Post-Election Reflections
In 2016, I was lying on my bed in San Marcos, Texas watching the election returns come in. I updated my Facebook status saying, “So. Much. Red.” I went to bed knowing that Donald Trump would be elected President of the United States. The following morning I greeted a group of depressed, angry, shocked yoga students and, instead of teaching asana, I put on music— Baba Olatunji, Florence & the Machine, Patti Smith. We danced, screamed, stomped our feet and shook our fists at the gods until we were able to offer fears, prayers, and chants to the puja fire.
It helped.
Like most prayers and practices, the help that came wasn’t a change in any outer outcome. The help was in the change in consciousness that happens when energy moves through the body and is amplified by the shared rituals of prayer, song, and dance and empowered by tears making their way outward from the cracks and crevices of a broken heart.
Last night, one of my friends texted me saying, “I feel like we are in San Marcos again.” She had been in the room next door to mine in 2016, helping me with a 5-day asana intensive. Another student texted me yesterday morning saying, “I’m flashing back to 8 years ago. Wishing I could be with everyone, burning my fears and crying my heart out and listening to Patti Smith.” In last night's writing group, a woman shared that while she was disappointed in the election’s outcome, she was “not surprised and it felt familiar after 2016.”
And while I, too, am feeling the echoes of the 2016 election, I find myself wishing for the small solace that came then from knowing that Hillary Clinton had actually won the popular vote. I must confess, the results of this election — in the face of Trump’s first term, the Covid-19 debacle, the insurrection, the numerous indictments, felony convictions, threats of violence and the Project 2025 playbook— feel much harder to bear. From my vantage point, black women and black men did their job at the polls, while white men and women most certainly did not, which is another hard truth to bear.
So, yeah. All that and more.
Yesterday, I had no shared ritual of dance and song, but I did go to the gym. I showed up to teach some back bends online. I made a bunch of phone calls to friends and family. I followed my food plan. I walked in the woods. I met with my women’s writing group. And, it helped. Again, not the kind of help that rewrites history, but the kind of help that comes from movement, moments of shared kindness, deep listening, and basic self-care strategies. I plan to proceed much in the same way today. And the day after that. And, the day after that. (You know, the teaching… “Everything you need to know about practice is on the shampoo bottle—lather, rinse, and repeat.”)
I grew up with parents who used to say, “Well, soon the other shoe is going to drop,” always cautioning us to not rest easy in periods of good fortune. Maybe because they were raised by people who endured and survived the Great Depression, maybe because both of their families experienced traumas and misfortunes galore. At any rate, as a result, I have always felt a sense of cautiousness in my optimism and understanding that both good and bad will come and come to pass. Last night, I said to Kelly, “I guess that shoe finally fell.” Then I realized that it’s early days in terms of how the new administration will roll out what I perceive as the madness of their plans. So, maybe it is more accurate to say that the proverbial shoe has begun it’s descent. I am not hopeful about the consequences of its landing.
But I do know that moments of expansion are always possible. I used to have a much more simplistic relationship to spirituality and faith than I do now, characterized by a kind of transactional vantage point that had at its heart an assumption that prayer “worked” and that blessings would rain down in the form of a turn of circumstances toward the recognizably good and the immediately preferable. Whatever vestiges of that child-like perspective that were left in my psyche were worn away in the pandemic, as the death toll mounted in the face of prayer vigils, lit candles, and people of all faiths were swept into a global suffering. And, weirdly enough, today over half of voting America does feel like God answered their prayers. So there is also that.
What I think now is that expansion- a movement toward depth, compassion, care, dignity, understanding and Love is always possible. Do I think it is probable? No. Do I think it is easy? No. Do I think it is likely? No. Am I always able to access it? Also, no.
And yet, just this morning, I woke earlier than usual and was unable to go go back to sleep. As I do every morning, I meditated. Moment by moment my mind settled, my heart softened, my breath deepened. When my timer went off, I wanted to write more than doom scroll. Expansion. And this experience is not a one-off or a fluke. In the laboratory of my practices, I have found consistent results— meditation, chanting, prayer, writing, asana, walking, help move me toward an expansion of consciousness. And somehow, this understanding feels more useful than an image of God as some kind of wish-fulfilling tree, granting or withholding perceived favorable outcomes. Today I have faith in the movements of consciousness from contraction toward expansion, from mean-spiritedness toward kindness, from self-centeredness toward empathy, from resentment toward forgiveness and from isolation toward connection. I have faith in the many forms of love that expand my humanity and that, in so doing, expand my capacity to reference my perspectives, perceptions, and actions in something other than outer circumstances only.
So yeah, like one of my teachers wrote yesterday, we are going to need each other in ways we can’t yet imagine. And as the forces of contraction mount, moments of expansion and and toward love will be all the more essential. May that force be with you and with us all. And may each of us have the grace of good company in the midst of these uncertain times.
Keep the faith. More soon.
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