean what you think it means, actually.
But I would say around the race thing, it's been really positive.
I honestly, I feel like, so I'm just so Excited right now.
It feels like there's so much growth happening.
Right.
You know, it's like leaps and bounds that I'm seeing.
I mean, because I've had, I've had the opposite occur.
I mean, I've had, we had an incident at one of our accessible yoga conferences a few years ago that was just really disheartening where some white women felt attacked because they were told they were racist, you know, by a presenter who was a person of color.
And he just called them out and they just freaked out.
Right.
Talked about reverse racism and all this crap.
And then, you know, it became, it was a really uncomfortable scene.
Right.
And that woke me up to the fact that the disability community needed to do more work around anti-racism because it's such an intersectional group.
The disability community isn't really a community.
It's just, it's like a cross section of everyone.
You know, everyone will get sick and die, like I say.
So it's really an incredibly diverse group and not organized.
Right.
Like, I think maybe you've heard me say this.
It's the largest minority group in the world.
Right.
People with disabilities.
But like, how much power do they have, really?
Like, it's like a completely disorganized group.
But actually, I think there's so much racism there, at least on the part of the white people.
So in the U.S., I can speak for them.
And so Since then, we've shifted our conferences to really try and highlight that and bring in more presenters of color and address racism at our conferences and try to have those conversations.
So it's just so good now to see that happening more.
That's awesome.
You know, the last question I have is, you know, the testing and medical side of ACT UP, as you're explaining to me, really has done as you're explaining to me, really has done a lot to coordinate its efforts with, you know, the research facilities and the public health officials who are
you know, the research facilities and the public health officials who are looking for the vaccine.
And you know, I don't know how that's progressing with regard to HIV/AIDS, but it's being worked And now we have this shadow of the need for a vaccine in relation to this global pandemic.
Opposition to it is rising from a number of political angles, a lot of them converging around conspirituality.
And so, how are you going to continue to support good public health choices while also being how are you going to continue to support good public health choices while also being a Like, how do those two things work now?
Because there's such an opposition, there's such an antipathy within a large demographic towards, you know, the kind of medicine that is actually required For people's lives to be saved.
I mean, I hope there's a vaccine.
I'd be happy to take one.
I'd be happy to encourage others to do so.
Because to me, that is exactly the kind of service that yoga is about.
Being vaccinated is a service to others.
And I think the Anti-vax movement is selfish, honestly.
I mean, it's just a selfishness to want to protect your body at the expense of the public body, like you mentioned earlier, you know, at the expense of others.
And I think that we've seen that.
And AIDS is an example of where I wish there was a vaccine.
I mean, it's 30 years on.
I know.
No vaccine, no cure.
Which by the way, I feel like people with COVID need to kind of just wake up to that a bit and realize the timeline.
People are like, when's there going to be a vaccine?
It's like, you know, I even read today, oh, we'll have one by the end of the year.
And I was just like, that's really, I mean.
Yeah.
So when you heard, when you heard like back in April, they were saying, well, eight, you know, 12 to 18 months, that'll be really fast.
You must have laughed.
You must have laughed.
It is laughable.
I mean, it's possible because in a way it just shows me though, The fact that so much more could have been done for AIDS, you know, that if I realize it's a different vaccine, I mean, I mean, I'm a different virus.
So I don't understand the science enough to say, well, maybe it is more difficult to make a vaccine for HIV than it is for COVID.
But obviously, because of the nature of this pandemic, There's a lot more attention and a lot more work happening behind the scenes to create a vaccine.
And I think if that level of care had gone into addressing HIV, we would have seen some real progress by now.
And by the way, HIV is still An epidemic.
There are, I believe, something around 5,000 people get infected each day.
What?
Really?
It is still in the top 10 killers in the world.
Oh, 5,000 in the U.S.
or?
In the world.
And this is much more happening in Africa and countries that don't have access to some of the basic things we take for granted.
I don't I mean, I don't know why it's happening exactly.
But it's devastating to me.
I mean, I was, I was shocked to see that was still the case, that it's still one of the top killers in the world and there's barely any attention going.
I mean, I know there are researchers working on HIV AIDS still, so it's not that there isn't any, but I just, it's nothing like what we're seeing with COVID.
So yeah, I would just say vaccines, I mean, we'd be lucky to get a vaccine.
You know what I mean?
You're lucky to get a vaccine.
You're lucky to take it, you know, and to put your, your, yeah, to put yourself first, It's upsetting to me.
It really is.
It's heartbreaking.
And it's not spiritual.
Yeah.
Well, Jeevana, thank you so much for your time.
I'm really like, I'm really aggrieved to hear, this is a couple of times now I've heard just a little bit of your early ACT UP experience and how you were surrounded by dying friends.
And I'm so sorry that you had to watch that happen.
And this is not a lemonade statement, but in a way, I'm really glad that you're able to communicate that, what that's like and what it means.
And you've been able to bring that into the yoga world because I just don't hear that in many other ways, not in such a direct fashion.
Like many of the anti-racist activists are speaking directly to this convergence between spirituality and justice.
But I'm really grateful that you're able to do that, and thank you for taking the time.
Yeah, thank you.
I always appreciate your perspective.
You always help me see things clearly.
And I really do appreciate that.
So thank you.
Thanks for having me.
In our lifetime, it was illegal to be gay.
Just being reminded about that, can you imagine the trauma that that wages on this community?
It's sort of like civil rights in the sense that I was born just after And yes, I'm experiencing the consequences and we're reliving so many aspects of it, but it always has some distance.
But in my lifetime, in all of our lifetimes, it was illegal to be gay.
Fascinating, or just frightening, both.
But the thing that jumped out to me the most in that interview was when he's discussing the vaccine for, you know, how quickly the vaccine is being developed now.
And we think that, you know, this is really the first time on a planetary level that all the researchers in the world are working on one vaccine.
But then to point out it's specifically because it is a disease, a virus that no one is immune to.
And I realize that that is such a big part of what's playing into all of these COVID-19 conspiracy theories is that, specific to Americans, is that Americans, and in this case, a lot of middle to upper class white people, they cannot believe it's actually happening to them.
Disease has been used throughout history, at least since nation-states started forming, as a signifier that that person is dirty or that person is diseased, they're sick.
And the idea that Americans are now realizing that they're not invulnerable or they're not invincible And that actually they can be one of the diseased.
I really think that that's a big part of why all of these conspiracies are popping up right now.
Yeah, Matthew, one thing that jumped out at me, I actually wrote it down because I thought it was such a great passage.
You had a moment where you said, public health officials are fraudulently imposing a lockdown, not only because they want to impose social control, but also because they want us to be afraid.
And if we can transcend our fear of death, then we'll realize that we don't need to wear masks and we can have our green drinks forever.
I just thought that was absolutely great.
Yeah, and also just I think really poignant in conversation with somebody who has lived their life in the shadow of like an unsolvable medical mystery and lived in a culture parallel to that that has been interested in supportive care or in alternative health care and also realizes very clearly its limitations.
It's like there's an incredible reality check principle going on with the history of AIDS activism projected into the current time that I was just really happy to be able to talk with Jivna about.
Yeah, you picked up on a thread from last time as well, maybe last time or the time before, just about Louise Hay.
And it was really interesting to hear his reflections about what was happening in that actual time period.
And in line with what you were saying earlier today about that empathy, just the realization that for these gay people in the face of this absolutely awful plague and the incredible shaming that was going on, A, to have someone who came along and was giving this sort of empathic seeming message that if you would just love yourself enough, then that would hopefully cure AIDS, right?
Or supposedly cure AIDS.
And also that in that time where there wasn't really a medical answer, it makes perfect sense that people would go in search of whatever they could find.
You know, when I had Lyme disease, I tried every possible cure you can imagine, and I'm the biggest, at this point in my life, I'm the biggest alternative medicine skeptic you could come across.
I drank a serum that claimed to be made of crocodile blood, because crocodile have this incredible immune... I mean, I did everything.
Who knows what works?
I have a feeling it was the antibiotics, but... You did everything?
You were desperate?
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I also really loved how, what a different way that he expresses death as compared to the corona is a hoax crowd, which we were talking before about coronavirus is a hoax crowd.
We were talking about Mickey Willis's expression and the way that he expresses it, being in the trenches, working in the hospices in the late 80s and 90s.
late 80s and 90s and i also the pointing out that the buddha the buddha who was born a prince and his father tried to shield him in this commune that he got everything he wanted and his first realization is seeing someone sick and then someone dying and that led to the spiritual practice i i
So just a wonderful and important way of framing it because that again is something that we're missing that information right now in this yoga and wellness community about where the roots of our practice lies.
Yeah, and it makes his story really archetypal because it also comes in the framework of, you know, I was going to San Francisco to live my life and to come out and to celebrate myself, my sexuality, my identity, and I found myself, you know, at ground zero.
And to spend, like, I'm not quite sure on the timeline as to where he becomes ordained as a minister in integral yoga, but it's on that arc where, in a way, he does enter this pathway through the hospice of he does enter this pathway through the hospice of his generation and is able to see clearly somehow how public health and, you know, personal wellness and spiritual practice
personal wellness and spiritual practice can actually be coordinated in ways that have integrity and ways Absolutely, yeah.
Before we leave, Jeevan, I've posted in the show notes a tribute to his work that I was able to give at one of his events here in Toronto, actually.
And just to sum it up, I think what is most valuable about his instruction in accessible yoga, which is basically I mean, the bottom line is that he says that as a fitness practice, modern postural yoga is basically a series of ritual worship postures to ableism.
It's every single sequence, every single People do modifications and they have props and stuff like that.
But for the most part, there's a sense of moral and spiritual virtue that's attributed to being able to do things with your body.
Like you are given a kind of spiritual attitude or value according to your capacity to move in certain ways.
And I didn't really get it until I was in a class with him and he said, Let's imagine what tree pose would look like if you had to be in your bed.
And so I lay down on the floor and I I crooked one leg up, as I would in tree posture, as if I was standing, and immediately I thought of myself as either disabled or dying, and I realized that tree posture was not something that I would accomplish
through some sort of physical feat of balance or what have you, or muscular control, but that it was some kind of internal gift, some sort of poetic image that I could feel internally, regardless of what my body was or could do or
And, I don't know, it was a really life-changing moment to recognize that I had attributed so much value to my physical activities and my capacities, when really, whatever yoga is, it really should, as he says, be accessible to anybody in any state of waking life.
So, I just wanted to end with that.
make sure that that wasn't missed.
Growing up overweight and with big ears is not fun.
Bowling was common in the Jersey suburbs in the 80s, and for many years I was the victim.
It wasn't a constant affair.
I had plenty of friends and I incessantly played sports throughout my life.
But young boys sometimes need to assert their dominance.
And whether it was through friends or kids I didn't like all that much, I was a regular target.
I entered high school around 5'4", but by my sophomore year, I was 6 feet tall.
I kept growing throughout college, ending up around 6'3".
I didn't really lose weight, I just stretched out.
But people's perceptions changed.
And even though I spent most of high school and all of college with a different body, I never forgot how people treated me when I was young.
It imprinted.
And this resulted in recurrent bouts of orthorexia in my 20s and early 30s.
Orthorexia is an eating disorder where you obsess over certain foods and eliminate entire categories of foods deemed to be toxic or which you fear might cause you to gain weight.
I've worked through that, though I can't say my body image has ever been great, even though I've weighed roughly the same within a 10-pound range since 1997.
I attribute this to my chronic need for exercise, which is another result of my early obesity.
It's a good habit, but I do know where the roots are buried.
This is how I started working in fitness in the first place.
I began teaching yoga in early 2004.
By the end of that year, I was hired by Equinox, where I taught until the start of this pandemic, and may return to if gyms are even a thing in the near future.
Based on my teaching load, I've taught between 7,000 to 8,000 group fitness classes, mostly yoga, but also cycling and kettlebells, martial arts and dance, a wide range of movement.
In those classes, I've seen every body type and capability imaginable.
And being a social person, I've talked to many people about their feelings and their insecurities about their bodies.
I've known people like myself who are quite strong, but will never be on a magazine cover.
And I know people that have been on magazine covers, but aren't actually that strong.
Aesthetics, strength, flexibility, and mobility are all separate categories that don't always intersect.
But as a culture, we've deemed aesthetics to be king.
Personally, I'll choose mobility every time.
But not only have we chosen to elevate physical form, a large portion of the wellness community champions inner form as well.
And the vehicle they do this with is the immune system.
And in her book, On Immunity, and thank you to Matthew for introducing me to this wonderful book, the writer Eula Biss quotes physician Michael Fitzpatrick, who says the term immune system has always been a metaphor.
And in reality, your entire body is an immune system.
It's not like the central nervous system or the endocrine system, which has clearly defined organs or tissues, which is how a system is medically defined.
This quotes Fitzpatrick.
Though the term was borrowed from the science of immunology, its new meaning was filled out with ideas derived from influential contemporary trends, notably environmentalism, alternative health, and New Age mysticism.
Biss also writes that invoking the immune system has worked like a talisman that shields us from our vulnerabilities.
For years, I had this idea that meat is toxic, which during my two years of veganism, which was wedged inside of my 20 years of vegetarianism, was something that I believed.
But then I read evidence from Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology by Daniel Lieberman and Richard Wrangham that shows that meat is how we became human.
Now, you can argue about the horrors of factory farming, and I'm right with you, but meat is toxic is the mindset that led to cancel culture, rewriting history to try to make it match current standards.
You need to know where we came from if you want to evolve, and you cannot deny the validity of the past just because you don't like it.
You can change it, but you first have to understand it.
I've spent a long time in this wellness industry.
While I tend to teach a very dynamic, physical form of yoga, I've studied and practiced a lot of styles, and I've been in countless classes where we meditated or chanted for the freedom of all beings.
It's a beautiful sentiment in a yoga studio in America.
But when things got rough, I watched members of the same community, those that sing the Gayatri Mantra and subscribe to the Bodhisattva vow, start to immune shame people that are susceptible to this coronavirus.
And it transported me right back to my youth when I was harassed because my body did not look like the body of my peers.
It's okay to feel vulnerable.
It's a healthy part of being human.
Joseph Campbell, as Julian said, friend of the podcast, used to say that the hero finds their path through their wound.
And that certainly happened to me in the world of fitness and in health in general.
And it's important to recognize that we do have an obesity problem in this country.
We have a food problem and we have an economic inequality problem.
And all of these contribute to our immune system because your immune system is you and you are part of the environment.
Health is never just an individual matter.
That's a point this makes.
It's not just your immune system.
We share one collectively.
And I wish these healers and yoga teachers and wellness advocates would understand that.
If someone is drowning, you don't yell at them for not being a stronger swimmer.
You reach out a hand and you help.
Thank you for listening to Conspirituality.
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