Presence with pain

Yoga is about presence: with the self, with the community, with the world.

And there is absolutely, completely, no-doubts-about-it, no way to be present right now without being present with the horrors we are watching happening real-time in Gaza.

Presence with pain is deeply uncomfortable. It requires us to discern our own part in the suffering around us. It asks us to engage with how our lives and choices — not those of others — contribute to the abuses we see. It demands that we give up the comfort of distance. Ultimately, it demands that we change ourselves, not that we ask others to do so. In short: presence rejects judgement but requires discernment.

This, I have found, is the hardest bit for most of us. We want to judge, or we do it without thinking. We set up an “us and them” dichotomy that allows us to believe we’d never have to change. But we are all in this together. There is just the “us” that is all of us.

What I am saying is not that both sides to a conflict are always equally right, as a value proposition. It can never be right to bomb and starve children. It can never be right to harm others because of who they are or what they believe. These things are crystal clear. Others require us to hold several, apparently contradictory, truths at the same time. Most demand that we look into ourselves to identify where we too are like those we want to judge. We too at times find it hard to see the humanity in everyone, especially those we don’t agree with.

But we all have the capacity to love, and it starts by loving ourselves enough to recognize where we contribute to suffering and harm, and to hold that reality with discernment and accountability, with commitment to change. It starts by valuing love over punishment and being “right.”