Rediscovering Citta: Vignettes on Violence and Healing in Life and Commercial Yoga Spaces

Abstract

I have spent most of my life fighting for breath. It is hard to connect and fall in love with breath, the very life force of a person’s being, when you are busy every moment of every day fighting for it. When you are this structurally vulnerable, healing is near impossible because you are constantly bombarded by violence. I am a large built six-foot Black man who spent the first three and a half decades of his life disconnected and disembodied. I felt purposely separated from myself. Numb for the sake of survival, sober, but inebriated with disassociation just to make it through the day. This is an intentional and well-calibrated consequence of structural racism. I obviously did not know this as a child. Maybe I knew deep down inside, however like many young Black men I could not adequately put words to the emotional location of my experience. One thing I remember being confident enough to affirm (I was around the age of five), I did not feel “well” and things around me did not feel “sincere.”