On Wednesday night, on the day after the anniversary of George Floyd’s death, I attended this event called “A Bridge Between Grief and Hope,” which was a vigil and space-holding/-creating event that included breakout rooms in which you worked with your affinity group, which was of course in my case white.

I attended this event to support the effort overall, but specifically to support Michelle Cassandra Johnson, with whom I hope to collaborate through the Weeks Well platform, and Dr. Terry Jones and Lakshmi Nair, who were part of a powerful event Yoga Alliance held last year in the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s murder. They all want to use the conversation and practice of yoga to bring global society to a more just place.

In the breakout room, I learned a phrase called “elastic neutrality,” which is a state that our breakout room leader said she had herself just learned from another white woman. According to my understanding, it describes the state of mind and attitude when being in relationship with people of color. I’m still reflecting on this term today. Here’s what I think it means.

The idea that white people could start from a place of neutrality when tackling and taking in all the overwhelming issues of racial and social justice is at its core the right idea, but that we should be wiling to stretch and bend through that perspective of neutrality is even better. To be clear, it isn't that you’re neutral to the problems. To get to a neutral place and disavow the institutional and cultural racism that has benefitted you takes work. For white people, there is hopefully a lot of writing and conversation on this. As a white person, you have to define these privileges that have shaped you and then consciously embrace being in a mindset of accepting, without any pre-formed response, the BIPOC perspectives that by definition are truths you have never been able to take in or on.

To be elastic within a neutral state is to tune in and listen more deeply to these truths. And also these strategies and tactics. You have to stretch and therefore expand yourself and your perspective into the ideas, solutions, and deep, strong feelings and vision that BIPOC people necessarily should have prioritized by everyone for the creation of a better and more just world.

From an energetic, experiential, embodied and even etymological point of view, to be elastic is different than being “flexible,” a favorite word, of course, among modern-day yogis. To be elastic is to expand “spontaneously to fill the available space.”

My perspective, after sharing in this space with both people of color and white people in our breakout room on Wednesday night, is that “flexibility” is itself, ironically, too neutral, in that it means to bend without breaking. It’s less alchemical, less transformative, than being elastic, which seems to me that in being, you are inviting the opportunity to expand your own self with this movement and these people. That’s the only way that real change is going to happen. White people cannot be neutral to this cause, and at the same time, we have to fill all the available space we are given by BIPOC folks in order to be legitimate allies. For this week at least, I am glad to have been exposed to this phrase and to continue reflecting on how I can be in this state of mind to be of service to and influence in the larger conversation.