In Praise of Anger

I’m on the outs with one of my favorite yoga teachers, and I feel like a monster just for typing that sentence. She’s one of the rotating teachers for the Friday night Recovery Yoga class I’ve enjoyed for about a year. I’m not in capital-R Recovery for anything, but the sharing combined with yoga definitely got me through all the trauma therapy of last year. I’d always meant to try her women-only Trauma Sensitive Yoga classes, and last Sunday, I finally gave it a try.

Though I’m often ill-at-ease in the (Trump supporting) white suburbs of Philly, this particular space has almost always felt safe and welcoming to me, and if you’ve read me at all, you know that’s hard to come by. But when Nice Trauma Yoga Teacher started off the class with a message that was something like “Sometimes you’re called to stand up for what’s right, but make sure you’re calm and nice when doing so.” (I’m paraphrasing, I wish I could remember exactly what she said.) I felt a little betrayed by her and wondered if I should leave.

The Nice Trauma Yoga Teacher apparently didn’t know that women, survivors, LGBT folks, and people of color are CONSTANTLY being admonished to be calm, constantly being blamed for pain, harm, damage that was actually caused by our/their oppressors, who are NEVER asked to be calm, the straight white men whose anger is seen as righteous, romantic, troubled, worthy of compassion.

Still, she might not have known about all this, might not have known that tone policing is a thing, and I might just have been taking her advice the wrong way. I followed her directions though the poses and felt the good balance she’d always provided, tried some new poses and felt very proud of myself.

Then, instead of the usual quite reflection during shavasana, she read this. Fucking. Poem. By Max Ehrmann, a white man, in 1927.

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;

Go placidly?! THIS IS AMERICA!

Speak your truth quietly?! When will I know I’m quiet enough for you, dude?!

But worst:

Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.

In that moment, I went from feeling like a cared-for member of the class to knowing that deep down what my teacher would feel towards me is fear, maybe even contempt. I was so angry and unbalanced and hurt that I left as quickly and quietly as I could.

To tell women not to be loud, that loud people are bad.

To tell rape survivors they have to be nice to almost everyone, or else they don’t belong.

To tell a room full of survivors who trusted her to guide their bodies and care for their well-being to be quiet, to be careful what they say.

As if women, as if rape survivors, needed someone to tell us to be quiet, someone to tell us to stay under control lest we become vexations.

I went home and wrote her a compliment-sandwiched facebook message, saying this: my voice is one of the most important parts of my body. It has been my safety, my power, and my saving grace. I wouldn't feel welcome or safe in a place where my voice isn't respected and honored. On a wider scale, the idea of telling a room full of survivors to be quiet and polite borders on cultural gaslighting, and is deeply offensive to me.

She was kind and apologetic, but also equated anger with hate, something she was afraid to “poison herself with.” She invoked Dr. King, of course, and intimated that I couldn’t really be a yogi unless I, too, stigmatized anger.

This is where I tend to run into trouble with my spiritual quest, even one as individualized as yoga and meditation. You never know when it’s going to stop being about caring for bodies and souls and start being about controlling each other, about repression and oppression.

This exchange with the Nice Trauma Yoga Teacher might not have upset me so much if it hadn’t been the week of “walk up, not out” backlash/victim blaming and the week after I felt the real cold touch of evil in a facebook conversation. In an otherwise-very-productive conversation about gun control and the power of protest, a young friend of the family, someone I’d known since he was a baby, said this: “Black Lives Matter is a terrorist organization, it just is.”

Of course, I knew this was a thing people said, but I’d never heard it from someone I knew before. As I typed my pushback comment, I felt cold fear run through me, too horrified to yet be angry. I’ve known all along that racist media coverage and just plain hatred blots out ignorant people’s conscience and empathy, blinding them to the grief, the love, the power, and the strength of Black Lives Matter. I feel heartbroken for anyone who won’t get to feel the power of marching with that movement, or with others, because they have been convinced that protesting is mean.

Anger-shaming is a tool of sexual abusers, sure, but it’s also a tool of white supremacy, and that’s why I felt so deeply disturbed at my yoga teacher’s choice of poem. Even as I write this, I’m afraid I’ll get in trouble for it, that my anger makes me unworthy to be in a family, a community, a yoga class. I’m scared that it means that I’ll never really have a place in the world, but still, when faced with the NRA, with rape culture, with white supremacy, I can’t see anger as anything but a sane response to an insane situation. It’s not the only emotion I feel in my activist life (LOVE being the strongest one) but anger is a cherished and beloved guide.

So, as I look for more yoga classes and more wild and free ways to express my divinity, I just want to say thank you. If your anger is pushing you to call congress, to make beautiful or unbeautiful art or especially vexing art, if your anger helps you sign up for marches or just stay home and treat yourself like a treasure, THANK YOU for your anger. And THANK YOU for your work.