We are love! (A short history of Labor Day and modern yoga)

In the United States, we celebrate Labor Day and workers’ rights in September. Anywhere else, the first of May (May Day) is famously the time for workers’ rights celebrations.

It has always been clear to me that the September holiday was a way to, pointedly, not celebrate workers’ rights at the same time as communist, socialist, and (now) even capitalist countries with strong labor unions. But I did not realize until quite recently that both holidays have their origin in the same uprising in May 1886 in Chicago.

This common origin feels comforting and somehow entirely right to me. Not the fact that everyone is celebrating something with roots in the United States, but rather that the commemoration of solidarity and collective action that we so studiously avoid in the United States (i.e. May Day) is actually in solidarity with us. It is love in action, directed at us, despite us.

How perfect is that!

It feels not unlike the entangled and complicated back-story of modern postural yoga: a series of actions, reactions, and counter-actions to colonialism and racial stereotyping.

In a crazy coincidence, the era of modern yoga is most consistently traced to another moment in Chicago in the late 1800s: Swami Vivikananda’s address to The Parliament of Religions in 1893. In the decades that followed his presentation, distinct yogic traditions were merged with military drills, gymnastics, and other movement practices, compelled by a drive to disprove racist biases and colonialist erasure.

And yet. Modern asana practice is movement with breath. Movement is how we focus the breath, focusing the breath is how we self-regulate, self-regulation is how we get to be truly present, and being truly present is how we love.

Despite ourselves.

Despite our history.

We are love.