Honoring the Exquisiteness of this Effort

I wanted to write from the amorphous abyss of the unknown, because this is the realm of Yoga.

And so, here I write. From the early morning, waning moon darkness of the day following Election Day. I write from the very bottom of the exhalation of election day, the kumbhak, where all breath has been pressed out of the body, but before the new breath has begun its journey into the nostrils.

As predicted, ballots are still being counted and there is not yet a winner.

We don’t know what is going to happen.

There is an impulse somewhere that tries to conjure immediate scenarios by scrawling on a wipe board with phantom electoral votes.

I understand this impulse, but I have lived through elections before as well as moments (now memories) where I wished I could speed things up and know what would happen. I wished I would know exactly how all of my efforts “paid off” or didn’t.

Yoga teaches us to honor the efforts.

When Krishna counsels Arjuna in the center of the battlefield– “Dharmakshetra, Kurukshetra…”(in the field of Dharma, in the field of Kuru)– he reminds him that he must do his dharma without attachment to any outcomes. Arjuna was faced with an impossible choice: go to war against his cousins, his teachers, his extended family or be killed by the same people and watch his immediate family be killed. Every outcome seemed utterly hopeless for Arjuna, warrior.

Yoga teaches us to respect the unknown.

Yoga Sutra 1:12 says that stillness (nirodhah) comes from many years of effort (abyhasa) without attachment to outcome (vairagya). We can do everything on the checklist and still uncertainty prevails.

Now, in this space before we know the next move, I want to acknowledge and lift up all that I’m noticing right now that is filling me with life and hope.

• I see so many of us who have never before been active in electoral politics, reclaiming this aspect of their public lives getting involved: not just by voting, but by phone-banking, text-banking, having long conversations with people about the issues that are important to them (and really listening);
• I see us widen our perspective, learning our blind-spots and committing to including everyone in our vision of the future;
• I see so many of us reclaiming our public lives by creating, supporting and being supported by mutual aid projects;
• I see so many of us developing their own political ethic: around their own values, their lived experiences and current observations;
• I see us becoming skillful in our efforts to understand those whose opinions differ from our own;
• I see us gathering to discuss the things that truly matter in our lives;
• I see us identifying design flaws in our system of government and skillfully developing strategies to learn from the flaws and fix them;
• I see us loving in public.
  

And this is not the end.

Let us learn from these moments and adapt in ways that honor connection and liberation.

This is a beginning. Every moment a new beginning.

Inhale, exhale.

Keep going.

Stay in the love.