Shared Language, Terms
“Yoga means to “yoke.” It means to move into alignment and union with ourselves and one another. As we practice yoga, we bring together things that may be in opposition such as our values and how we show up in the world. We practice moving into union to realign and integrate the different parts of who we are to remember our connection and relationship with all beings.” -Michelle Cassandra Johnson
To get familiar with terms, it is recommended to read Skill in Action: Radicalizing Your Yoga Practice to Create a Just World by Michelle Cassandra Johnson section on Shared Language. In this book you may become familiar with the following terms: Culture, Dominant Culture, Prejudice, Implicit Bias, Discrimination, Oppression, Internalized Racism, Privilege, White Supremacy, Race, Social/Institutional Power, System, Racism, Patriarchy, Individualism, Colonialism, Suffering, Spiritual Bypass, Harm, Liberation, and more!
Watch/listen to the talk with Michelle Cassandra Johnson on “Skill in Action” and read some basic terms terms below to get familiar with the language used.
Basic Terms Defined
Wildness: Often defined as disorderly, unruly, not submitted to restraint, training, or regulation—wildness is not out-of-control delinquency. It is embodied, resilient, and wise coherence that has an always present natural order if we can be vulnerable enough to risk exploring a way of being that is outside of our conditioning and more true to our nature.
- “To be wild is to be emotionally sovereign and when you’re emotionally sovereign you are informed by your own emotion about how you are relating to your perceptions and the world around you, rather than your emotional state being manipulated by any number of things.” -Ren Hurst
Domestication: A state of learned, taught, bought, or forced helplessness. Domestication is when we interrupt someone’s natural emotional processes in order to control them.
- “A synonym that we use for domestication is to tame, but the other one that I seem to recall hearing on more than a few instances is “to break” and it seems like that at the core of this domestication is a breaking of the human spirit, the breaking of all animal spirit and it’s the severance of the self from the soul.” -Ren Hurst
Colonization: The action or process of establishing control over people through force, domination, and power. Settler-colonization is the removal and erasure of peoples of culture in order to take land for use.
- To un-domesticate is to de-colonize is to re-wild.
Trauma: Trauma is not caused by the event (or events) themselves. Trauma is caused by the involuntary biochemical responses that occur in the body as a response to the event, or incompletion of the event.
- “Trauma is an interruption in emotional development; not what happens to us or things that interrupt us even though those cause interruptions. Trauma is a prolonged unresolved interruption in emotional development. Many things cause trauma. Anytime we interrupt a young animal, human or otherwise emotional experience, in order to control their behavior we are domesticating them.” – Ren Hurst