The Yoga of Dual Power
spiritual practice and revolutionary praxis
When I was thirteen, I started doing yoga. I’m from Southern California, where you can’t swing a cat without hitting a dozen yoga studios or read a single article on wellness without seeing Twenty Different Poses to Unlock the Power of Your Pelvis, so it took a few years for it to become more than a physical practice to me. It took a few more years for me to understand that the physical practice and the spiritual practice are not separate things.
Yoga means yoke, it means union: between the material and spiritual, between the self we can define and the self that is infinite, between the actions we take and the authentic inspiration that moves through us.
I’ve been searching for God since I was ten. Perhaps the only driving urge of my being that pre-dates that search was a resolute commitment to justice. When I was seven, I watched George W. Bush become my country’s president after losing the popular vote to Al Gore. It bothered me, not just because my parents were upset, but because the numbers didn’t make sense. I was good at math as a kid, I liked numbers, and there was something fundamentally wrong to me about a man losing the popular vote but becoming president anyway. It wasn’t just. It literally didn’t add up.
