Episode 06 - How Do the Yamas and Ahimsa (Non-Violence) Guide Us in Everyday Living? featuring Dianne Bondy
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Please enjoy this excerpt featuring Dianne Bondy on ahimsa, stereotypes around aging, and a radical ask.
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SHOW NOTES
How Do the Yamas and Ahimsa (Non-Violence) Guide Us in Everyday Living?
Featuring Dianne Bondy | ERYT 500 | Dianne Bondy Yoga | Author of Yoga For Everyone
Self-Love is a Revolutionary Act
Dianne Bondy is a social justice activist, author, accessible yoga teacher, and the leader of the Yoga For All movement.
Her inclusive approach to yoga empowers anyone to practice—regardless of their shape, size, ethnicity, or level of ability. Dianne is revolutionizing yoga by educating yoga instructors around the world on how to make their classes welcoming for all kinds of practitioners.
A Change Agent in Modern Yoga
Dianne’s commitment to increasing diversity in yoga has been recognized in her work with Pennington’s, Gaiam, and the Yoga & Body Image Coalition, as well as in speaking engagements at Princeton, Duke, University of Buffalo and UC Berkeley on Yoga, Race, and Diversity. Her writing is published in Yoga and Body Image Volume 1, Yoga Renegades, and Yes Yoga Has Curves.
A Master Yoga Teacher
Dianne is the author of the international best selling book, Yoga for Everyone (DK Publishing, Penguin Random House), co-author of Yoga Where Yoga Are, and a frequent contributor to Yoga International, DoYou, Yoga Girl, and Omstars. She has been featured in publications such as The Guardian, Huffington Post, Cosmopolitan, Mashable, and People.
IN THIS EPISODE:
Dianne and I discuss the Yamas and Ahimsa.
An overview of the five Yamas - ethical guidelines, self-regulating behaviors, restraints
ahimsa (non-violence), satya (truthfulness), asteya (not stealing), brahmacharya (moderation) and aparigraha (not hoarding)
Deep dive on Yoga Sutra 2.35, ahimsa, non-violence
Social Justice, Body Image and Antiracism. How to have the challenging conversations and explore important topics from others' perspectives.
Yoga’s call to stand up for civic action and specifically to call out the wrong things when you see it.
The connection of all five yamas to ahimsa.
Ahimsa and our inner critic and self-judgment.
How do we incorporate the yamas into everyday living?
LINKS
Find Dianne online at diannebondyyoga.com, yogaforalltraining.com, and yogaforeveryone.tv.
Connect with Dianne on social media
TRANSCRIPTS
Note: Please excuse any errors in the transcription.
Monica Phillips (00:41):
Hello and welcome. I'm here with the amazing Dianne Bondy, social justice activist, author, accessible yoga teacher, and the leader of the yoga for all movement. Welcome.
Dianne Bondy (00:52):
Thank you for having me Monica. It's an honor to be here.
Monica Phillips (00:56):
You led a workshop for the YogaWorks teacher training, which I got to be part of, and it was so beautiful. And I wanted to bring your words to more people. We're going to talk about the Yamas today in particular Ahimsa which we'll get into, but I want to share a little bit more about you because you have such a beautiful background and experience. You have an inclusive approach to yoga, to empower anyone to practice, which is so important to me. I teach beginners and I've had the privilege and honor of teaching people, their very first yoga class ever. I get to hold them and bring them into the mat.
Monica Phillips (01:28):
And I think of you when I teach them, I think like yoga is for everyone. And yoga is a gift that I get to share for those who are willing to come and practice. You have this really great inclusive approach of regardless of shape, size, ethnicity, level of ability. I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about yoga as we'll talk about that in a little bit, and then your revolution yoga by educating yoga instructors around the world on how to make their classes welcoming for all kinds of practitioners. We were talking a little bit about how in this post-COVID time, you've really helped a lot of yoga teachers move online because you've been doing it since 2012. And so even just allowing that accessibility, right, accessibility looks different now. Maybe not a wheelchair ramp, it's bandwidth. How do we get to participate? Your commitment to increasing diversity in yoga has been recognized in Pennington's, Gaiam, and the Yoga and Body Image Coalition.
Monica Phillips (02:23):
You also speak and have done a lot of speaking engagements for Princeton, Duke, University of Buffalo, and UC Berkeley on yoga, race and diversity. And your writing has been published in Yoga and Body Image volume 1, Yoga Renegades, and Yes, Yoga Has Curves. You have an awesome book - you have two books.
Dianne Bondy (02:39):
I do.
Monica Phillips (02:40):
For more than 20 years, you've been leading yoga revolution, empowering students to come to the mat as they are. And so we're going to talk about the inclusivity and leading systemic change within the yoga industrial complex. It sounds so exciting. A really good starting point and people who want to know more will have to find you at diannebondy.com and it'll be in all of the show notes.
Monica Phillips (03:01):
I want to talk about the Yamas with you and the Yamas are these ethical guidelines, self-regulating behaviors. And we also say restraints. There are five of them. So in the eight limbs of yoga, the Yamas come first and it's how do we live to the outside world? You can tell me more your version of that. And then it's Ahimsa (non-violence), Satya (truthfulness), Asteya (not stealing), Brahmacharya (moderation), and Aparigraha (not hoarding).
Dianne Bondy (03:36):
That's the tricky one. Yeah.
Monica Phillips (03:40):
Tell me about your work, how you see the yamas in your life.
Dianne Bondy (03:45):
Well, what I really led to that, looking at yoga as a system to actually change the world by first, reflecting on myself and how I show up in the world and what I want to share with the world. So for a long time, and I think we touched on this even just briefly, we've had this misconception, that yoga is a series of poses that we do on a mat in athletic gear. That's often highly sexualized or revealing or whatever. Like I've never seen a pair of yoga pants, or I don't very often, I shouldn't say never. I don't very often see a pair of yoga pants that aren't always sold to me as a second skin and bud sculpting and all these things. These are the things that we need when we're in, in a practice of getting to know ourselves and how we want to show up in the world.
Dianne Bondy (04:29):
So it was the first two limbs of yoga, the yamas, and niyamas spoke really, really deeply to my heart because it really spoke to why I was on the mat. I'm not on the mat to change my body. I'm on the mat to change my mind and to create an understanding, a larger understanding of the world, my impact on the world and how I can leave this place, this world, this community, the people around me, a better place than when I entered into it that I have a legacy of moving the world forward. And so the very first Yama - Ahimsa - nonviolence spoke to me. And the first time it actually clicked with me was in my first 200-hour teacher training. When my teacher, Linda McCalsky said, when you look at yourself in the mirror and you start picking yourself apart, that's Ahimsa.
Dianne Bondy (05:18):
So Ahimsa has to start at home first, because if you are comfortable with picking yourself apart, putting yourself down, being highly critical, whether it's of your intelligence, your looks or of your body, it gives you permission to be that way with other people so that when we see other people in media, we're quick to criticize what they look like or how they're behaving, because we do that for ourselves. So it becomes a projection of even our own self-loathing onto the world. And when she said that, that's when that kind of clicks for me, how much of our discrimination, our behaviors that caused violence and harm to other people are based in our own self-hate. And I have some theories and some feelings around, or some thoughts around that's how come we have these divisions around race and gender and sexuality. There's something that's deeply embedded in ourselves that we are unhappy with, or that we don't understand that makes us fearful of people who are different from us.
Dianne Bondy (06:15):
And that kind of perpetuates this idea of us versus them and the othering of people. And the understanding that in order for me to feel fulfilled, or for me to be at top of the heat, I have to have more. And some people have to have less. And that learning that that is rooted in our own violence toward ourselves. That was my deep dive in my second day of teacher training. When we, the first day was like, get to know each other and we're going to practice together and let's talk about our path. And then the second day was - okay, down to business, let's start unpacking those eight limbs. And then when she hit on Ahimsa, the first time I was like, I have never thought that the violence that I do to myself perpetuates the violence that happens in the world. I had never put those two things together before my yoga practice.
Dianne Bondy (06:59):
When I started my yoga practice, I was three years old. My mother started it because she had three children under the age of four and needed something that she could do in her house that wasn't going to require her to leave because she didn't drive. And she was a new immigrant to the country. So she was very limited in the resources she had around her. And so for a long time, I thought that's what the yoga practice was. And it wasn't until I got older and I started digging into the philosophy. I thought I can use this practice to change the world. I can use this practice to bring awareness to the vast inequities that happen around marginalized communities that happened here on the mat, in a practice that's supposed to be about unity. So all of these things weren't lining up and making sense to me.
Dianne Bondy (07:42):
So I had to figure out how do I apply my understanding of yoga, my understanding of yoga philosophy in changing the perspective on the mat, maybe having more people look like me, practicing and teaching and being regarded as yoga experts. Because when I was coming up and I was being trained, there were no people of color who were training yoga teachers, certainly not people of size. And if there were people from the LGBTQIA+ community teaching, upon first look at them, there's no way to tell that they're part of that community, unless they're with their partner or they say a lot of the time, there's no way to determine. So I wasn't seeing people who were other than thin, white, young, flexible, able-bodied people on the mat teaching me contortionists. I wasn't seeing that link to "how do I take the lessons from the Gita?" How do I take the lessons from the yamas and niyamas and the eight limbs, and then move out into the world and make a huge change or help other people see that the way we change the world is through ourselves. First is understanding what our impact is. How do I do that? How do I make it make sense outside of these acrobatic I was doing on the mat. The
Monica Phillips (08:56):
I lead workshops on empathy. And I recently read some research that - this will not surprise you in regard to certain people in the world - that with more power and more assumed status, we lose empathy.
Dianne Bondy (09:12):
It's true. And I've seen it. I think if we look at the political landscape over time, doesn't matter what country you're from. When you see people ascend to the highest office, you see them lose touch with humanity a little bit. And I've seen it with people who've ascended from being a practitioner and going to yoga a few times a week, then becoming a yoga teacher, and then gaining a little bit of yoga notoriety, whether it's in social media circles or in the industrial yoga complex, and maybe have been elevated to expert. And those people that you knew before, who are now experts, you see that transition away from their empathy, or you see that they become a little bit self-entitled or self-righteous. And I'm certainly seen that. And I've always wanted to make sure that that my teaching of yoga was about everybody and not about me.
Dianne Bondy (09:59):
And it's easy when you have people around you telling you all the time, how much your work has impacted them, or how much you've changed their life or whatever, to get caught up in your own stuff, and think you're great and begin to disconnect from whatever their struggle is or not seeing them as anything other than let's say a fan. Whereas any work that people have done in a course that I've led or in a conversation I've had is work that they've done. I might've just the same way. Linda turned that light bulb on for me and I was, huh, this is what the practice is for me. And that's all I did for you. I happened to be there. When you were having a moment, you did all the work. I take no credit for it. Like it's the yoga that's doing the work.
Dianne Bondy (10:39):
I just happened to be the one that caught your attention in the moment. When I teach my I'm done teaching 200-hour training. But when I used to teach 200-hour training, I would say to my teachers all the time, don't get caught up in your own height. So people are going to come to you, even when you've taught the worst class, or you perceive the worst class of your life and say how it had been life-affirming or changing for them. No, that they were in a space to receive that information from the yoga that you taught. It has actually nothing to do with you. Just so you're clear, just so that we don't get caught up and lose our connection to each other, which to me is losing that connection of empathy. That study doesn't surprise me at all. We see it all the time with politicians and rockstars people start to use each other. And I think that speaks to Aparigraha, right? Where people start to think everything is there is to have and to hoard and to keep and it's not. The more you have, the more you should be sharing.
Monica Phillips (11:32):
It's cool to hear your story because I think that - when I started practicing on the mat in my twenties - like you, I had a mom who practiced yoga, so I've always known about it. I did not always engage with it. But then I actually took my first studio class in France. I was in Minneapolis for five years and then DC for 10, I used to think that it was like, Oh, people who were athletic and gymnastics would do yoga cause they could. They had the range of flexibility. I have seen an overarching shift. I don't know if it's just because I'm finally aware of it too. And so I noticed all the people who are bringing this mindfulness into yoga, at least in the last 11 years, for me, I've noticed at deep change in who shows up to yoga classes, taking away the need to be in the body and really coming to the mind. And so I think of Ahimsa and I think of your work in social justice. How does someone start to tap into this when they see yoga as, Oh, I'm not bendy, right? How do you come to that?
Dianne Bondy (12:30):
It's really changed now? So when I started doing yoga publicly, I remember when I opened my studio, I opened a studio. I want to say in 2006, like an actual studio, I had been teaching all this time, but then I had a brick and mortar business in 2006, a lot of the yoga industry out there was very much white, very much able-bodied, cis-gender, heteronormative, check all the boxes, featuring young people, primarily all of the things. When you look at that constant imagery, you're like, well, clearly yoga is not for me. Like you said, athletic people and flexible people, dancers, gymnasts seem to be attracted to this practice because they can do it, I think with not a whole lot of effort. And it mimics a lot of the activities they've already done. So it feels like familiar and comfortable and all these things. And then you don't see a lot of that.
Dianne Bondy (13:17):
And I wasn't seeing a lot of that and I wasn't even in my own yoga studio space, putting pictures of myself up because I thought that I was somehow bastardizing the practice because I was a plus size person. And quite frankly, because I was a person of color because I wasn't seeing other people of color in positions of power, within teaching communities, teaching and sharing. And so for a long time, I was in my own confusion around that. And the minute I put my picture up on the website and I changed my website, I started to see different people filtering into the studio and people identify with my body type and my hair texture and my skin shade as people who are like, Oh yes, I'm a person of color. Oh yes. There's a place for me in that. And then I met my friend, Melanie Klein on Twitter of all places.
Dianne Bondy (14:03):
I wrote an article in 2011 or 12 - I can't remember - for Elephant Journal called "Yoga isn't just for skinny white girls" and that's how we met because that's all I was seeing in everything. And I remember going to a yoga class and having somebody look me over and go, "do you do yoga?" And then that was that. My head blew off. There has to be other people out there that look like me who do yoga. This cannot be only this thing. And so I started speaking out about it and the minute I started speaking out about it and I found my friend, Melanie Klein, and together with a group of us put together the Yoga and Body Image Coalition. And we started churning out forward-facing imagery that was contrary to what we were constantly seeing in hopes that people would see that imagery and go, wait a minute.
Dianne Bondy (14:49):
This is for me as well. So in the beginning, it was incredibly hard, I think now, because we have seen a shift around accepting the bodies we're in and a pushback against this constant narrative that our bodies are a project that we need to be always fixing and apologizing for and all that, that people have kind of risen up. The time we were - I think when we started this conversation, we were little before our time because we used to get a lot of pushback against promoting equity and diversity in yoga and go figure - but now it comes full circle. I remember back in 2000 and I want to say 10, I started sending out packages to yoga studios going, "I'd like to come and teach about yoga and diversity and inclusivity and equity." And I sent out, I think somewhere around 50 to 75 emails and promotional packages saying, I'd love to come to your studio and teach.
Dianne Bondy (15:40):
And one studio got back to me. Everybody else was like, that sounds really good, but that's not really what we're into here. One studio got back to me and that studio was in Ottawa. I went there and taught that workshop and it was funny because nobody was interested. And so then I thought to myself, okay, that's fine. I'm just going to do teacher trainings, our teacher trainings around that in my own studio space. So that if people in my community want to learn about that, that's great. But the larger world isn't really interested and ready. And then all of a sudden they were, and it's only, I would say been in the past four years that people have actually opened their eyes and looked around a yoga class and went, Where are the fat people? And I mean that in the most loving and respectful way, I refer to myself as fat. Where are the plus size people? Where are the people of color? Where are the people with disabilities? Where are the older people. That's been recent And that should have been from the beginning because yoga is the practice of consciousness. And if you are unconscious to your surroundings, then you're creating harm.
Monica Phillips (16:39):
Thank you for saying that. It's something I deeply appreciate about YogaWorks is that I see all bodies in the classes. I don't know what they did by design to allow that. But imagine if you hadn't done your work, I used to not like the phrase we say, "if you can't see it, you can't be it." I don't believe that. But then ultimately as I unwrap that phrase, I think people do want to see it. And when you share your story, you give someone else permission to share their story. And then they feel safe sharing their story. And then they feel safe being a plus size black woman in a yoga class
Dianne Bondy (17:12):
And empowering to see the teacher that looks like you and say, I can do this too, because I had momentarily had a pause around that thing as well. If you can't see it, you can't be it. But I do think it's truthful. And I think of it now, as the administration is shifting that we're going to see a black woman in the second highest position in power in the entire world. So for all the black women in the world who thought they could never ascend to that place, we now have an example for white folks. There's always been an example of excellence in everything. So people can always ascend to that from folks there's only been limited examples of excellence. And often they focus around our physicality professional athletes about what's been held to this high standard. It's interesting that people can be of a super bigoted mindset and still like their favorite basketball player or whoever it may be.
Dianne Bondy (18:09):
And that has been largely where people of color have been funneled. I've heard Neil (Neil deGrasse Tyson) - everybody knows who I'm talking about - when he was studying physics in university, people were constantly trying to pigeon-hole him because he's over six feet tall, you should be playing basketball. You shouldn't be studying physics because the only example of black excellence that you saw at that point, I believe he's in his fifties or sixties were people who had athletic prowess. That was just a way, or musical prowess. That was the way that we ascended. We weren't looking at people of color, who were elevated in the public eye who had incredible intellect. It wasn't until I saw the movie Hidden Figures that I even knew that black mathematicians helped get the first man on the moon, that GPS was created by a black person. These things that we use in modern times were created by people who look like me and had I seen that, how different would my world be? Had I had an example of black women in power, Michelle Obama or Oprah, when I was growing up, what would my perception of myself be? How much different when my world be? How much greater of an opportunity could I have created for myself if I knew that that was possible? Seeing that it's possible is extraordinary.
Monica Phillips (19:29):
You wanted to launch this workshop, you went somewhere else. They weren't ready for you yet. Right? There's this safety in being in a community that sees you. And so then you go back to the least common denominator, where can I go where I feel safe? What can we share with people who are listening to this about the yamas to help them notice something in themselves and take action to bring more of the yamas into the world?
Dianne Bondy (19:56):
The, especially the first one - Ahimsa - this one I think aligns great with a niyama, which is self-study, looking at how we talk to ourselves, how we look at ourselves, how we interact with the people around us, because the first stop, that's why I think Ahimsa is so important for the first, because it really asks us to look at how we show up and how we create situations that are unsafe. Not only for ourselves, for the people around us. And until we sat with that I feel, we can't dive any further. There's a reason that the yoga practice starts here. What violence am I creating towards myself? Towards the environment? Towards the world? Towards people who look different from me, who think differently from me, who have different lived experiences from me? How can I move from a place of violence and where I don't want to be around them?
Dianne Bondy (20:49):
I don't care if they're asking for too much. There are stereotypes I believe about these people, too. I need to put down my walls and get to know somebody that I am afraid of or get to know somebody who's different from me then to learn that we're not so different at all, that we want to be loved and we want to be seen and we want to be accepted. And we want to raise great children that go out into the world and do great things. The minute I sit down with somebody who is different from me in those aspects, and I learned that we have a same common goal or denominator. Then I can see that person as myself. Then I can see that person as myself and then I can go out into the world to make change. But the first thing we have to do is know who we are and know what our impact is.
Dianne Bondy (21:30):
Having said, that there are people out in the world who have no interest in getting to know who you are, who are going to meet you with violence. And we thought with insurrection, we thought with the instruction on Capitol Hill, there was a group of people out there who truly think that they are entitled to everything and that you need to sit down and be quiet. And when you are coming to meet them face to face, they're going to meet you with violence and death. These are people that you have to set aside. These are people that you were not going to agree with. These are people that don't have empathy, and it's not up to you to change those people. It's up to you to connect with people who can help lift up the world instead of dragging the world down. So I really have to make that distinction.
Dianne Bondy (22:13):
I am kind of over this yogic idea that I have to love everyone. Especially if somebody is trying to kill me in the process, over the color of my skin, it doesn't work that way. It will never work that way until those people have sat with themselves and decide why it is they hate people that look different for them and have their own, as I say, come to Jesus moment - that I have to be discerning about and step away from because it may cause violence to me and harm because they haven't looked at their impact on the world. They're only looking at what they can gain from their actions. So that is separate from the rest of us. So we have to be careful in the yoga community with this. We are all one kind of spiritual bypassing that we do. We all come from the same source. That I believe, I believe in Supreme consciousness. I believe we all come from the same source, but we have very different lived experiences and very different. How you show up in the world is very different from how I show up in the world. What you will gain from the world will be very different from what I gained from the world, doesn't mean that we can't come together and know each other and do better, but we have to understand that people have their differences and that's okay. Differences aren't incurring harm on someone else.
Monica Phillips (23:25):
Yes. And I love that you connected it to self-study. There's this book "Chatter" by Ethan Cross. And he references that people are able to think of as many negative thoughts, all the negative self-talk in our heads in 90 seconds as what would be spoken in a 6,000 word, one-hour state of the union address. We put all of that into 90 seconds of negativity in our brains. And I think of this essence, "Yoga citta vritti niroda," getting out of the chatter in our heads, stopping that. And there are so many people, like you said, in the very beginning, there are so many people who are hurting and they cannot meet us where we are. It's not up to us to go forward and get killed in order to combat that I find it's actually combined. They are not ready. The workshop you did. You mentioned that you don't say Namaste because Namaste means "the light in me sees, honors, and values the light in you." And you don't know who is in the room and if they really see and honor you. Can you tell me more about that in the sense of Ahimsa.
Dianne Bondy (24:36):
I've had this conversation with other people of color in particular, a really good friend of mine, Rebecca Price of I Rise Yoga, and we've had this conversation in depth and she illuminated this for me. I know that Susanna Barkataki talks about cultural appropriation around the word, Namaste. She has a really good, interesting lecture on her website and on her social media, around that. For me, exactly that, I don't know who's in the room. I don't know who's had their self-study and sat with their discomfort and it's actually seeing me as an equitable human being. So for me, saying "the light in me sees the light in you" when you may not see the light me doesn't feel as authentic and safe. I would rather thank you for sharing your practice with me or wish you peace in the world than to say "the light in me sees the light in you" when I'm not sure that that's true, true at all, that we're not mirroring that same energy. It doesn't feel authentic to me anymore. I said it before, and I used to love to say it because I really meant it when I knew who was in the room. When I knew who my students were, when I knew where people's hearts were. I don't know if it was in your particular cohort, but in a cohort that I had taught, there were a couple of people in the room who felt as Republican women they were the most discriminated group in society - Republican white women was their feeling -- was the most discriminated group in society.
Monica Phillips (26:02):
There was an expression of that in my cohort. It's hard.
Dianne Bondy (26:06):
You don't see the whole world then. You're going to tell me that your experience walking through life is the same as a person who identifies as LGBTQ. You feel equally as affected as they do? As affected as I do? That there tells me that the light in you and the light in me are different. And you don't see the light in me. If you think as a white Republican woman, that you are the most discriminated group in the world, are you serious? I had an opportunity to take an advanced teacher training with an incredible teacher named Matthew Sanford, who is an Iyengar teacher who happens to be a paraplegic. And so we learned how to do yoga with people who have quadriplegia and paraplegia. And that workshop forever changed me because I had no understanding of what it was like to leave your house and get to wherever you need to go.
Dianne Bondy (27:02):
Because I just get up, put on my coat, my shoes, get in my car and drive. It doesn't occur to me that if you were a person in a wheelchair, it may take you all day because you may need help getting there. You may need help getting dressed. You may need somebody to come and pick you up and take you there. You may need somebody to do things that I take for granted every day. And then I came home, I lived in Canada and I was watching a person with paraplegia talking about how navigating the transit system in Toronto was a nightmare because he was in a wheelchair. So they took an able-bodied person and they took him and they started off at the same starting point and it had to make it to a destination. And they saw how much time it took the able-bodied person to get to the destination versus the person with the disability. And it took the person with a disability twice as long, if not four times as long, get to these different locations. And it blew my mind how much I take for granted how easy it is for me to navigate through the world that is discrimination. When that is inequity, when a person who has a disability, can't get to the same destination as a person with an ability within a reasonable amount of time,
Monica Phillips (28:09):
But I think about it, that design thinking, building and creating. To whom are we giving access and who is limited by our decisions in creating the system this way.
Dianne Bondy (28:20):
Exactly. And that's why representation is so important as Ahimsa. Representation is non-violence or the perpetuation of empathy and understanding. You are creating a structure and there's going to be a hierarchy in the structure. At the top of the pyramid everybody needs to be represented because if those are the people making the decisions and they are unaffected or unattached or unaware of what it's like for a person with a disability to move through the world, a person who is a person of color to move through the world. If you are not making decisions with all that in mind, then you're creating violence. And that's why representation is so important because you just need one person from a marginalized group in to say, "Hey, how is this person going to get access to these things?" It was really interesting at the beginning of the administration. You can fill in the blank of that. When they were writing executive orders on women's issues and everybody in the room was a white dude.
Dianne Bondy (29:16):
I was, excuse me, you're going to make decisions for me as a black woman, decisions for you as a white woman, decisions for women with disabilities, like honest to god, you get to decide with no understanding and no connection to that. No awareness of that whatsoever or limited awareness of that, because you might have a cousin or a wife or a sister who has that, but your understanding is much more limited than a person who's actually living in that body. And that, to me, beyond anything I could comprehend. And that for me was why it's so important to have representation because representation is intrinsically linked to nonviolence because representation means we are going to have more opportunities to give more people what they need because we see them and we feel them. And we can relate to them.
Monica Phillips (30:06):
It's inspiring to see all the changes in society in the last couple of years, because women are getting on boards, minorities are represented at all levels. I mean, I live in Silicon Valley so I live in this area where a lot of this happens more often. I live in a very liberal area and I live in an area where people believe that for the most part, that - we have our fair share of haters - but for people to believe that everyone has a right to certain equitable, rights - you know, healthcare and housing. And so there's this, what's possible. I think of the expression "first, they came for the Jews and I didn't do anything. And then they came for me" and I believe in what you're saying, who is making the decisions for whom and what are the biases they bring into the room. And it's so harmful.
Dianne Bondy (30:51):
And that's the violence, what is the bias and the stereotype you bring into the room. And then you make your decisions based on that very narrow perspective that you have, that is violence to everybody. Who's going to be affected by your decision. When I was watching the administration, trying to roll back healthcare, 50 million Americans, I was like, why, why do you want to cause harm to people who just want healthcare. Why do you want to start to deconstruct education? Because I truly believe the constant defunding of education that's been going on for decades is how you got here, is how you got 70 million Americans to think that the living nightmare, the rest of us were living, and when I say us I mean Americans, because I'm a Canadian, we're living the rest of the world was watching in horror, was good for everybody. It's a lack of education.
Dianne Bondy (31:44):
Again, it's why poor people will vote Republican. If you just look at the United States, the poorest states with the least opportunities are run by Republicans. What state do you want to model your country after? Kentucky? Isn't that Mitch McConnell. And it's a lack of education and a lack of awareness that we know that democratic states do better in housing and equity. And all those things get people to vote against their own best interests because of stupidity. And I believe I tell this to my husband, six, seven times a week, it's the defunding of education that is going to be the end of the world.
Monica Phillips (32:22):
It's funny that the yamas come first, because everything we're talking about here makes me think the Niyamas should come first. And in my coaching even, I look at, in order to bring empathy into a team first, we need to look at ourselves. We need to look at the negative chatter. We need to recognize our saboteurs and we need to embrace what's possible within ourselves so that we can give that to others. Why do the Yamas come first?
Dianne Bondy (32:51):
I think that's a whole dissertation, I think. For me, I think self-awareness and self-study is at top of the heat, but we can't do what I think without understanding the violence we cause against ourselves and others. It's an interesting way.
Monica Phillips (33:05):
And the yamas and niyamas have often been compared to the 10 commandments.
Dianne Bondy (33:09):
Totally.
Monica Phillips (33:09):
And it's this sense of how we live in the world. The general population knows it's wrong to kill someone, but then you go down a layer. It's wrong to cause harm through various violent actions. Even if it's not murder, it's wrong to take something from someone that causes them harm. Ahimsa really is all encompassing of all the yamas that's harm. And it's also stealing you keep breaking it down, but then how do I see myself in the world? How would I want to be treated? How would this feel if it were me? And then now what is the self-study I need to do to get there?
Dianne Bondy (33:43):
A hundred percent. The big thing that you said that a big light bulb for me was, "how would I feel if that were me?" Could we start saying that on a regular basis, when we're seeing violent acts, when we're seeing black children murdered by police, when we're seeing people protesting against black people saying black lives matter, saying my life matters somehow infringes on your life. It doesn't, I'm just saying my life matters, too. Okay. To the same extent America wouldn't have been America without the hard labor and suffering of African-Americans. You have to ask yourself how a new colony, a new colony in the world went to being a superpower in the world in less than a hundred years? Cotton is how that happened. They had something that everybody needed and they could produce it with free labor. So all the wealth and institutions that you see in America have been given to you on the backs of indigenous people and on the backs of black people and why black folks are hated worldwide is beyond me.
Dianne Bondy (34:50):
I will never understand what we did as a people to incur that kind of hatred and violence. I was watching excerpts from Phil Donahue. I'm aging myself here. Now he was like the first show person that I remember. It was Merv Griffin my mom used to watch, Michael Douglas, and then Donaghue who had that first daytime kind of talk show. I was listening to an excerpt about a person who was Farrakhan speaking, and now Farrakhan has got us their own, the nation of Islam has its own set of issues and things, but that's a whole nother podcast to talk about. When he was talking about the plight of black people in America this one woman was scared of equality for people of color, because she was afraid of the violence that is associated with that. And then I look at the world and in America in particular and who perpetuates the most violence? Not black folks, the number one terrorist organization in America is White Supremacists. They have outshot, outgunned, out-bombed jihadists by a long shot.
Monica Phillips (35:49):
The most violent terrorist attack on the U.S. - Oklahoma City Bombing.
Dianne Bondy (35:53):
Which is why you can no longer bring firearms into federal buildings. That law started in 1995 based on that attack that was perpetrated by two white men. So when white folks talk about violence, they're afraid of the violence of black folks or that we're kind of sitting here waiting to enact some kind of revenge for 401 years plus of oppression, not happening. We're not about that. I've been to all the meetings. I'm just kidding. We're not about that. We just want equity. We just want to not be shot the same way nobody bothered to shoot the insurrectionist that had a noose for Mike Pence and were talking about killing Nancy Pelosi. No shots were fired. If anything, Capitol police were opening their doors and letting people in. And then in the summer we had the full national guard on display when peaceful protestors were saying, please stop shooting us in the street.
Monica Phillips (36:46):
How do you bring Ahimsa into the students that you teach on the mat?
Dianne Bondy (36:51):
I start with "Ahimsa starts at home, which is where I learned it first. It starts within your own body. I have a small studio space in my house. And prior to COVID, I had a group of women, older women that would primarily practice. I didn't teach public classes. I had this one group. The oldest woman in my group was 85. And I think the youngest in my group was 72. And two of them were very strong. It's like the 85-year-old would say "I want to do handstand by the time I'm 90." Handstand is kind of performative and I don't really think you need to do it and I'm not comfortable with you in handstand. L at the wall I'm comfortable with that. And she would be up in L at the wall for literally five minutes. She was the strongest out of the group.
Dianne Bondy (37:32):
That group was really great in showing me my stereotypes around aging. And then the other two people in the group couldn't do a whole lot. So they did a lot of things on the chair, a lot of things at the wall. And I just remember they were of a generation that was constantly criticizing their bodies on the mat, sit on the mat and be like, Oh, my thighs are so flabby. They used to not be this flabby. It it's so crazy when I do this pose and I would constantly have to say to them, this is a vessel for our soul. And it is an extension of the divine. So we want to remember to treat it as such, you only see your thighs as flabby because society has told you that flabby thighs aren't great. So who benefits from you tearing yourself down? Not you.
Dianne Bondy (38:15):
They're going to try to sell you some kind of cosmetic surgery or some kind of cream to rub on your thighs to make them, I don't know, less cellulite-y, but you have to be grateful that your thighs are showing up for you and working for you. They carry you around the world. My hashtag on Instagram is #thickthighssavelives #thickthighsridebikes, making peace with the vessel that you're in, especially at this age. You have been living in a world that has been telling you that you were less than your entire life. Don't buy it.
Monica Phillips (38:45):
Imagine if girls learned that at 14 and imagine the layers of ahimsa that they could create within themselves and share with the world, because they have stripped away this irrelevance of all these things that cost money, that contribute to unfair labor, that plastic in the world. All of that.
Dianne Bondy (39:06):
Exactly. If we could see it for what it is. And I constantly tell people in my practice around ahimsa, who benefits from your self-hatred? Not you. There's somebody out there making money off your self-loathing. So isn't it a radical ask not to pay those people.
Monica Phillips (39:24):
It's phenomenal. And I just think of what we can do right now to live in our bodies and to be strong in our bodies. And when we see ourselves and our imperfections and accept it, we get to see the imperfections in everyone else, and we get to accept it. I have never met a perfect human being ever in my life.
Dianne Bondy (39:46):
Perfection doesn't exist. It doesn't exist in nature. It only exists in our own imagination. It only exists in the marketing mind of the world. Perfection is not a thing. I remember having a conversation with a young group of women around back in the day when remember 17 Magazine was a thing and you turn 12,
Monica Phillips (40:04):
I'd look through and think, what outfit do I want to buy? And how can I come up with $400 for that outfit I have to have when I'm 17. I mean, I was probably 14.
Dianne Bondy (40:12):
The magazine seemed relevant at that point, didn't it? But I just remember all those images in 17 Magazine in the 80s, when I was a girl and Gunne Sax in a commercial, had to have the Gunne Sax dress and all of that and all of that self-loathing and there are always the articles in it. "How to dress for your figure flaws." I need to let everybody know there are no figure flaws. That is not a thing, that is a marketing concept to get you to either buy into plastic surgery or buy some kind of restrictive clothing to make you look smaller or to sell you some kind of diet. Everybody has a different body shape. If we all look the same or all we're designed to eat the same things and do the same things, how boring would the world be? It would be like eating mashed potatoes for all your meals forever because everything would just be the same.
Dianne Bondy (41:03):
Body diversity is a beautiful thing. We see variations and bodies in nature all the time. There are no two trees that look the same. There are no two flowers that look the same. What is this weird obsession with having this idealized body shape that doesn't exist? You look at the Kardashians running around, setting the beauty norms and standards for the rest of us. And all of them are surgically and digitally enhanced. So they're not even a representation of what just a regular body looks like. We elevate them to the highest beauty standards that we expect everybody else to live up to that. Right?
Monica Phillips (41:45):
And I love that yoga allows us to strip away these layers of what I'll call pretend and connect to what is really honest and truthful, through the yamas. Have you seen the show, The Good Place? I take all these coaching moments from it and I work them into what I do, but there's this scene. I don't want to ruin it, but I'm going to a little bit, but there is a scene where these four humans, you know, they're in "the good place," they're appealing to the judge of the universe. The demon who's kind of on their side, Michael, he says, your honor, you don't realize how hard it is to be human and the choices we have to make. And she goes down to try this human thing. And she comes back and she goes, I get it. Now, this guy sent flowers to his mom and he got points.
Monica Phillips (42:27):
This other guy sent flowers to his mom, but he used an online service and he didn't use a local florist. And there was shipping involved. And the flowers came from people who were not paid fairly. And he lost points because his decisions were not right. So when you go to a store and you pick a tomato, is it a good tomato, or is it a tomato that had GMOs and is hurting our soil and the layers of the choices that we have to make? Sometimes - I'm mostly vegetarian fish and occasionally I'll have a bite of meat - I remember once this woman talking about nutrition, being human is really hard. All of these choices we have to make and ultimately you get to the store and your choice is organic, non-organic... Ultimately at the end of the day, eating an apple is still better for you than eating a bag of potato chips. So just pick the apple. Sometimes we don't have access to make those choices, or we don't have income to make those choices. I think of that all woven up into Ahimsa because we cause so much harm by, we can't always make this perfect choice. It doesn't always exist for us.
Dianne Bondy (43:24):
It's true. And I would even hazard to say, I don't have any morality around food. So I'm happy if you want to grab the bag of potato chips over the apple, because I'm going to be a hundred percent honest. That's what I'm doing. Apples are great. And I'll eat those. I'm an equal opportunity eater, I guess I would say. And honestly, you go to the grocery store and you have a choice between an apple and a bag of chips, but how much money do you actually have? Like, there's lots of people that have food insecurity and not access to healthy good food. I was once watching a documentary where they took some kids from the inner city in LA out to the suburbs, to a grocery store. And there were things that these kids had never seen in a grocery store before. And that blew my mind that there's lots of places in the United States.
Dianne Bondy (44:10):
and I'm sure here in Canada where you don't have access to food that's good for you or you don't have the income because when we choose to eat foods that are high in nutrition, they usually are high in cost as well. The more equitable option for people is to get the bag of chips. And I mean, there's a certain amount of nutrition in the bag of chips as well. So I'm not trying to vilinize that, but I'm just saying, like you said, it's hard to be a human being. So just make the best choices you can make that make you feel good in your body. And then take that energy and change the world.
Monica Phillips (44:41):
As a coach, I love to challenge people to take action and step into being and along the lines of Ahimsa, maybe if for anyone who's curious or would like to try it, who's listening, I was thinking a great way to tap into Ahimsa, would be to check ourselves on access. So when we're creating something or building something or designing something, Who has access? Who doesn't have access? And how can you create something so that more people have access?
Dianne Bondy (45:07):
A hundred percent. That's brilliant. That's a small check, right? I think we get frozen in inaction. Just like that whole apple scenario. There are just so many things going on when humans are given too many options and too many things to think about, we will choose nothing. Think about your favorite yoga studio that has a class on the hour, every hour. And you think to yourself, great. I'll go at 7:00. Well, I didn't make it at 7:00. I'll go at 9:00. Blah-blah-blah. Well, I'll go at noon. Oh, you know what? I'll go after dinner. Oh, well, you know, I'm tired now and you didn't go. You had all of those opportunities and you chose inaction. We're kind of like that as humans. We clutch our pearls and we look at the world and we're like -- that is horrible!
Monica Phillips (45:47):
I've never clutched my pearls. That's a funny expression though. I'll clutch my lotus flower here. (laughter)
Dianne Bondy (45:52):
And then we choose an accent. So we need to catapult ahead of that. Go in headlights. Don't move. Don't make too many sounds. Maybe nobody will notice us to, what can I do? Like you said, when I'm designing something, what can I do? What can I do? What is within my reach? What is it within my ability to do? And like, "Just do it," get out of the comfort zone, get out of your own way and do the action and yoga. We call that karma action. Do the action.
Monica Phillips (46:17):
There's so much power in all of these interconnected ideas, Dianne Bondy. Thank you! Thank you for being here to do this with me. I really love your energy and what you bring to all of us.
Dianne Bondy (46:28):
Thank you so much. It was so much fun to have these conversations and to think about things in slightly different ways. So I'm always excited to have these conversations with people who want to have them, right.
Monica Phillips (46:37):
I would have these conversations every day. Check out Dianne Bondy at diannebondyyoga.com and be well. And I can't wait to talk to you again.
Dianne Bondy (46:48):
Thank you so much, Monica.