Here’s the first installment of a regular timeline cleanser featuring interviews with folks reflecting on hope, faith, resilience and building community in hard times.
You know—all the things that conspirituality itself can’t offer.
These are short, personal visits in which Matthew asks each guest the same five questions about their life wisdom—at least as it’s coming together in this moment.
To start this series, Matthew hearkens back to the roots of Conspirituality Podcast in the yoga world with guest Jivana Heyman. Jivana is the founder and director of Accessible Yoga, an organization dedicated to increasing access to the yoga teachings and supporting yoga teachers. He’s the author of Accessible Yoga: Poses and Practices for Every Body; Yoga Revolution: Building a Practice of Courage & Compassion; and The Teacher's Guide to Accessible Yoga: Best Practices for Sharing Yoga with Every Body.
BTW: here are the five questions. You can think about them too.
What terrifies you most in these times?
What is the most meaningful and supportive idea or story you return to for reliable wisdom and relief?
What is the greatest obstacle you face in forming community relationships, and how do you work to overcome it?
If you were responsible for comforting and guiding a child terrified of climate catastrophe, how would you do it? What would you say?
If your wisest ancestor came in a dream to offer you one piece of advice about living in difficult times, what would it be?
Show Notes
jivanaheyman.com
9: Ableism in Conspiracy Theories (w/Jivana Heyman) — Conspirituality
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Hello everyone, this is Matthew welcoming you to the Conspirituality Relief Project.
This is your regular timeline cleanser, featuring interviews with folks reflecting on hope, faith, resilience, and building community in hard times.
You know, all the things that conspirituality itself can't do.
These are short, personal visits in which I ask my guests the same five questions about their life wisdom as it is in this moment.
My guest today is Jivana Heyman, the founder and director of Accessible Yoga, which trains yoga teachers in how to expand access to yoga for people of all abilities and stages of life.
Jivana was an early guest on the podcast back on Episode 9, that's July of 2020.
where he came on to discuss the theme of ableism in right-wing conspiracy theories.
And he was the perfect guest for it because he started his journey as an AIDS activist who offered yoga to the dying and marginalized during the AIDS epidemic.
Now, whenever I introduce guests for this series, I'll say one personal thing about why I admire them or why I've connected with them.
So, I was taking a yoga class with Jivana years ago, and he was teaching us how to lead our students with limited mobility into a gentle backbend.
It's a super simple movement.
You stand with your hands against a wall and your chest close to your hands, and you use the smallest amount of pressure to arch gently up and away.
And I'm doing this movement that's so simple I can hardly feel it, and then I really feel it.
I feel that Jivana is teaching us how we can take care of ourselves and find relief at the end of our lives when we are disabled by age or disease.
And that was the moment that a key aspect of the disability movement became clear to me.
Yes, it's about justice and caregiving, but it's also about fully realizing how ephemeral your own abilities are, how vulnerable you are and will be, and how much you depend on the grace of others.
So, of course, I thought of Jeevana when I was shortlisting guests for this project.
Here's our conversation.
Jivana Heyman, welcome to the Conspirituality Relief Project.
Thanks, Matthew.
Thanks for inviting me, and I'm excited to talk to you.
I sent you five questions.
You've had some time with them.
They're the same five questions that I'm sending to all of my guests for this.
I'm going to ask them, and I'm just going to try to stay out of your way.
Now, the first question is a little bit bleak, but I think it sets the stage for the relief questions.
So, number one.
What terrifies you most in these times?
Well, so I just want to say I hope you won't stay out of my way.
I'd like to have a conversation because I just do best in that way.
I think that's kind of, in fact, when I really thought about these questions, what I came to in general is a feeling of the need for community and other people.
And it's so easy for me to just lecture or like babble on, but I'd rather Yeah, I'd rather have a conversation, because I think that's the answer, actually.
Well, let's do it.
Let's do it.
Yeah, so I guess first I just want to challenge the frame of that question and to say, I really try to stay out of terror.
I don't identify in that way.
I'm afraid of things, things scare me, but I just think that Part of it is to accept just the range of emotions that I have as a person.
They will all be there.
I have moments of joy and moments of fear and moments of deep grief and, and they're all acceptable, you know?
And I just, so I guess I just, I want to say that like for me, all my feelings are valid and okay.
And there's something about the question that actually suggests that there's something in excess or something that's too much right now.
And that might not be so.
Yeah.
It felt a little like a leading question, which is fair.
You know, you are leading the conversation, but, and I think that's what you're asking.
You're curious about, but I just, I don't know.
I think to me, the first answer is the best way for me to respond is to recognize the validity of all my feelings and The range of them and how much they change moment to moment.
It's like unbelievable.
I mean, maybe it's me and my mind, but I just find that it's constantly changing.
Like if we look at, I think part of your questions are about like the political world right now.
And I think about what's happening right now with Kamala Harris and like all of a sudden there's a big chef, you know, Biden dropping out and she's running and it's like all this hope now.
But I also think, wow, you know, it's so easy to get caught up in that.
So I hear, Jeevana, that you you teach yoga or you know something about yoga.
Is there some influence there that we're starting to dig into?
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
It's it's it's all the same.
It's all the same.
So my job is to come back to some center, or at least, I don't know, maybe not even a center.
Let me say it another way.
I think by recognizing that all my feelings are valid, it helps me to let them go and just move through and come back to something else.
Yeah, so that's the yoga part.
Well, I guess that leads to the second question for discussion, which is, what is the most meaningful and supportive idea or story that you return to for, like, reliable wisdom and relief?
That was the hardest question that you asked me because there's so many.
I have many sources that I turn to.
Yeah.
Constantly in my heart, calling out to my Whatever, like the gods and my ancestors and my current family and friends and everyone around me for help.
I mean, I think it's constantly calling friends, texting people, you know, kind of wanting people to affirm my existence or something, but also wanting support.
And that's just kind of how I live.
But I was thinking if I had to choose one currently, I've been thinking a lot about my grandmother and her journey.
And I just want to share a minute of that, which is that, you know, she, My grandmother, like, she came over from Russia during, what was that, the programs in the early 1900s, you know, as a Jew, basically escaping Russia on a ship.
She said it was like a month-long journey.
She was a young child and she went blind, psychosomatically blind, because she was so traumatized by that experience.
Like on the ship?
She lost her sight?
She lost her sight while she was on this voyage.
And she was probably, actually, probably like eight years old.
Like, you're a kid.
And of course, she was telling me these stories when she was older and she said that she regained her sight over the next year after arriving in America and landing in New York and that was also very traumatic.
But something about finding stability, she found her sight again.
The doctors couldn't figure out why she went blind, what happened and couldn't explain it.
And that led her on this lifelong spiritual journey of trying to understand alternative medicine and things like that.
She was always teaching me.
She studied yoga in the 50s with Krishnamurti and Swami Satchidananda, who became my teacher.
She was living in LA at that time, so that was already happening here.
She was an early adopter.
She just inspired me with her I don't know, just her resilience and her openness.
She was always learning and teaching me.
And one of the things she taught and spoke about a lot to me was reincarnation, which is just so weird because I, and I don't even know why I'm saying this to you, except that I, it's like she put that idea in my head at a young age.
You know, she literally, My earliest memories are literally with her and I figured out why.
I've been writing about this recently, but my sister was born when I was four and I remember my mom bringing the baby home.
And then all of a sudden I was with my grandmother.
And so I just have like these memories of, and it makes sense, right?
Like my mom had a new baby.
So all of a sudden my grandmother was taking care of me and it was very exciting and positive, but she would practice all the time.
So every morning she'd be standing on her head.
And I remember that, like I can picture her, Like, early memory of, like, her on her head.
Like, what was she doing?
It was so weird, you know?
And then teaching me yoga.
And more!
I mean, so...
I guess it's not a story, but it's just a person that inspires me.
But there's a hinge point, which is that she had this wound at eight years old, and it pushed her into trying to discover what is the connection between experience and reality, or experience and my body, or experience and the way in which I see or don't see the world.
It sounds like that was the starting point.
And spirituality, like what is it?
What is spirituality?
How can I engage with it in a productive way?
And so she found the yoga world and you did too and that's the next question which is about the obstacles that you face in forming community relationships and how you've learned about that and how you work to overcome those obstacles and how does community work for you?
I think the biggest challenge is our own egos, you know, and the obstacle to creating community is the kind of capitalist focus on self and success and, you know, myself included.
So I see this in myself and in my peers and the people I'm trying to connect with always.
It's that we are struggling to be in community and also be successful.
But it's more than capitalism.
I think it's human nature.
You know, it's like competition between each other.
that competition between yoga teachers is fierce.
They're the worst.
You know, that makes no sense.
It's like spiritual practitioners are the most competitive people I know.
I mean, how is that, you know, it makes no sense.
So I don't know.
I think that's the biggest obstacle.
I mean, of course it's an obstacle in the yoga teachings too.
I mean, it's maybe, maybe paradoxical, right?
Like egoism.
And also it's a reality in our lives.
Like we need to make money and be famous in a sense to be successful.
It's just so, so frustrating to me.
And, um, I've tried many times in my life to bring community together, and I still do in small ways, but I'm trying to let go of fixing it for everyone else and just doing my work.
I think the answer is service, and I just want to practice what I preach and be of service to the world as best I can, rather than trying to I don't know, like herd cats or whatever, you know, like bringing yoga community together, which is basically doing that.
I'm working on that.
Yeah, so for me, the biggest obstacle is my own ego and my desire for success and fame and all those things.
And I see it interfering with all the ways that we try to build community and the ways I have.
You know, I had built a non-profit that we closed this last year, the Accessible Yoga Association.
I mean, now we're just Accessible Yoga, but closing the non-profit was just such a kind of, I don't know, clear Um, example of the challenges of building community in a way, you know what I mean?
Like I, I just thought, I thought that's the way to do it.
I thought I could manage through this nonprofit, you know, conferences and connections and stuff.
And it's just, I don't know, there isn't that support for it in the yoga world, or at least, um, there's, there's just, it's too much business.
I'm hearing that egoism and capitalism are synonymous in the way you think about things.
Is that fair?
Yeah.
I mean, I probably should think about that more, but at the moment it feels very much the same.
Right, right.
Yeah, yeah.
What do you think?
I haven't put those two concepts so closely juxtaposed before, and I think I can see a way in which something is resolved between The thing that feels very approachable and personal and intimate, like I know what my egoism feels like and something that is very real and yet very abstract and impersonal and machine-like, you know, which is how I understand capitalism to operate.
There's something that disturbs me about this distance that I often feel between when I'm talking about myself as a psychological agent And when I'm talking about myself as part of a structural dynamic, those two things don't seem to meet.
But if I think of egoism and capitalism as being somehow similar terms for slightly different categories of the same experience of I don't know, what is it, like grasping or trying to make something that is ultimately ephemeral stay when it can't?
Then, yeah, that begins to make sense to me.
Exactly.
I think, in a way, isn't society just a macrocosm, you know, in our world?
I mean, it's not just by chance that capitalism exists.
I mean, it's built on the way we think.
That's what it feels like to me, at least in this culture that I live in.
You know, I think that's the way I've been trained, but also the way my mind works too.
And I think it's partially, when I think about egoism from a yoga perspective, I like to think about this idea of mistaken identity.
Like you said, like it's like, according to the sutras, at least, you have egoism is the mind taking responsibility I feel like capitalism is the same thing.
People like companies and CEOs taking responsibility for the work of everyone, you know.
Speaking of capitalism, if we go to the end point, this next question I have is about climate.
And so it goes, if you were responsible for comforting and guiding an eight-year-old, let's say, who is terrified of climate catastrophe, how would you do that?
What would you say?
I think the problem with parenting is that You know, and I know because I have two kids and I, they're older now, but I've just noticed how I tend to want to make things better.
So there's a tendency to want to like fix things and almost, I wouldn't say lie, but almost like manipulate the facts to make it okay.
You know?
And so it's, it's challenging to find a truthful answer that is soothing.
One thing that might, that I might do is talk about Kind of just the nature of being human and how that there's always challenges that we face.
And I guess maybe generalize the issue a little bit, because I do think while I understand the climate is the most pressing issue, especially for a child, probably to consider.
I think that humans have always faced disasters.
I mean, we have created them or experienced them one after another.
And so far, I think Some of us have survived, and I feel like it's important to put some kind of positive spin for a child, just somehow to give them hope.
I think hope is the key.
Hope that maybe someone will fix it.
Maybe it'll be them, that there'll be some way out.
I just think without hope, there's no reason to live.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, my job as a parent is to give my child hope.
And to find, to maybe, maybe I'm grasping, but like to pull at something that gives them hope.
And, and, you know, it could be talking about the journey of my ancestors.
Like I mentioned, my grandmother and something that she challenged, a challenge she went through.
Or something I personally went through.
Maybe like for me, you know, I try to go back to my experience during the AIDS epidemic and how it was to survive during a plague.
Even COVID, I think, is a good example of survival for some of us.
Of course, a lot of death and loss is part of the story.
Climate probably is the same.
There's a story of survival there, right alongside loss and death and grief.
But to me, that's what it is to be human.
I think that's the nature of our experience.
And I also, I guess one other thought I have is to offer spiritual teachings, because to me, you know, that's why I go to those teachings, because the world makes no sense.
I'm just not willing to What's the word?
I don't know, to give up hope, I guess, and to be a, what is it?
Not just a pessimist, but like a... A nihilist.
A nihilist, exactly.
Because in my heart I feel hope.
I can't help it.
And I think it's, that's why I teach yoga and spiritual things.
Like, I just feel like there's some unknown or like, I don't know what it is.
There's something, There's something beyond my experience of the natural world going on.
I don't know what it is.
It could be nature itself.
It could be God, whatever you want to call it.
But I want to find that and I want to express that to my child.
I want them to feel like they have access to that in some way.
I think the premise of this question is that climate catastrophe is categorically different from anything that your grandmother faced or anything that you faced during the AIDS epidemic.
But I think part of what you're saying is that the actual confrontation with that challenge is going to look the same and it's going to require the same tools and it's going to benefit from the same skills.
Yeah, I don't think there's another way.
I mean, we're just human.
So this is how we do things.
I mean, there will be suffering and death.
There already is.
So that's already happened and happening every day.
But at the same time, there's survival and there's hope.
And I guess I just want to find both things.
I want to share both things.
It sounds, Giovanna, like you have hope and then you ascribe that to the spiritual teachings that you've received and that's what you want to pass on.
But what if that's just your personality?
I mean, no, it's a serious question.
Because I feel something similar and then I don't know where it comes from particularly.
And even though I feel fairly agnostic most of the time, I understand why people will say, well, it just doesn't seem to make sense that I feel this way, given how bad things are.
And so, I wonder where this inspiration is coming from.
But this is what we're talking about, right?
Like, you feel as a parent, you feel like you need to give over hope.
You have to pass it along.
And that seems to be integrated with what you're describing when you describe spirituality.
Well, I have a few thoughts.
One is that, yeah, the spiritual teachings, it doesn't have to be that.
I think that it could be Something else unknown, you know what I mean?
It could be just not knowing everything, just recognizing the fact that we have a limited comprehension of reality.
There's some aspect of, I don't know what, the natural world or beyond that is beyond my mind.
I don't have to look to the teachings to recognize that of myself.
And maybe that is me, that I have, I want to have a connection with that part of myself.
Like my practice is literally doing that, is trying to connect with a part of myself I don't understand.
Having kids, I also think a big part of the answer is, is helping them figure out their question and not answering and just affirming the question And also at the age that they are.
So it's always like, it's an age appropriate thing too.
It's like, at this point in your development, how can you really understand that question?
And what could you do to explore it more?
You know, let's kind of give them some tools to actually take it on.
And maybe that means reading books about it more or talking to someone, you know what I'm saying?
Like maybe it's just supporting their journey to figure it out.
Isn't it interesting that we're both talking about hope and we both place a high value on honesty at the same time.
And so we don't want to whitewash things.
We don't want to mislead our children.
We don't want to tell them that things will be all right.
And yet we want to communicate hope at the same time.
And I think that paradox probably tells us something about You know, the paradoxes of religion itself, right?
Yeah.
And actually, that's also the danger of religion and why I avoid it at all costs.
You know, I think spirituality is all different than religion, but I don't know.
You know, it's so conflated.
But it's like, I don't want anyone telling me the answer.
Or my kids, either.
You know, I want to be in the question and just give it space.
And, you know, maybe in that question, like we're talking about, just when we opened, you know, the first question around terror, I think you used.
Even in that question, I think there's terror, but there's something else, too, for me.
Well, certainly when you flip it, there's something else, Giovanna.
Yeah.
But there is, because I have hope.
I really do think there's some other side to this story.
I don't know what it is.
If your wisest ancestor came to you in a dream to offer you one piece of advice about living through hard times, what would that piece of advice be?
Well, we're just talking about my grandmother, so I guess I would think about her and I think she would use the word love more than I have been using and say, just focus on love and care.
And maybe I use words like service or I don't know what spirituality, but I think she would ground it in relationships and just, you know, talk about love the people around you and love what you do and just engage with love as much as possible.
I think to me, that's how she lived her life.
She just cared for her family.
That's, you know, that was her passion.
and those around her. I mean, it wasn't just her family, but just her immediate circle.
She wasn't concerned with anything beyond that. It was quite interesting.
And she was passionate in that love, just dedicating herself to that.
I don't know if that's an okay answer.
I think that's a perfect answer. Yeah. But why does she use that word and you use words like
service and spirituality?
Is there a space in between those two things?
Because I'm kind of intellectual.
Oh, okay.
I don't know.
Because I think love, it seems so sappy and it seems so vague.
It's such a big word.
It's like God.
It's like, let's talk about God, you know?
Right.
What does that mean?
What does love mean?
Because love could mean so many things.
But I think you're also talking about something that's very pragmatic in her case, right?
Yeah.
Her love was very much about Well, a service, too.
Actually, I think that's what service is.
Service is acting in love, or from a place of love, as opposed to other kinds of actions, which come out of maybe selfishness or goal orientation.
So, what I see in her story, and in so many people in my life, is moving from that feeling and acting on it.
Literally cooking and cleaning and taking care of us.
I remember just that support she gave me.
Literally keeping my body alive.
And I think about when I go back to my first yoga teacher in my 20s.
Her name was Kazuko Onodera.
It was just such another important figure for me that I feel like I'm just trying to reconnect with now.
And I've been thinking about what she did for me.
It was during my AIDS activist years and I had lost hope completely.
I was grief stricken and depressed.
And she just literally fed me.
She started teaching me how to cook.
We would garden together.
I'd go to her for yoga classes and I would spend the day in her garden and kitchen.
And it was like nourishment and care and love.
And I think that's what I've, my greatest teachers have shown me that by loving me and caring for me and teaching me that I need to do that.
And actually as a parent, I saw, I saw my capacity for that differently than I had before.
It's, you know, when you're in the role of parent and you have like an infant crying in the middle of the night, you don't think, How much are they paying me?
Just get up and feed them or change their diaper.
Yeah.
Tivana Heyman, thank you so much for taking the time.
