by Sub-Meditator Marcos

“Be the change AND use it to kick some arse” - Mahatma Guevara

Wisdom traditions and bodymind practices such as yoga, embodied approaches to leadership and meditation have been co-opted in service of the ruling corporate class. A radical alternative is now needed to what has become a Spiritual Industrial Complex (SIC). This article is a battle cry for guerrilla teachers in the awareness industry who no longer wish to prostitute themselves to the 1%.

The functions of the Spiritual Industrial Complex (SIC)

Warped wisdom traditions and body awareness practices are now serving a number of harmful functions. This may be hard reading if like me you’ve dedicated much of your life to this field, please stick with it, the second half of the article is about how we can become spiritual warriors in a meaningful way. In brief, the SIC can and often does:

Make us suckers who accept the suck

Make us suck more

Help only the 1% to get unsuck

Helps the 1% make our lives suck more

1. Makes us suckers who accept the suck

Warped wisdom traditions and body awareness practices can make life in a psychological and emotionally damaging, social unjust and isolating, and environmentally destructive world bearable. While well-intended they can perpetuates a system that needs change not toleration. Bodymind practices, particularly when twisted and packaged for the mass market, do not threaten the status quo but unwittingly support it by placating those it damages. If we are suffering from the state of the world we can either do something about it or mediate to feel better irrespective. Religion has always been the opiate of the masses but now the opiate of the middle classes is “spiritual but not religious”. McMindfulness meditation®, Shitram yoga© and other Bodymind Lite™ practices are organic prozac.

A wider context of Western consumer bodymind practices is the the Positive Psychology movement which has roots in nutty religious America and now expresses as a requirement to be optimistic no matter how bad things get - expressed eloquently in “smile or die!”. The head of the movement and president of the American Psychological Society Martin Seligman won a huge military contract uncontested after inspiring the CIA’s “learnt helplessness” torture strategies.

2. Makes us suck more

Many modern adaptations of bodymind systems focus us on the individual, and on personal gain through superstition. This stems from West-Coast US cultural dominance in the personal growth field (see here) and its place as another market product to be consumed means that bodymind practices are increasingly vehicles for narcissism, selfishness and vanity. This was first identified and named “spiritual materialism” - using spiritual practices in service of the ego - and is now the norm. See also this piece on spiritually transmitted diseases. “Yoga makes you skinny and hot” is the message on almost every flyer and website I see. The SIC is actively creating the unhealthy consumer culture it claims to cure.

SIC hyper-individuality diverts the energy of questioning individuals from external social change to internal change. This happened in the late 60’s and early 70‘s when the US West Coast “human potential” movement hijacked a politicised youth and sent them up their own arses. If bodymind practices were done in tandem or to support external change this would be admirable but it is usually offered instead of. The standard view is that if enough people can relax and get long hamstrings the world will be transformed irrespective of domination structures and systems. The incomplete sentence “be the change” is useless as a strategy for social justice or environmental sustainability: at no point in human history has personal example alone forced those abusing power to give it up. Gandhi also fucked shit up - massively disrupting the economic base of the British Empire. The warped wisdom of the SIC can be seen as a kind of “second matrix” - a pressure valve for the mainstream.

Another issue with bodymind practices politically is that they are usually structured like medieval Asian dictatorships. The implicit message in many classes is conform and obey an authority external to yourself. When was the last time you gave feedback to your Five Rhythms teacher or did yoga democratically?

What appears to be counter-cultural is not, it is part of the problem.

3. Help only the 1% to get unsuck

While watered-down SIC new-age bodymind practices to subdue the masses have proliferated, other awareness practices are mostly accessible to the elite with financial and cultural barriers blocking others. I had a moment recently where I saw this in yet another workshop full of white, middle-aged, middle-class corporate trainers and the wives of the 1%. Increasingly quality bodymind teachers prostitute* their services to the world’s abusers by only making them available to the highest bidder. Were they doing genuinely transformative work this might be a good thing (it’s the sick who need a doctor after all) but more often than not it’s just putting knives in the hands of dangerous children (see 4.). In a world where everything had a price, wisdom is just one more commodity to be traded, and those with money will get the biggest share.

4. Helps the 1% make life suck more

Bodymind practices are increasingly used to benefit the efficiency of psychopaths in power without changing either their fundamental attitudes and behaviours, or the structures and systems they benefit from. Teaching meditation to arseholes can just make them more efficient arseholes (or snipers). It is naive to think that powerful tools will always have a positive impact. I have also learnt working in business that there are many non-psychopaths in charge (I’d guess about 50% of the 1%) trapped in a kind of doublethink, horribly stressed and hooked on wealth and also victims of the system in a way. Causing distress causes discomfort in all but the psychopathic, alleviating this distress is not kind. Even of we take the perspective we are helping traumatised and dehumanised people feel again, this is little more than cruelty when they continue to operate a machine that retraumatises and dehumanises them and others. Note that even if wisdom traditions could make them happy the machine they operate does not stop. While humanising those in power can of course be beneficial - in fact I’d make the argument that helping those in power to feel themselves and therefore others and the planet is a vital PART of the solution - much more is needed for significant change. Teaching yoga to banker is not revolutionary.

Invalid Excuses

The following are excuses I have made myself and continue to hear in the field as reasons to continue supporting a harmful, unjust and environmentally destructive system. I’ve become recently become somewhat intolerant of my own and peer’s bullshit so excuse the cantankerous tone:

“I just help people”

No, you help people who hurt people

“I help everyone”

No, you mostly help those who have the $$$

“The work always have a positive influence”

Don’t be so naive. Read Zen at War.

“I change things from the inside”

Really? You may help people get happier but does that change the systems and structures?

“I can’t afford it”

You mean, “I’m not willing to make any sacrifice at all in my lifestyle to live in accordance with my ethics”. It refers to greed not necessity. With very few exceptions most of us are not breadline. Cut down on trips to India and save some carbon too :-)

Guerrilla action for bodymind teachers:

So what’s can I do? Can we fight for something instead of just against how things currently are?

First, I think an honest holding up of our hands and saying, “yes, I’m a part of this” is needed in the teaching community. I am far from free from blame and write this having recently started to wake up to the SIC. This is quite painful but for me now, anything else is living a lie. I encourage others to have the courage to take a hard look and make the transition to being “guerrilla” meditation teachers, yoga teachers, aikido teachers etc. If you’re tired of saving people from drowning and want to find out who’s pushing people in the water in get in touch. I would love a world where wisdom traditions are used in support of genuine social change. Where we meditate to support social action, and our social action is part of our spiritual practice. What would it be like if having the privilege of access to leading-edge bodymind technology we ensured accessibility to all, especially those on the front lines of social activism? What would it be like if we downed tools and refused to help those perpetuating abuse?

Here are some personal commitments that may also be helpful for others too. For my part I will:

Take the position that we live under an occupying force that does not have our best interests at heart, and that I am part of the resistance. My aim is not to accommodate or support a psychologically damaging, socially unjust and environmentally destructive system but to support those who will destroy it from within and without. The first shift is mindset. I have a choice between being a collaborator or being a trainer of real revolutionaries. No, not metaphorical spiritual revolutionaries, real integral ones who use the inside to benefit the outside and vice versa.

Find ways to make my work financially and socially accessible. No excuses. I may have to cut down on expensive soy cappuccinos. This has already started by designing an open-source peer-led and democratic personal development program based on 12-step.

Refuse to teach anyone with power unless I see a significant opening for meaningful change. No giving knives to already dangerous children.

Actively seek our change makers who would benefit from what I do

Design a radical embodiment course to highlight issues of social injustice

Design a leadership course specifically for radical groups and give it away

Continue psychological resilience work with NGOs

Cease supporting the mainstream SIC financially as a consumer

Incorporate a service elements into my courses and other aspects to discourage narcissism

Make the links between the embodied work I teach and politics explicit (see video links)

The term “spiritual warrior” can be taken much more literally than the normal Californian lameosity…including in ways I won’t be discussing publicly online ;-)

*NB: prostitution is used as an emotive analogy for selling that which is sacred and is not an attack on sex workers.

Video resources on the politics of embodiment

Deep Green Resistance - an inspiration

Climate change and Buddhism

When practice isn’t enough

Dance therapy for veterans

Africa Yoga Project

Aiki Extensions (martial arts for social change)

Body electric

Disembodied mess

Spiritual wanker

Consumerism and the body

Occupy Oneself

Anna Halprin

Embodied Nonviolence - Paul Linden

Body and gender in the media

Better Dead than TED

Wellbeing tips for those on the front lines

Environment and the body

Zen Peacemakers

Anti-fascist martial arts

Somatherapy

Who the hell am I talk like this?

In the spirit of self-obsessed personal development allow me the indulgence of sharing my own story here. I came to the beautiful bodymind practice of aikido while depressed and alcoholic while still part of an “educational” system I found a repulsive tool of social control. In aikido I found meaning and dived-in, eventually becoming a full-time live-in aikido student in several countries. My life changed when I became involved with Aiki Extensions an organisation that used aikido in peace projects in the Middle East, The Slums of Brazil and East Africa. After some years living put of a bag in various areas of conflict I came home burnt-out and traumatised. I got myself together and started employing what I’d learnt in the bodymind field to organisations founding a business training company. In the last seven years I have been of some use in major multi-national corporations, in well known charities, with Occupy and even the Army of Sierra Leone and The House of Lords I travel to areas of conflict with our resilience training initiative. In this time I have seen the popularity of mindfulness, yoga and related disciplines sky rocket, first to my glee and now with concern. I think my industry has reached the point when we have moved from helping the sick get better to helping them make everyone else sick, hence this blog.