A friend of mine recently began teaching community yoga classes after completing her yoga teacher training. I asked her how it was going, and she shared with me a story that definitely made me think, although I’ve not been able to come to any conclusions.
Photo by graywacke/A Landing a Day
The other night she decided to incorporate a “black and white breathing” technique into the class that she had learned from one of her teachers.
The trick is to simply imagine negativity in the form of thick black smoke, and to breathe it out on the exhales while bringing in pure, white light on the inhales.
She loves the simplicity of the technique and thinks it feels great.
At the end of her last class, she was asking for feedback on what others thought about it and someone said, “The breathing exercise was racist.” She was shocked, and got self-admittedly defensive once the students had left. She processed the event with several other friends, most of whom agreed that it was indeed a racist exercise, and one of whom said that he felt embarrassed for her.
I didn’t really know what to make of the story at first, and made the suggestion that she use the color green instead. Green is the color I used to use with purification breathing up until a few months ago when I found a Buddhist purification breathing technique that involves green, blue and pink breathing in addition to the black and white. It never occurred to me that there would be situations where colors would be inappropriate. I had, however, thought about the fact that the traditionally masculine color, blue, was associated with cleansing the masculine channel in the body and the pink with the feminine. I wasn’t offended by it, however.
My friend seems to have come to the conclusion that she does not want to cause harm, and therefore does not think she’ll be using the technique again in that form. Does she just instruct them to exhale negativity, in whatever color it wants to be? Does she choose different colors?
Walking away from the conversation, I began to think about depictions of the “dark goddess,” or the “Black Madonna.” Kali the destroyer is almost always shown with dark skin. The dark goddess, in my understanding at least and in her generic and specific forms, has been depicted as such just by way of contrast to the light goddesses. She is in the dark, hidden, ungraspable, mysterious, unconscious.
When did the dark goddess, or the Black Madonna, become evil? When did black become evil? These aren’t questions I pose because I need answers, really, but I’m pretty fascinated by all of this, and a little overwhelmed at how complex it all seems, and figured I’d post just these few words about it to see if we might be able to get some conversation going. There’s definitely something there about the unconscious/primitive-dark-evil continuum, but I’m curious as to what your thoughts might be.
Is it insensitive to use something like black and white breathing in a class? Is it an example of white privilege to ignore it, or to be insensitive to it even being an issue? What are the possible ramifications to ancient teachings?
I mean, I’m always harping about how religion has to adapt in order to remain relevant. I’m also clear that “masculine” and “feminine” refer to energies rather than genders. But at the same time I’m at a loss when it comes to making judgment calls about some of these things, especially when it comes to questions of race. I’ve always chosen to consider myself “human” far more so than my Swedish, Mexican and Lebanese ancestry, but I’m also aware that I was born into a level of privilege that makes that decision far easier.
So I’m a bit out of my league here, but open to learning. And I’m highly curious about what others have to say.
One cannot err if one strives to help others feel respected, seen, heard and appreciated. One need not understand, nor agree, nor relate to another’s way of experiencing the world in order to adjust in a way that helps the other feel respected, seen, heard or appreciated. It’s ok to be surprised at times, by how others experience the world, but now that it is known, why not adjust?
I’ve have heard of a similar breathing exercise: “I breathe in light, I breathe out joy.”
Oddly enough, neither the light nor joy are “bad.” I like the idea of taking in goodness, and generating goodness for others, too.
I have liked that breathing exercise as I have followed it on a Kabbalah meditation CD I once had but in their exercise I was breathing in clear pristine fresh healing light and breathing out sooty, smoky, chunky exhaust fumes.
I think the metaphoric black and white is innocent enough but since the world has been ruled by white elitist’s for so many centuries it probably is wise to take that heritage into consideration for our analogies.
In truth though black hated cowboys does not always mean bad anymore. The good and bad are much more complex these days. We white people often fuck our skin up by trying to be darker – So I cant really imagine getting too caught up in the political correctness debate to that extent either.
abc123: I really like your thoughts on the matter, both in regard to the idea of adjusting when we can adjust if it is compassionate and respectful to others, as well as the idea of taking in goodness and putting out goodness. That said, I also understand that it can help to put a visual metaphor to the process when we find ourselves needing to release something that is or feels negative/destructive to us.
Yes, our shadow is part of us and it’s part of out respective journeys to integrate it (there’s that connotation of darkness again!). But sometimes we take on the shadows and pain of others — and releasing that is an important step.
Anyway, I’d emailed Amanda Moreno some initial thoughts I’d had after editing her post for the blog here, and thought I’d post them as a comment:
Given that black smoke is usually smoke emanating from something burning — especially things with impurities or a fuel like coal — I’m not so sure the choice of “black smoke” is racist. There are all kinds of examples of things that are impure that are black in nature — blackheads, decayed vegetation, the burned crap underneath the burners of an electric stove…..
I suspect the correlation of “black smoke” with “negativity” pre-dates questions of race in this case. In fact, I wonder if those correlations with natural black impurities/dirt/etc in nature contributed to the biases in ancient history against those with black skin?
So, coming back into the modern, upper-middle-class liberal American yoga class: are people getting so sensitive to racism (and its perception) that they can’t see any kind of dark/light duality in terms of anything besides race?
Or: is it actually that we’re seeing how it’s time for us to revise our color-based metaphors to better reflect our understanding of how harmful the black/white polarity has become?
If we go with that second option, how do we use other colors without running into other loaded situations? For example, “red” could be misconstrued as racist against American Indians, and “yellow” against Chinese (or other Asians)…and “red” and “blue” have been co-opted by politics; so does that render the masculine/feminine even more offensive than the gender stereotyping of colors?
Anyway, I guess instead of using colors at all, she could just say “smoke=negative/light=positive,” without any descriptors. Then let each individual’s imagination fill in what that smoke looks like.
Definitely a thought-provoking situation!
was thinking that it might be that this exercise brought up some fear – and that it was expressed through the accusation of racism. It can be pretty challenging to breathe in black/negativity and breathe out white/positivity . It’s similar to the Tibetan Buddhist exercise Tonglen – which is really powerful. Thanks for this stimulating piece, Amanda.
Lizzy — I believe the exercise Amanda M. describes is the opposite: breathe the black/negativity *out*, and breathe the light/positivity *in*. Though I imagine that for some people, even the idea of imagining blackness/negativity emanating from them could bring up some fear.
In either case, the idea of fear coming up and being projected as racism makes a lot of sense to me!
Of course! makes much more sense (my excuse is that it was early Monday morning). Thanks for setting me straight, Amanda. .
😉 No worries, Lizzy! I had to go back and double-check that *i* was not the one who’d revered things! Monday mornings can be like that.
Ha ha! Cheers, dear Amanda!
Perhaps invite each person to personalise the negativity – each person feels and breathes in their negative feelings/experiences and breathes out compassion. (this is Lizzy’s Tonglen exercise). Or breathes in the void and breathes out white light – the void as absence of light rather than ‘black’?
Sometimes these sorts of happenings feel frustrating – I want to cry ‘ Please just take it that I mean no harm or disrespect even if I appear that way’
They feel frustrating to me too, Pam. 🙂
Hi Amanda,
I see your logic, but feelings do not tend to be based on logic, in many cases.
It calls to mind the old saying, “Would you rather be right, or happy?”
But here is another color that might work — grey. Unless it offends people with grey hair, of course. But you could say, “I breathe in light and I breathe out grey smoke.” Hmm.. maybe charcoal? I breathe in light, I breathe out charcoal-colored smoke.
I still like the “breathe in light, breathe out joy” the best.
Is the YinYan symbol racist?
Bingo, Lizzy. I think you are on to something.
If there is power in the vibration of these colors to work energetically in the mind and body, don’t dilute it, hold up the mirror. Teach it.
The gift to the new yoga teacher is not that she has to modify her sharing of ancient teachings for contemporary sensitivities. That’s crazy making. Truth is always going to offend someone. The gift is that she gets to drop more deeply into the teachings for herself, integrate them, and thus discover how to teach from personal.
I am old and easily get my Kali kicked up. Thanks for sharing this story Amanda. It’s good stuff.
“I am old and easily get my Kali kicked up.” Ha! I love this. I also love the reminder that truth is always going to offend someone, and perhaps that offense or dissonance provides an opportunity for conversation.
Always learning…
Ha ha! Love your example of the YinYan symbol, Diva Carla. “The gift is that she gets to drop more deeply into the teachings for herself, integrate them, and thus discover how to teach from personal. ” So agree with you. But I also think that the yoga teacher will learn a lot from this experience – as good teachers care a lot about how their students react to them (as she did ), and learn from it it may be that the breathing exercise would work wonderfully later in the course, when the students have got to know each other and their teacher.
Dear Amanda,
The sensitivity expressed by those objecting to the use of color in the breathing exercise may be a positive sign of growing discrimination (in the GOOD sense!) in taste among the populace.
There is a new book out which has clear insights into the Black Madonna, Earth mythology, etc.
http://goldenaer.com/Underworld_&_Archetypes_Fully_Illustrated.html
Thank you for the interesting article!
Thanks for the link to the book! Looks fantastic.
I think there’s a distinction between “black and white” and “dark and light”. Even just shifting from the former to the latter might shift how your friend’s breathing technique is received. Just a thought. Very practical, I know, but perhaps it would make a difference.
The breathing exercise used by your yoga teacher/friend is a familiar one, of Eastern origin, I believe (although I learned to exhale grey plumes of toxic energy and inhale white, fluffy, cleansing cloud-like air). The branding of her imagery as racist seems both harsh and phony, and I’m as arch-liberal as you can get, but there are studies showing children as young as six months old preferring a white-skinned doll to a black-skinned one, even when the baby is African-American. How can this be?
Research into the limbic, or “reptilian” brain–the oldest portion of our thinker, where primitive fight-or-flight response is triggered–has led some to conclude that a subconscious fear of the dark is rooted in our earliest collective memories, when a shadow crossing our path meant that something swimming above us, or stalking us from behind, meant we were about to be eaten. Switching our neural-response pathways from the limbic to the pre-frontal cortex is a purely biological explanation of the ascension process, and we’re probably doing it, more or less, right now.
Nevertheless, Amanda, you’ve asked an enormously important question: when did we begin to associate dark/black with evil?
Being a daughter of the South and descendant of slave owners, I went in search of that answer many years ago. At first, my motive was to purge some uncomfortable white guilt, but later, it took on a spiritual quest to find the root of racism. Along the way, I found the Calvinistic base of apartheid and paired it with patriarchal misogyny. Bingo. It’s all about fear.
The deliberate act of conflating dark/danger with the Feminine was a result of religio-cultural-sexual politics–the vagina being a scary, threatening cave to the fearful male ego. Misogyny goes hand-in-hand with racism, goes hand-in-hand with all fear-based, ignorance-laced “otherism,” ad infinitum.
That may be why most women I know are far more courageous, by nature, than most men I know: women embody the symbol of mythic power, a vagina. It’s no big deal to us, but to many men, it’s … well, it’s more than a body part.
Misogyny and racism may simply be a puerile, unreasoning limbic response to generalized fear combined with an overweening ego, and that combination can be found in both men and women. Whatever. They’re both primitive, left-over survival instincts–as irrational and unyielding to factual logic as they are driving the engines of Mordor evil. The sooner we grow up and beyond all this subconscious fear–literally rewire our brains–the better, because it accounts for most of the pain and suffering on the planet.
Thanks for asking that question. It needs to be asked a lot, and widely.
Fascinating studies you mentioned – I haven’t come across those.
My days as a “social sciences” undergrad proved one thing to me – that although I found my classes on racism and gender inequality to be interesting, the theories became too convoluted and complicated for even my mind to handle – which is kind of hilarious to me because I thrive off of the unexplainable and conceptual. What I took away from them was a basic understanding that our economic and social systems are based on slavery to such an extent that we oftentimes can’t see it. I’ve always been grateful that there are people who *can* tackle those subjects (much as I’m grateful for physicists and mathematicians – I can’t stand that stuff).
Your comment made my thoughts run in several different directions, but the one I’m pulled towards at this moment has to do with what I see as the difficulty of moving through victimization. I agree that the sooner we “grow up” beyond the fear, the better, but at the same time it’s difficult to gauge the extent to which political correctness and/or sensitivity are appropriate — I suppose it’s a personal decision. Y’all have shared some interesting perspectives, and I thank you for that. keep ’em coming, if you will.
‘..it’s difficult to gauge the extent to which political correctness and/or sensitivity are appropriate..’
?Perhaps again to put oneself in the mix as you are that way you can qualify/reply to the concerns of others as they happen
xxxp
…as you are and also as ‘awarely’ as one can
I found your comment so fascinating, Jeannine.
Amanda – no time to say much – but wanted to post this link, as the whole issue of racism (and free speech) came up very strongly recently, over an award that was given to Charlie Hebdo:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/29/writers-join-protest-charlie-hebdo-pen-award
This black/white terminology poses a different, yet similar problem for me; I am part of a spiritual practice that uses “black” to express the idea of spiritual protection, or absorption. The “black” isn’t something I want to breathe out, as I call on it for protection and absorption purposes on a regular basis. No need to use colors at all to express the idea of incorporating vs. releasing; holding space for people, to me, isn’t about projecting one’s own perceptions onto what things “should” look like. This was a good wake-up call for your friend, and honestly, I’m glad to hear she was “shocked”–this means she’s actually paying attention. She’ll be a more skilled facilitator in the future as a result, and that’s a great thing.
I just can’t get past the initial “It’s racist.” Racism itself is black and white. People, however, are not. Obviously, to the students in the class and to others, the word “black” means “black people,” but I still think it’s worth questioning the use of those descriptors AND to strive to be sensitive to the sensitivity of others around the connotations these words carry. As a teacher, I would honor that I’d transgressed the latter, while maintaining my affiliation to the former. There’s a difference between insensitivity and rejection of the common parlance because of its limitations, but since that difference is impossible to discern from the outside, it’s only fair to respect that the words might upset those who are still using them with those meanings. Am I being too black and white here?
I found this article on white privilege (and male and other privilege) useful and interesting:
http://amptoons.com/blog/files/mcintosh.html
Wow, serennu, great article. I think I have a lot to learn. Food for thought for a long time to come.