The Buddha tasked a young monk to go to the river. “Sit there until you have heard all the water has to teach.” And so the monk sat, silently staring at the water, hearing the burble, asking it to share its wisdom. Many days into his meditation, a small monkey scampered by him, jumping into the water. The monkey splashed and frolicked, laughing with joy. The monk returned to the Buddha in tears. What did the monkey understand that he did not? The Buddha smiled and said, “You were just hearing. The monkey actually listened.”
I was thinking about this story recently when a former yoga student reached out to me to voice some concerns. She said that while she really enjoyed my (free) online pandemic yoga classes, she was increasingly put off by my social media presence, specifically my daily Instagram Story. If you follow it, then you know it’s a mix of educational and inspirational: studio events, motivational quotes, funny memes, animal reels, miniatures videos, and political or social justice content. It’s that content she is so bothered by.
“We live in America. You are free to believe as you believe,” she wrote. “But while you as an individual can think whatever you want, it’s not really a good business tactic to so publicly stand on one side of the fence. Talking about these things (and I can assume from context that by these things, she means systemic racism, LGBTQ rights, abortion, income inequality, and climate change, to name a few) is, in her words, divisive. Her passive-aggressive postscript stated, “ALL lives matter.”
I hear this more than you might think. For the most part, Americans still believe that their churches or spiritual communities should avoid addressing social and political issues. These topics make people uncomfortable and many are coming to the yoga mat (or the church pew) to avoid feeling uncomfortable, to feel solace and ease in their mind and body.
Let me be clear. I believe that, on the most basic, molecular level, we are all one. I also believe we are not, on any societal level, equal. When people say, “all lives matter,” they too often mean that “some lives matter more than others.” Any spiritual or philosophical community that isn’t asking us all to confront our own biases and shortcomings isn’t actually fulfilling its purpose. If we aren’t a little uncomfortable, we just aren’t paying attention.
She is hearing without truly listening. Like the misguided monk, no amount of meditation will fill this woman’s heart with joy or compassion. They are both practicing what’s called spiritual bypassing, where one uses their staunch beliefs to avoid the truth. It’s a way to rise above what feels like shaky ground, thinking about living without actually doing so. The more they are confronted with a different view, the deeper they dig in their heels.
On a systemic level, the statement “all lives matter,” isn’t wrong in the absolute sense, but it serves to perpetuate systemic harm and operates as a means of avoiding the pain of truth and understanding. Spiritual bypassing is propagated by plenty of well-meaning people. But it’s spiritual abuse when we disregard the needs of any under-represented group. It occurs when spiritual ideals get elevated to the realm of absolute truth in such a way that our real, lived experience gets denied. We say one thing in the pew but act differently when we’re asked to question our own biases. Saying positive vibes only is a head-in-the sand approach to living that assumes the world is always a positive place (um, it isn’t). Saying we are all one ignores the ignoble truth that, by any social definition, we just aren’t yet.
Everybody wants enlightenment, but nobody wants to do the dishes.
If we want to understand water, we need to get wet. The river is probably going to be cold. It might be infested with snakes or slimy things that seem to grab at your ankles. We are definitely going to get tired of treading water. But if we want to truly live, to live in a place of gratitude instead of grasping ignorance, we’re gonna have to jump in.
