Can yoga bring hostages home? No. Can yoga stop a genocide? Also no. But this won’t stop earnest practitioners from instrumentalizing practice for both purposes.
For supporters of Israel, practice is dedicated to the protection of land, the return of hostages, and to uphold the spiritual valor of soldiers. Among supporters of Palestine and a ceasefire, yoga practice and community is an organizing principle for decrying genocide, building mutual aid, and resisting global colonialism. Both factions cite the Bhagavad Gita.
Does yoga support nationalistic violence and body fascism? Isn’t that where its modern origins lie? Or does it have deeper, intersectional roots in universal liberation?
The interpretive war, articulated and inflamed online, only accelerates the material war.
But there is a third space we examine today: the gap between how spiritual aspirations appear and are praised or condemned in the world of the spectacle, and how they play out in the flesh.
Show Notes
Tel Aviv Yoga Event
About : Israeli hostages taken by Hamas
We Are Still Standing handstand event
Carmel Gat | Yoga in captivity
Taken captive: Carmel Gat, seen doing yoga with hostage children
Initial Twitter posting of Alfie's yoga class in Gaza
Reserve combat engineer practices yoga with soldiers in a house in Gaza
IG post | criticism of Yoga Journal cover
In Israel, Chanting 'Om' Between Missiles
What does Israel's rescue of 4 captives, and the killing of 274 Palestinians, mean for truce talks?
AP: Calculating death numbers in Gaza
Sarah Martin Little Rock yoga benefit event
Rasha Madkour fundraiser for The Longhorn Muslim Alumni Network
UK yoga event for the Palestine Children's Relief Fund
Hot Yoga Glasgow yogathon for the International Rescue Committee
A look inside the growing Pro-Palestine student solidarity encampment at UCSB
Pro-Palestinian Demonstrators At USC Join Camp-In Movement On Heels Of Valedictorian Controversy
Sheena Sood's Yoga for Palestine series at Bhakti Yoga Movement in Portland
50. Sellouts & Zealots (w/Sheena Sood)
Samson's Foxes insignia
Reserve combat engineer practices yoga with soldiers in a house in Gaza
The Dangerous History Behind Netanyahu’s Amalek Rhetoric
Dark Mirror: A Torah View of Revenge, and its Reflection in Israeli Media During Operation Iron Swords
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
When we think about liberation movements, we tend to think about if the liberation movement were to win, everyone would be more free and equal.
And part of what's really tricky in this part of the world is that some of what might be viewed as a liberation movement, in this case against Israeli occupation and aggression, were they to win.
women and gay people would not be more free. They would have actually a harder life than
they have in Israel for the most part. Yeah, and so the question is, well, what do the
rest of us do to support them? Yeah, absolutely. Hello everyone.
Welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
And we are on Instagram and threads at ConspiratualityPod.
And you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
Thank you.
Yoga for Israel.
Let's start with some basics for new listeners.
It's not news that among the wellness disciplines that have emerged over the past century, yoga has never simply been about deep breathing and stretching or mental focus or peace of mind.
Even if these benefits are key words in the upfront sales pitch, going all in, and especially becoming a teacher, Usually means attaching an array of other meanings to postures, flowing movements, and the sensations of meditation.
Why?
The physical tools are marketed with a thin veneer of ancient philosophy.
The postures carry oriental names, rich with symbolism, and the physical rationale for doing them is so vague, they cry out for spiritual and cultural purpose.
Yoga is ostensibly non-competitive and for everyone.
And that means it can be instrumentalized in any direction, toward any goal, in a discourse that can eventually wind up expressing the whole of a person's life and commitments.
You start with a casual prenatal yoga class because you need some gentle exercise and relaxation.
And before long, you get a sales pitch for a retreat in which you'll learn to transform the world through the magic of the divine feminine.
You want to treat your back pain without medication and you wind up with one foot in an all-organic anti-vax pipeline.
You want to sit and breathe with people in community because you're lonely and the world is on fire with war and at the end of the class, the teacher reads out of the Bhagavad Gita.
As you listen, you're not quite sure if the book is justifying violence or encouraging peace, but the teacher is very impassioned and you know you're supposed to dedicate yourself fully to some intention.
That's the general background for the subject today.
How members of this core professionalized yoga world are responding to the war in Gaza by organizing and practicing within one of two streams of logic and political commitment.
For supporters of Israel, practice is dedicated to the protection of land and heritage and the spiritual valor of soldiers.
Among supporters of Palestine and a ceasefire, yoga practice and community is an organizing principle for decrying genocide and building mutual aid.
Yeah, very well said, Julian.
I've spent about a month looking at how these opposing applications shake out because I think it gets to the heart of one of our core themes over the past four years, which is that the politics of yoga and alternative spirituality are moving targets.
The cultural assumption, dating back to the hippie era, is that yoga embodies a liberal left or progressive politics.
But then this assumption is shaken by any cursory glance at the history of the modern yoga movement, which has been dominated by authoritarian charismatics who got their start in the nationalist blood and soil physical culture of the 1930s.
And that means that questions about why the IDF incorporates yoga into its military culture versus why opponents of Israel's military actions utilize yoga to build resilience in their anti-war activism, these are not mysteries.
So, I've organized this discussion into three parts.
So, yoga for Israel, yoga for Gaza, and then yoga online and off.
And that third part will get into some new territory, at least for me, in that space between how people form polarized positions online versus how people on the ground, in their individual experiences, engage with their spiritual ideals.
And, you know, just to clarify from the top, We study the instrumentalizations of yoga and wellness.
We're not political scientists or historians of the Middle East, so a lot of our discussion today is going to be parallel to the actual nuts and bolts, the bullets and bombs, if you will, of what is happening in this terrible war of atrocious attacks and genocidal responses.
Yeah, and while the three of us have perhaps some differences in terms of how we perceive the historical, political, and religious complexities, Like most of the world, we want the atrocities to stop and for there to be some kind of workable solution for coexistence.
But really, today's episode, Matthew, will be about the multiple interviews you've done and the exploration of perspectives you've been examining and thinking about.
Yeah, the value of examining the weirdness of yoga and spirituality in relation to this or any tragedy
is not in figuring out how to end a war, but in learning more about how people's inner lives
either support or distort their politics, especially when they feel like they have
a very small amount of political power, or how their politics are seen by others
who cannot see their inner lives, especially online where differences erupt into enmities,
where miscommunication plus stress cashes out in conspiracy theorizing,
and where opportunities for understanding each other and to just chill the fuck out are just too often lost.
And I'm also gonna note that this is one story among others in this vein that I'm working on,
such as how religious moderates in the region can use their spiritual heritage to resist the extremism
and conspiracism of their fellow believers.
Part 1. Yoga for Israel.
trail.
Back on November 11th, Instagram lit up with images from an event that had some familiar echoes.
Hundreds of yoga practitioners, almost all of them women, dressed identically, moving fluidly and somberly through sun salutations, filmed from above by drone and on the ground with gliding steadicam shots, while this Hit Instagram real music we're hearing from Ludovico Einaudi plays.
It's the one with the soaring violin chorus.
You know, I think everybody knows the feeling.
Yeah, so I mean, this is really easy to critique both in terms of the performative aesthetics and the style of yoga activism that is about implying that by doing yoga, perhaps in large groups, we exert some almost magical influence on the world through the power of intention.
It also answers the burning question on everyone's mind, which is what are the yoga people think about?
Yeah, right.
But, I mean, that aside, on a more empathic level, these are people who live somewhere that just went through an extremely terrifying event.
This is part of how they're coming together in community to deal with the trauma and hold a kind of vigil for hostages about whom they are very worried.
Yeah, and you're jumping ahead a little bit because, yes, this is the double reality that we're really looking at in this episode.
We have critical eyes, and with this particular moment, we're going to see how that criticism rained down.
But we also have empathetic eyes, and I think the whole world is looking at public performances like this while also sussing out the private feelings of the performers.
And this is happening all the time, and I think it's very confusing.
So, we've seen dramatic scenes like the one on the Tel Aviv dock before.
The Aloe Athleisure Wear Company started hosting and filming outdoor yoga events in this precise style about, you know, maybe a number of years ago, five, six years ago, to advertise their yoga lines.
And those events would feature hundreds of people.
Almost all of them women, arranged in neat rows in some central urban public space, all wearing white togs.
And these events played on themes of cultural cohesion and shared values, wrapped up in the uniform sleekness of stretch fabric and a shared intention.
Oh God, I think I know where you're going here.
Well, it echoed this older, more politicized aesthetic, I think, it's fair to say, in which mass displays of yoga-influenced physical culture, you know, where there are sun salutes and static poses intermingled with calisthenics and harmonial dance.
were central to nationalist expressions of domestic vitality and purity.
So many northern European nations engaged in these rousing events in the interwar period, and they met their zenith in the art of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, as directed and filmed by Leni Riefenstahl.
And today, the International Day of Yoga, which is the brainchild of the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, And then it was adopted by the UN in 2014, carries many of these themes forward as his alternative health ministry stages an annual yoga display performed by tens of thousands wearing government-issued t-shirts on the Grand Central Boulevard in New Delhi.
And often Modi himself is leading the class looking limber and hearty for his 73 years.
It's just so emblematic, right, of all of these strange mirror world inversions.
where because it's India and because it's yoga, there can be the sense of like,
oh, it's somehow represents a transcendent unifying principle coming out of mother India.
And here is yoga, which is just great for everyone.
And so it is somehow politically neutral according to the UN in 2014, at least.
Right, right.
Maybe they've gotten a little more savvy.
And you know, we have to be careful because people will often say to us, oh, here they come again, the conspirituality guys saying yoga is fascism and everyone who is involved in spirituality is a Nazi or if you're a vegan, you're actually like a puritanical awful person who wants to do ethnic cleansing or something.
But questions of how cultural aesthetics and patriotism can give cover to the worst impulses of ultra nationalism,
I think are very salient.
And I'm also really struck by that sense of like, in those times, like if we go back to the 30s,
I would imagine that a lot of the ordinary people in those countries were participating
in what they thought were really wholesome displays of ethnic pride and sort of cultural,
you know, aesthetic appreciation.
Right, and I think that's where we're gonna land, actually, that increasingly, we live in a spectacle machine in which all emotive group activities, if you stare at them for long enough, begin to hint at fascism, regardless of what the people involved are feeling or thinking.
I think we actually do this with a lot of circumstances.
We do it with MAGA rally people, even if the event organizers are clearly manipulating them and abusing their time and their money and leaving them stranded in airfields.
So anyway, back to November 11th.
The scene is this beautiful wooden boardwalk on a pier in Old Tel Aviv.
The women are wearing black yoga wear.
It's not all adults.
The camera finds at least one girl who's maybe 10 years old in the dozens of neat lines.
But what stands out most is at the top of each mat, right between where your hands would go for the sun salute, is an 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper, color printed with a portrait of one of the Israeli hostages taken during the attack on October the 7th.
And we first see these images from a high drone shot above, and this is reminiscent, the drone shot is, of the Allo event films from years before.
Incidentally, one of the organizing yoga teachers for this event is an Allo Pro representative.
And the reel ends with a montage of several participants resolving to namaste with their hands folded over their assigned portrait, which is pinned to their tops.
And then there's a card flashed for the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which is a non-profit that was spun up by hostage families in the days after the atrocity, in which Hamas militants killed over 1,200 people, most of them civilians.
Now, this wasn't the first yoga-themed public event on behalf of the hostages.
The videographer on the pier that day, his name is Ben Azoulay, and he had previously shot a We Are Still Standing Bring Them Home event in Tel Aviv, where over 140 yoga fitness types, I think more equally men and women in that event, arranged themselves into a Star of David, again viewed from above by drone.
And they all stood on their hands in a handstand for the photo op.
So we're still standing, but we're standing on our hands.
And they too had portraits pinned to their tops, but they had to be upside down so that when the Steadicam shot rolled by them in a handstand position, they appeared right side up.
And that event was supported by Israeli wellness influencer Danit Greenberg, who is like a fiercely pro-Israel war hawk, who has a half million followers on IG.
So it got a fair amount of coverage.
Yeah, it's so tough because to me, you know, people who are in these various situations, it's the water they're swimming in, right?
And they're responding to something that is happening in their world, to their communities, to their friends, their families.
This is how they're dealing with it.
And I have some leeway for that.
And yeah, I think, you know, not to say both sides, but I will say both sides.
On both sides, there are going to be reactions and ways of trying to deal with impossible suffering and fear and anguish.
And that's completely understandable.
Yeah, and I think a lot of what we're talking about today is like, how do we respond to those responses?
Now, similar but more low-key events have continued.
Like, there's an ongoing Free the Hostages yoga class every Friday morning in Hostages Square in downtown Tel Aviv.
And then there have been satellite events around the world in the Jewish diaspora with several focused on the health and well-being of a hostage named Carmel Gott, who's an occupational therapist.
She was kidnapped from Kibbutz Berri, where Hamas militants killed
close to a hundred civilians on that day.
And the hostages since released have reported that Carmel leads children through yoga classes
while in captivity.
Now, here's how Mikhal Cohen, one of the organizers of the Tel Aviv event,
described the event in her Instagram post.
Unity is what yoga is all about.
Uniting people, uniting body and soul, uniting the world.
A group of 243 Israeli yoga teachers came together to practice the sun salutation and bless life.
The sun is our source of light, positivity and health.
Movement is the way we choose to express our prayers to the world.
Prayers that all the hostages come back.
The kidnapped little girl.
The teenager.
The baby.
The soldier.
The mother and father.
Grandmother and grandfather.
That all of them come back.
Bring them back home.
Now.
We are all one.
We are the sun.
So very earnest, very heartfelt.
I also think we can hear how that might be read and received in the worst possible way.
And so it was.
And I reached out to Michal and Ben, the videographer, and another organizer for comment, and no one got back to me.
I wanted to know whether the number of yoga teachers was meant to reflect the number of hostages, you know, one-to-one, because that 243 number seems to line up.
And I also wanted to ask about how they felt about the flood of criticism that poured in from around the world.
And I think I would have asked them what they felt about how the IDF's attempts to rescue hostages had worked out so far.
So, going to the comments, here are the first two out of 2,700-plus mostly negative comments on Mikhal's post.
Which, unlike many of the other original posts, drew a lot of English language users, so this is a factor too.
And really, I have to give some props here to Mikhail for leaving these up, because people are not mincing words.
Julian?
The privilege of security looks like this.
The privilege of calling family home because your home still exists looks like this.
The privilege to gather and not be bombed again and again looks like this.
This is not practicing yoga.
This is using it.
Yeah, and then there's this one.
Wow.
This is insulting to the practice of yoga and what it actually means.
If they're using sun salutations to also stop the genocide in Gaza, They are great yoga teachers.
However, turning a blind eye to innocent Palestinians being murdered every day by Israel is extremely insulting to the practice of yoga.
Each one of these teachers needs to refresh their memory on what yoga actually represents by reading the Bhagavad Gita.
However, I wouldn't be shocked if none of them have actually read it.
Please refrain from insulting India's ancient practice of yoga with supporting genocide.
There is a lot going on in this comment, and I think we knew that the Bhagavad Gita was going to come up, and I know we have a lot of thoughts on how many ways the Gita can be and has been read, and the gaps between its historical origins and its modern usages.
In a lot of ways, I think it's good to take a moment here because the confusion around this book exemplifies the complexity of the topic today.
Oh yeah, I mean this is really key for me in terms of how metaphysics gets unironically claimed on both sides of the political spectrum as a spiritual justification.
And to me, that's always going to be built on quicksand.
Both because closer inspection doesn't always support the culture-bound foundational intuitions many people have about these so-called scriptures and the true meaning of religion.
And because quotes from those scriptures aren't automatically wise or true statements about
the world, because they're just books.
In terms of the Bhagavad Gita, I mean, the story is actually a dialogue in which a squeamish
prince is told by a deity to do his unavoidable karmic and dharmic spiritual duty, which is
to go to war with his cousins, and to hold in the back of his mind the spiritual truth
that the world, the battlefield, and indeed death and killing themselves are really an
Yeah, and the thing about the cousins really hits hard when we're talking about Israel and Palestine, right?
And I think you're being a little gentle here on how chilling the scripture is, because Krishna says emphatically that if Arjuna kills his cousins while in an entranced devotion to God, he will not sin, because he will have realized that they're not really bodies anyway, and that if he doesn't show some manhood and go for it, well, he's no better than a eunuch.
Yeah, I mean, you know me, I try to take the gentle interpretation of most religious texts.
As with all of them, there's some debate whether the war being referred to as allegorical, you know, a metaphor for the inner struggle to be a good person, or if it's literal.
But as you just forcefully pointed out, thank you Matthew, the text is explicit, the topic is literal, this story is a religious justification for doing one's divinely ordained duty as a member of the Kshatriya or warrior class within a culture, or warrior caste I should say, within a culture that sees social status as an output actually of past life karma.
So it's unavoidable.
Yeah, and that politics have been complex within India for generations because a key part of Krishna's argument is that if Arjuna doesn't seize righteous control of the empire, the divine order of the castes will fall apart.
Like, people will get out of their place.
Also, very, very much apropos to, you know, the subject of the Middle East.
Lower-born people will mingle with the higher-born.
And this is why the Marxist and Bedkarite movement in India, which aligned with Buddhism, held the Gita up as evidence of justified caste oppression.
Yeah, to me, the contextual cultural details make abstracting it too much of a stretch.
It's kind of like laundering, and you do see people try to do this.
All the time!
Sadly, I think spiritual warriors, both in the IDF and in Hamas, can defensibly weaponize the Bhagavad Gita to their own needs, just as they can other ancient texts that preach holy war.
It's much more difficult to claim that reading them correctly just leads to peace and love, man.
Back to the Instagram spectacle on the Tel Aviv Pier.
You know, invoking the Gita is a little shaky.
However, the more general critique of privilege and perhaps spiritual bypassing and partisan spirituality used to support a You know, nationalist state war effort will find a huge target of criticism here, and I think that makes sense given people's social feeds.
Because you just can't juxtapose aspirational or utopian imagery with those violins in the background against many, many more images of rubble and crushed children without provoking intense rage.
And when that happens, all of the contradictions and supposed hypocrisies will be excavated by the online world and spotlighted with critics pointing out how deeply ingrained yoga is in the military culture of Israel, and in the U.S.
military as well, and how it functions to launder the violence.
That's how the argument goes.
So I've got two examples of this that came up in the immediate sort of wake of this yoga activism on both sides of this equation in the fall.
Actually, this one came in January where Photos began circulating of a guy named Achia Alfie who's a 28 year old reserve combat engineer who is leading a class for fellow soldiers in an occupied Palestinian house or apartment in Gaza.
Now the photographs are really eerie.
Six young men have rolled out their olive green army bedding to use as yoga mats on the tiled floor in front of Atiyah, who leads the class at the front, and they all look like reservists.
They're young, they're definitely not buff or battle-hardened, and this is a reminder of the Israeli draft that draws in everyone.
The furniture has been cleared out of the room.
There are sleeping mats, maybe from the evicted or possibly dead residents, that are piled up in the corner.
And the room is mostly undamaged, except that the occupiers have spray-painted graffiti high up on each of the three visible walls.
And I ran the Hebrew characters by an Israeli listener to translate, and I learned that the markings spell out the cardinal directions.
And so I would speculate that this is just a protocol for an occupied space so that personnel are alert to where any explosions might be coming from.
Now, there's a lot going on in these images.
You'll get them in the notes, and they predictably provoke some very strong responses in the comments, such as... Is this before or after they butchered children?
It seems very relaxing to steal a house and then practice yoga in it.
I mean, yeah, this is very dark all around.
When I first started hearing you read the description, Matthew, and that's actually a pretty fair comment.
I feel like we're entering new territory here, right?
Because one of the things I wanted to say earlier is the reality of what happened on October 7th is that many of those kibbutz attacks, the people who were attacked in those kibbutzes were progressive.
They were peace activists, right?
Totally.
Who practiced a lot of yoga, actually.
Yes.
And so for them, it is like, yes, yoga is one of the ways that we engage in our particular worldview and belief system and spiritual yearning for peace and unity.
Now we're in a completely different territory because we're talking about an occupied dwelling that people have been kicked out of.
And here are these these Israeli soldiers practicing yoga.
It's very weird.
Yeah, well, okay, so that story gets unpacked a little bit in part three, so hang on for that.
The second example I have is in a similar vein, which is that several anti-war accounts dug up a yoga journal cover from November of 2018 depicting a female soldier in king pigeon pose beside a tranquil lake in full fatigues.
One critical caption read as follows, The IDF slash IOF teaches yoga to its murderers.
And then we have a barfing emoji.
Hindutva fascists use yoga to beat other castes and minorities into submission.
Our ancestors' sacred medicines weaponized for empire.
So we have a supercharged reaction economy, and critics begin to paint a nauseating picture of smug privilege and cruelty.
And it's a nausea that makes a kind of prophetic sense.
Because, you know, to be honest, the critical comments on Mikhail Cohen's video certainly aged better than the video did.
And as we saw on June 8th, bringing the hostages back can be its own horror.
You know, that's the day that the IDF, supported by U.S.
intelligence services, rescued four captives, but then killed over 270 Palestinians in the operation, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
Some of the dead may have been Hamas militants, but many were women and children.
So, more Palestinians were killed on June 8th, and Israelis were taken captive on October 7th, and more than the number of participants at the November 11th yoga event.
And that 270 adds to the overall death toll in Gaza, estimated by the Palestinian Health Ministry to have just crossed over the 37,000 mark, with estimates of women and children making up between 38% and 64% of those totals in different months, as opposed to men who may or may not have been fighters.
And those are the numbers that are at the center of the International Court of Justice weighing a case of genocide against Israel brought by South Africa.
And the International Criminal Court considering issuing arrest warrants against Bibi Netanyahu and his ministers.
They're considering the same for Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, also for war crimes.
So, is an operation like that on June 8th what Michal Cohen and her colleagues at the Tel Aviv Yoga Gathering back in November had in mind for their event?
Did they envision something more peaceful?
And given that it didn't turn out that way, will future events be dedicated to demanding a ceasefire and the release of more aid to those in refugee camps?
Because that's where an opposing form of yoga idealism and activism is placing its hope.
So we'll get to that opposing usage of yoga in part two, Julian, but for now, what are your initial thoughts?
I think that trying to justify any position on any of this using spirituality As if that justification has some kind of metaphysical authority is always self-serving and a bit useless.
I just don't think it's necessary.
The intuition that we often have in Western cultures where we have enough long-term separation from theocracy is this well-intentioned thing that I see as kind of a self-deception that all religions are really about peace and love.
So if we can just get to the accurate and pure original meaning of that religion, we'd have world peace, we'd love each other.
The problem is that we're talking about a part of the world right now in which actual ancient notions of God and holy war and right to the land and the one true faith have raged for many centuries.
Everyone already thinks that their holy book justifies their position, including American Christian evangelicals who hope that this war gets bad enough to bring back Jesus.
And likewise, there are Jewish, Muslim, and Christian pacifists who think they've gotten
the interpretation of their text right too.
So in part one, we have yoga for Israel showing up in response to war in a way that's not surprising, because according to Gilad Haruvi of the Israeli Yoga Teachers Association, there are as many as 370,000 yoga practitioners in Israel.
That's about 5% of the population.
And here's another thing.
In researching this episode, I also learned that yoga retreats and other periods of contemplation are built into the life cycle of Israeli citizenship.
That after every young person's three years of compulsory military service, many young people take a gap year to find themselves, think about their lives, recover from battle, if that's what they wound up doing.
And I spoke with two IDF vets who both had this story.
Now, I just want to say something a little aside about compulsory.
You can get out of military service via marriage or pregnancy if you're a woman.
And up until just last week, the Supreme Court in Israel just turned this over.
If you sought an Orthodox religious exemption, you were exempted.
And the Israeli sources I spoke to for this expressed a range of attitudes from, it's just inevitable that you're going to do this service, to on the other side, people would say, if you don't try to get an exemption, you're not thinking very hard about what it actually means to fight for the IDF.
That revocation for the Orthodox religious folks, that's a huge development.
Huge development, yeah.
So there's a lot of people getting their discharge papers and taking the money in their pockets to India.
And as we know, organizations like Sivananda Yoga are set up to not only provide retreat space and time, but also send pilgrims back home with teaching certificates.
So there's lots of discharged vets who are going there, but also going to Peru because there's also a real interest
in plant medicine and shamanism.
So I don't think it should be surprising that yoga practice is folded into the military experience
and that spiritual retreats or tourism would come to balance out or mirror
various military campaigns.
And then there's also this well-known complementarity between non-conservative Judaism and yoga and Buddhist practice in the post-war period, which is where we get terms like Hinju and Buju.
Like, the basic history there is that children of Holocaust survivors worked really hard to find flexible spiritual frameworks for understanding what their monotheistic traditions struggle to explain.
And in that vein, I found some quotes from soldiers and vets who said that breathing and stretching is not only an antidote to the rigidity of military training and tension, but in their experience, it provided a form of somatic peace that wasn't necessarily available in their heritage of Jewish worship.
Okay, so now, in part two, we can look at what's happening on the other side of the yoga mat.
Yoga for Gaza.
Now, if practice and politics in Israel are folded together, or if they appear to be, in the anti-war camp, by contrast, they are separated into a heavily political discourse on one side and then on the other, a kind of relatively neutral pro-peace initiative type movement to raise funds for food and medical aid.
And in that latter category, scanning the yoga socials turns up a steady stream of small DIY mutual aid events.
So here's just a few.
In Little Rock, Arkansas, yoga teacher Sarah Martin donated the proceeds from a yoga event to the Islamic Center of Little Rock.
And I think it's notable that Sarah is black because, as we'll see, there's an intersectional protest theme that's emerging here.
Then Rasha Madkour in Austin, Texas, the heartland of conspirituality, did a yoga fundraiser on behalf of the Longhorn Muslim Alumni Network.
I love America, Julian.
Like, these are Muslim grads of the University of Texas in Austin.
Very interesting.
And then in the UK, there's a small event in the north for the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, but then Hot Yoga Glasgow is going for an internationalist approach to their yoga-thon.
So Julian, you want to read this Facebook post?
I just have to remark on Hot Yoga Glasgow.
I just never thought I'd say that phrase.
Well, it makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?
It's bloody wet and cold.
27 brave yogis are challenging themselves to practice up to five classes in one day.
We're buzzing for a day of hard work, fun, determination, positive energy, laughs, and delicious home baking.
And we hope good hydration because five hot yoga classes?
Jesus.
Come on.
It's all for a great cause.
We are over halfway towards our target of raising 500 pounds for the International Rescue Committee, who are working in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, and other areas affected by the worst humanitarian disasters of today's world.
We will also be donating an additional 500 pounds as a business towards food distribution in Gaza.
Yeah, so in this Glasgow example, the plight of Gazans is intersectional with that of other occupied or marginalized populations.
And there are also more enmeshed intersections between yoga and peace activism that we can look at.
Back at the beginning of May, students at the University of California in Santa Barbara at their campus protest encampment were doing yoga together among other activities like attending teach-ins on Middle East history.
And the University of South Carolina encampment students had the same idea.
There's a photo, actually, sorry, this is University of Southern California because the photo is in LAist, and it shows a young guy leading a quiet yoga class on the lawn underneath a big banner saying, silence is violence, which is a little bit funny.
Yeah.
And it's important to note that they are all masked as a COVID mitigation as per the intersectional ethics of a lot of the encampments where expressing solidarity with Gazans under fire is inextricable from expressing solidarity with the disabled in their own communities.
Yeah, I mean I've also gotten the sense that the masking is understandably perhaps about maintaining some anonymity.
Possibly, but I mean, most of these encampments have like really, really firm COVID mitigation policies, like straight out, you know, sort of on their front facing materials.
So it's intersectional in the sense of connecting people in need in war zones in different parts of the world, right?
When we look at the hot yoga Glasgow kind of approach.
Obviously, we can't have a very long and deeply nuanced conversation here about intersectionality.
I think it's a very worthwhile and insightful point of view and project.
I think sometimes in performative ways that can become this oversimplified template through which to categorize the world and into these good guys and bad guys.
And that then becomes quite easy to skewer.
Like, you know, you hear people pointing out that groups like queers for Palestine would probably not last too long on the streets of most Muslim majority countries.
And there, too, we have a difference between the perceived meanings of slogans and then what things look like in practice on the ground.
Like, this is a core theme of this episode.
Like, the actual practice of intersectionality is the opposite of black and white because it's about recognizing where and how various pressures intersect in complex ways.
You know, people are making that queers for Palestine jibe, but there is a huge range of on-the-ground reporting about how queer people in Palestine live and are supported within their communities versus persecuted by their government or clerics in this post-colonial context.
But the bottom line that they, you know, express is that weaponizing those tensions from the outside can be a really great way of glossing over the fact that being heterosexual is not protecting anyone in Gaza at the moment.
Yeah, you're not less likely to die because you're straight.
Yeah, I mean, I think what's really hard about it is that...
When we think about liberation movements, we tend to think about if the liberation movement were to win, everyone would be more free and equal.
And part of what's really tricky in this part of the world is that some of what might be viewed as a liberation movement, in this case against Israeli occupation and aggression, were they to win women and gay people would not be more free.
They would have actually a harder life than they have in Israel for the most part.
Yeah, and so the question is, well, what did the rest of us do to support them?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
And again, it's like super complex and yeah.
On a less cheap shot level, I think it's often lost on Westerners who love yoga,
that just the very act of practicing a spirituality with roots in an entirely different culture
is already emblematic of several things.
Like on the one hand, it shows that you live in a culture where that is permitted by law and it's not like socially frowned upon for the most part.
As a lack of loyalty or orthodoxy in any way that has negative social consequences.
But on the other hand, it also ties back to the Orientalist aspects of colonial fascination with the so-called noble savage and things like that.
But you know, if people want to raise money to help those who are suffering at bottom, personally, I'm all for it.
For these yogis and their sense of what it means to them, this is a way to practice loving kindness and I think that's good.
And I think also, I'll just reiterate, this is a practice that unfolds in a context of people feeling relatively powerless on the political level.
Like, what are they going to do?
It's hard to, you know, search around for something to do.
Yeah, so they're using what they have.
They're using what they have, yeah.
Now I have an example of another program that has a more sort of pointed politics to it and it's going on in Derek's hometown.
It's an attempt to make yoga and political practice really inseparable and it's happening at the Bhakti Yoga Movement Center in Portland.
This is a very loud and proud social justice yoga studio.
Queer and Indian owned in the tagline.
Most of the staff are people of color.
A prior guest of the podcast, Sheena Sood, is leading a virtual Yoga for Palestine series through this center.
It's by donation, with all funds going to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees in the Near East.
Now, Sood is a sociologist of religion who does a lot of work on how Modi's India has accelerated the nationalist history of weaponizing yoga against modernizing influences like public health and drives towards caste liberation.
And also used it to promote ethno-nationalist Hindu first ideals.
So, when we had her on, it was 160 episodes ago, for an episode called Sellouts and Zealots, we discussed how the yoga boosting ministers of the BJP served a broader anti-Muslim agenda.
People like Yogi Adityanath, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, for example, Who's always saber rattling against Muslims while wearing his saffron robes as a kind of, you know, I don't know, like, halo.
Modi's crowd also, you know, showed up this pious cruelty during COVID.
While they mismanaged oxygen supplies, they told their gasping citizens to stop being crybabies and to drink holy cow urine against the disease.
Now, Sud just gave a presentation at a yoga scholarship conference in Germany on parallels between the operationalization of yoga in both India and Israel.
She tied them closely together.
And she does this work under the title concept of OM washing, which is her Really catchy tag for the globalization of the Hindutva Saffronization tendency in which India winds up using yoga to spiritualize all kinds of reactionary ideas, gender essentialism, skin whitening cosmetics, justifying caste oppression,
And building the new $217 million Ram Mandir on the grounds of a medieval mosque destroyed by a Hindu mob in 1992.
Yeah, so the parallels there are pretty huge, right, in terms of the Dome of the Rock and yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Sood tracks these yoga aggressions back to the early modern period, in which mainly upper-caste proto-nationalists combined colonial-style physical culture with selectively remembered aspects of medieval yoga to create this pious form of embodied discipline and pride.
But she offers a really interesting double critique.
She's not just saying that Israel is appropriating Indian wisdom traditions to launder its colonial project.
She's saying that the source of these nationalist applications in the Modi regime is in itself a toxic mimic of colonialist attitudes of supremacy, in which upper caste Hindu nationalists have replaced the British at the top of the hierarchy and are using yoga in much the same way that the British used Christianity to justify their anti-Muslim bigotry, their misogyny, and their epistemological pride.
And I want to say that this work is a great corrective, because if you remember Julian, the initial waves of cultural appropriation discourse in the yoga world were really revealing and useful, but then this weird thing happened with a lot of it getting co-opted by Hindu nationalists, because for the most part, younger white social justice enthusiasts are like clueless about Indian history here.
And they tend to think that whatever an Indian yoga person says about yoga is just accurate and that listening to them and deferring to them is an act of reparations and it shows progressive credentials.
Yeah.
But non-Indian yoga people have to understand that when Narendra Modi spends billions on a new Ram Mandir on the site of a destroyed mosque, And when Baba Ramdev teaches the sacred yogic way of curing homosexuality, they're not expressing love and light and decolonization at all.
They are assembling the cultural and spiritual products of bigotry and authoritarianism and exclusion.
And so it makes a lot of sense for Sood and others to be concerned about whether non-Indian yoga enthusiasts, let's say in Israel, are using the practice and language and vibes in the same way.
Yeah, those parallels are all absolutely fascinating.
And there's the thing that we were talking about a moment ago too, right, is that there can be this oversimplified way of looking at it where it's like, oh, sit down and shut up because the person of Indian descent is telling you now what yoga means, never mind the fact that they're racist and homophobic.
And the thing I want to point out here too that's related to it is that in both the The Middle East as well as in India, the history of colonization is absolutely appalling and there were things already present within those cultures and traditions that were oppressive as well.
And so some of this sort of hearkening back to making, you know, India or Israel or, you know, wherever else great again, it's going to have some of those, you know, unfortunate realities.
Yeah, that's where I want to direct everybody back to the amazing episode that we did with Tenmori Sundararajan and her book called The Trauma of Cast because she really tarnishes that halo, that romantic halo with regard to, you know, what are we actually remembering when we remember the glory days of India.
Part three, yoga online, yoga offline.
It seems that we have a real polarization here, or do we?
I want to round this up with this third part by using three examples to really test the reality strength of what is mainly an online tension.
And I want to, you know, try to pry into how social media representations of religious or spiritual ideas or commitments can trouble or even distort what's happening on the ground.
And I'm going to start by returning to two of the visuals I referred to in part one.
Okay, so we had that series of photos of the drafted reservists doing a yoga class in the occupied Palestinian home, right?
And a lot of people had a lot of feelings about it.
But there are some really complicating details.
Now, I already mentioned that the Hebrew graffiti high up on the walls was directional.
North, south, east, west.
But there was another piece of graffiti that looked like some kind of insignia.
It was just sort of scrawled on the wall in black spray paint.
And at first I thought it was an eagle, and I searched through IDF iconography and insignias to find a match.
I came up blank, and so I forwarded it on to an Israeli listener who instantly identified it as a graffito version of the insignia of the Samson's Foxes.
Now, as a side note, this listener commented that the fact that he recognized it so quickly went to show just how militarized Israeli society is.
It's just in the water.
Okay, so who are Samson's foxes?
They came together as a military unit, an Israeli commando unit, in 1948.
This is the year of the Nakba.
And they have always operated in the southern part of the country and in the Gaza region specifically.
Now, what's the fox about?
Julian, maybe you can read from the book of Judges, chapter 15.
And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes.
and took firebrands and turned tail to tail and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails and when he had set the brands on fire he let them go into the standing corn of the philistines and burnt up both the shocks and also the standing corn with the vineyards and the olives Samson, if you're not familiar with him, is the superhuman judge of the old temple days who battled the Philistines throughout Gaza.
Philistines, not to be confused with the contemporary Palestinians.
But here in the story, he burns down their crops by sending foxes with burning tails into the fields, meaning he made their land uninhabitable.
So that's the symbol and the story under which these six guys are practicing yoga in an occupied Palestinian house, in an out-charred zone strewn with rubble.
Maybe the people who are in that house are dead.
And if you've been following the rhetoric coming out of Netanyahu and his cabinet, you'll know that this tracks with his biblical references to King Saul commanding the massacre of the Amicalites, and there are other stories that are operationalized as well.
But how do those young guys feel about those stories?
I think that the understandable disgust at the photos, and all of the smug, ohm-washing, to use Sheena Sood's term, all of the tone-deaf and privileged overtones that they were said to convey, those feelings might shift in relation to this interview I found with Achia Alfie, the class teacher.
Now, it was published in the super hawkish online Ynet.com outlet, so he definitely didn't get any tough questions.
but here's what he says in response to his photographs going viral.
When did you decide that yoga comes with you into Gaza?
Goes the first question.
It already happened when I enlisted, but the final decision was made on the bus the first
time we entered Gaza.
When I was trying to find within myself the answer to the question, how do I go into combat
when my whole life is to practice love, peace, and connecting?
I understood that yoga is connecting.
And at that moment, I decided that even though I have to fight now, I am completely at peace with that.
I bring these energies and forces of love and peace wherever I am and everything I have to do.
It sounds like he's been reading the Gita in that very particular way.
Right.
Okay.
So here's the next question.
How does this moment of silence feel when all around the cannons are bellowing?
Completely surreal.
It's sitting inside a house in Gaza.
Explosions all around.
Noise and chaos and communications in the background.
But precisely in this, the mind knows that this is what it needs now.
And it adjusts.
And this is the ability to practice yoga and practice meditation.
It doesn't matter where you are.
It is to pay attention to yourself.
Wow.
Okay.
So, I mean, there's so many ways to hear and to read that.
And I tried to track Alfie down for an interview, but no luck.
So, I feel like there's a lot there to unpack, and I would love to do that in the future.
But I do think that it's worth noting something that we pinged in the beginning, because we don't know where Alfie learned his yoga.
But one possibility is that he learned his yoga on a kibbutz.
And we should know that for decades, yoga has been a familiar part of the schedules at many of these small communities rooted in socialist ideals, which have often been at the forefront of Arab-Israeli peace efforts.
And so for me, the takeaway from this picture is I really need to know more.
Yeah, we need to know more.
I mean, it's really given the stuff that we've looked at over the years, it's hard for me not to hear what he's saying through the same lens that I heard about how the SS, you know, practice yoga and the kamikazes practice then meditation.
And it's like being at the still point in the center of the storm and letting the forces of destiny operate through you without being sort of tarnished emotionally by the reality of what you're doing.
Yeah, and I guess the question that I have is it's so easy to go there and yet, you know, if you can get the guy on Zoom, what would you find, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
And I can imagine putting myself in his shoes if I grew up in that culture and this was the situation I was in and I was doing compulsory military service and I had a yoga practice.
Maybe this is how it would consolidate in my mind as well.
Here's the second example.
I referred to that other photograph that caused a stir.
This was the 2018 Yoga Journal cover, which featured a woman in full camo fatigues and king pigeon posture.
Now, for those worried about OM washing, this provided a real target.
The implication in the caption that we read that got sent around was that the soldier was either IDF or USAF and that they were using yoga to hone their fighting prowess.
So, I got in touch with Robert Sturman, who is the famous yoga photographer who took the picture.
I actually didn't, there was no attribution on the photograph, and I couldn't find the Yoga Journal cover, so I actually had to use TinEye to sort of backtrack it and figure out where it came from, and I found it in his studio.
Anyway, you probably know Sturman.
He's an L.A.
guy, right?
Yeah, Robert Sturman's actually a good friend of mine.
I haven't talked to him in a little while, but yeah, I know him very well.
Really?
Yeah, yeah, he's taking pictures of me.
All right, well, okay, you weren't wearing a uniform, though.
I was not wearing a uniform, no, no.
Okay.
And I just want to add here, too, that this topic is actually unexpectedly emotionally provocative for me because I grew up in a society that had compulsory military service.
Because I left South Africa as a conscientious objector, very clear that there was no way I could serve in that military on moral grounds.
And thinking about how might that have been a little bit The circumstances, like obviously I disagree with the IDF and their actions, but I can see how within that society, if the message is, you must do this to protect your families and your society.
It's just, it's so messy.
Well, okay.
One of the first interviews that I did actually was of a South African yoga studio owner in Dubai, who has a community of Palestinian expats who come to their studio, her studio every day.
They grieve together and they sit together in meditation and they think about what's happening in their homeland.
And so that started to provide some of the broader geopolitical context for me and community context for me.
And one of the strongest things that this person said, as she's very pro-ceasefire, anti-genocide in all of her politics, was she also said, you really have to think about What those soldiers have been indoctrinated into what they have been led into and what kind of life That actually leaves them with and how much trauma they come away with and how much recovery they actually need And that was her actually that was one of her strongest statements.
Actually.
It wasn't about their You know, their complicity or their natural aggression, although we've seen plenty of that.
She took this broader view.
Anyway, back to Sturman's photograph.
He told me that the photograph was of a U.S.
Air Force servicewoman and that it was taken in Oahu, Hawaii.
The important part is, and where things get complicated, is that Sturman told me that the shoot had been arranged in conjunction with a non-profit organization called Warriors at Ease, which has, according to their homepage copy, been pioneering the delivery of transformative, evidence-based mind-body practices since 2011 to directly address the unique physical and mental health challenges faced by service members, their families, and caregivers.
Now, I don't know, Julian, if Warriors at Ease rings a bell for you, Have you heard of this organization?
There are several that are like this, that provide some combination of yoga and somatic therapy to veterans.
So I'm not that familiar with this one.
Yeah.
So, well, for me, it rang a bell because it was one of the more prominent groups that participated in something that I used to go to all the time called the Yoga Service Council, which started up in 2012.
And they had an annual conference at the Omega Institute in upstate New York.
This was the most hopeful part of yoga culture for me for years.
Like, I loved the conference.
I learned a ton.
It seemed that all the best people were there and that this integration of this weird new gig economy of yoga teaching into public health and community services would really improve so many issues at once.
Maybe even it would contribute to world peace.
Like, it felt really, really good.
You know, if yoga teachers start integrating into public service, you know, with their skills, their education has to rise.
They have to get clear on things like scope of practice and the entire drive to dominate the economy via charisma instead of competence.
It's just not so important anymore if you have a stable job, because nobody at the domestic violence shelter cares about whether you can like project high vibes on Instagram.
They need to know that you're safe, that you have a good head, that you, you know, completed a trauma awareness training.
And trauma awareness was at the center of the entire Yoga Service Council curriculum, including Warriors at Ease.
And that intersected with the social justice headwaters.
So the presenters who specialized in bringing yoga into underserved schools and into prisons and halfway houses and to corporate trainings and DEI.
They were all talking about trauma awareness.
And this is where I met people like past guest, Michelle Cassandra Johnson.
Her yoga programming was all about anti-racism activism.
But then, you know, she would give her presentation.
And I remember one day there was a workshop directly after hers from a Warriors at Ease representative.
And, you know, this is a person who's talking about serving the US military and its veterans.
And that was all part of the sort of, Wonderful feeling of a conference.
Nobody seemed to bat an eye.
Nobody said to these people, aren't you justifying war?
Aren't you facilitating imperialism?
One of their main exercises was called I-Rest.
It was a form of relaxed meditation developed by the clinical psychologist Richard Miller.
So it was also very research-based.
Okay, so Sturman's photograph ends up stoking rage as the bombs fall on Rafa, but that's because this whole chain of interconnected relationships has just become invisible.
Like, yes, it's true that the IDF and the U.S.
Air Forces or the U.S.
Armed Forces are hand in glove in terms of training and finances and geopolitical connections.
And on an abstract level of symbols and structural power, that uniform, it stands for state and global power and all of the violence associated with it.
So depicting that soldier as a vulnerable spiritual seeker can reasonably be said to launder, soften, or humanize that function.
However, just like with the guy leading that class in that apartment, on a personal level, we just don't know anything about the woman in the posture, except that she's standing between two worlds.
And she's involved in a program supported by some of the most progressive yoga people in the world.
who I guarantee you will be pro ceasefire and anti-genocide and who build their businesses and spirituality
on promoting peace through the repair of trauma.
So the uniform might indicate where the subject has actually come from,
but she also might be wearing it to be recognized by others who might follow her.
I just don't know what to say.
It's so layered and so complex.
And we're talking, yes, as you're pointing out about real human beings and being humble
about our lack of insight into what they really feel and what their life journey has been
and what their beliefs actually are.
And yet, at the same time, we're also talking about the power of a kind of contemporary iconography that can perpetuate a lot of unexamined assumptions.
There's this really good book from 2014.
It's by Dr. Andrea Jane.
It's called Selling Yoga.
And its core thesis is that phenomena like Sturman's photo, the utilization of yoga by the armed forces in the US, the Air Force soldiers' performance of white womanhood, and the fact that Yoga Journal is a lifestyle magazine, these are all facets of yoga as a neoliberal self-project designed to maintain the economic and cultural status quo.
Global yoga practice reflects the flows of capital more than the flows of breath.
That's how that argument goes.
It's a very grim argument, super powerful, very convincing, expertly executed, and there is something missing in my humble opinion because it's not based on interviews.
So I want to offer a last story based on an interview and a long email exchange.
It was with one American-Israeli yoga teacher in her early 30s.
She came from a conservative Jewish family in Chicago, and we talked about how she came to live in Israel and is now providing yoga services to the wives and children of IDF soldiers.
She described this swirl of influences and circumstances, like all of the elements of a life.
That drew her along this path, the faith of her family, her mom is a rabbi, this feeling of connection that she has to Israel, and the love and relief she found from yoga practice and her training in trauma awareness.
And she actually had trained with our friend, Hala Khouri, and that caught my eye, Julian.
In fact, that's why I reached out to her as I saw Hala's name and I was like, oh, there's something here, like we have something in common and I can ask you about what you're doing.
So we've agreed to keep her name anonymous because there's no real reason to direct controversy in her direction.
So I'm talking with her and I give her all of these tough questions about whether her commitment to yoga service was biased or limited, given that her Palestinian neighbors are weathering so much death and destruction with no access to medicine, food, and water, let alone self-care.
I asked whether she was troubled by the thought that she might be making it easier for Israel to maintain its war footing.
And I also asked whether she was aware of how the IDF's promotion of yoga for fitness and concentration rhymed with how Hindu nationalists use it in India as a soft political power.
And she answered all of my questions, frankly and without defensiveness.
She pointed out, as we've said, that military service in Israel is standard, so offering yoga was not going to change that.
She said that her community was diverse in terms of background, but also political outlook, and so it included the families of soldiers who were conflicted about the war.
She said that she believed yoga was for everyone, and that if she spoke Arabic, or was networked more closely with Palestinian communities, or if she had somehow permission to go to Gaza, that she would be offering yoga classes to them as well.
And in some, she is where she is because she wants to help as she is able and she has found the community of people she can help.
She said this beautiful thing.
She said, as a soul, I would love to do it all.
As a human, I must do what I can.
And so she's giving these answers and I suddenly felt strange about the questions because it was clear that they came from an abstract and political sphere that mainly exists online, where important matters of structural power are thrashed out, but often at the expense of understanding or even caring much about individual lives.
And isn't this abstraction a foundational cause for war?
I had found this person's work online and all of these theoretical problems instantly appeared for me simply because she said she was taking care of IDF families.
But there was no way, in fact, that she could have honestly indicated online what she was offering on some local interpersonal level in terms that couldn't be critically interpreted by an outside observer opposed to Israeli war actions.
But in that particular misunderstanding, which would probably have turned into an angry exchange, something would have been missed.
And then when we closed the interview, she mentioned that she was off to teach her next class for the day.
One of many that week that were simply classes.
They weren't content opportunities for Instagram.
And that mirrored the scene that I learned of at that yoga studio in Dubai run by the South African who said that, you know, she had a lot of these ex-patriot Palestinians in class every day and they just practiced together quietly in grief and solidarity with each other.
So I was really glad to do these interviews because it gave a kind of time to cut through the white noise of these public personae that we are forced to adopt by this technologized, politicized atmosphere through which we're all communicating in these very flawed ways.
You know, these personae that actually betray us in this hyper-connected world.
And I don't think do much in terms of fostering peace.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
Join us here next Thursday as we look into Aubrey Marcus's new documentary, Anti-Cult, which was actually named by this very podcast.
