At its core, yoga is about freedom. Any teacher who speaks to students about their body in a way that leads to discovery, release, and grounding could be called a guru, literally, a lightness that dispels darkness.

Yoga has always been associated with this word: To do yoga in any form means to practice mind/body hygiene, and to practice means to try things for a period of time and achieve or observe certain consequences. This process goes on, almost always with a teacher or, at least, in a group. As human beings we are drawn to one another, and the person who says they have identified light might want to share that light. In the United States and around the world, many more people than ever before in history—women—are now able to do so.

To do yoga is to plumb the depths of the mind, of which the capacity is infinite; this is why yoga feels like freedom. It can feel bottomless, boundless. It’s worth practicing regularly because doing so teaches you how freedom, as well as other sensations like pleasure, pain, or avoidance, feel to you. A teacher’s job is to draw you to these places in both communion and community, and to give you space to experience them for yourself.

Yoga is moving the body in time and space while simultaneously following the path of the breath and therefore the mind.

Since it does feel like freedom, yoga is a boundary-buster. Letting go is so often what people say yoga feels like, but/and letting go implies the loss of something (call it darkness) to the revelation of something else (call it light), either in the form of an action or observation. We have to discharge or neutralize A in order to make space for B or anything else that takes the place of A. This is energy.

Energy is everywhere, so practicing yoga cannot be contained any more than anything else. COVID has offered us a sharp, relentless reminder that lived experiences of external, societal freedom are not the same. Institutional racism and oppression are in right in front of us, and they’ve been there a long time. Yoga practitioners and especially yoga teachers, who could be called guru, can no longer look at injustice as anything but un- or even anti-yogic. Justice and yoga now must be explicitly intertwined, bringing darkness to light, and vice versa. Practicing yoga today could even be considered the privilege of practicing justice.