is inner work activism or escapism?

Peace and love, y’all! Hello and welcome back to the inside of my brain.

Here’s a transcript of the above podcast episode for all my voracious readers:

What if the only way out is in? What if the real social revolution is inner work?

What if we are not ready to transform the world around us until we find our own peace inside ourselves?

My name is Etai Atula, and I am a full-time solo traveler and yoga teacher. Over the past year, I've been traveling across Asia, visiting nine countries and studying under yoga masters, translating ancient yoga wisdom into modern tools for transformation that my chronically online generation can understand. During that year abroad, I've been able to create a beautiful community of over 450,000 yogis, and now I'm back home in New York, coming to you from the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York.

I'll be honest—I'm nervous to share these ideas. This might be my hottest take of all time, and I want to be careful not to offend or upset anyone. In this essay, I'm trying to cradle in my arms all the grief and pain that exists in this world today, which is inherently going to be sensitive territory for many people, including myself. But yoga has given me the strength to ask these questions rather than just sitting back in submission, and I'm thankful for that.

I want to start with a disclaimer: I understand that everything I'm about to say comes from a privileged position. I know there are people out there—some who might even be reading this—who are under too much stress in life to entertain these ideas. Financial stress, emotional stress, survival stress can make the brain unreceptive to new concepts. The purpose of this essay is to help us all dream—to imagine what the world could be like if everyone was involved in yoga.

Before we explore how yoga can help us all, let's define what yoga actually is and what it isn't. Yoga is not a stretching routine or exercise. The original definition of yoga is union with the supreme soul—a state of being that is equal parts exuberance and relaxation. It's feeling connected to everything around you and fostering compassion in your heart through moral behaviors, physical exercises, breathwork, meditation, and prayer.

Part of what we all need to do before having this conversation is throw out any idea of what we thought yoga was. Not only is yoga amazing for all the reasons I just mentioned, but here's the best part: yoga is free. Yoga is inherently anti-capitalist and egalitarian. Everyone has access to yoga. Unfortunately, capitalism has turned yoga into an exclusive thing—you supposedly need to buy memberships, outfits, and have a certain body type and aesthetic to participate. This is an illusion and a disgrace.

Let's remind each other that the internet exists. I am one of countless creators sharing yoga knowledge for free because I believe yoga can genuinely help everybody. This ancient wisdom that has diminished over time is not actually as gatekept as it seems. But let's not get it twisted—it has been suppressed because it's against corporate interests. Think about pharmaceutical companies and how every corporation requires us to be beneath our full potential so we can be taken advantage of, keeping us living in scarcity of money and health. That's why there's such a misunderstanding about what yoga is.

Yoga benefits the populace and threatens the elite because it wakes us up to what's really going on. This is what happened to me and so many other yogis I know. The reason you have the trope of yogis becoming hippies and dropping out of society—and by the way, that's not everybody—is because yoga allows us to think freely and question the societal code that so many people blindly accept.

Not only does yoga help us think freely, but when we get into yoga, our whole worldview starts to unravel. I'll tell you how it happened for me: I started thinking differently about food, money, and sex—basically all the values I grew up with and was programmed to believe. I started realizing that these were all just stories I had been told; they weren't my own beliefs. Let's never forget that if you hold a belief not backed up by personal experience, it's not your belief—it's somebody else's belief that you've inherited.

Yoga is not a religion or field of scholarship because it's not based on reading things and having faith that they're true. Yogis only believe what they have experienced. Try this stretch and see how good it feels. Try this meditation and see how it transforms your world. When all these inherited beliefs get popped like a bubble, life becomes simpler. We start to realize that the only rules we have to follow are the ones we create for ourselves, and that mentality of victimhood—being at the mercy of powers that be—has less and less grip on how we behave in the world.

In general, the outlook of a yogi is less cerebral and logic-focused. It's more heart-focused, more love-focused. What does that mean in a societal context? Imagine a world where everybody is a yogi, practicing meditation, compassion, prayer, volunteer work, and gift-giving. That would be such a beautiful world.

Now imagine if all the social activists in our society fighting against wealth inequality, climate change, and war practiced yoga. How would that change their efforts? Let me explain exactly why that would be such a seismic shift.

Yoga teaches us to take control of the subtlest energies within our body. We listen to our body whisper so we don't have to hear it scream. We notice tiny changes—little tingles in our body and mind—so we don't have to wait until our body is screaming at us, pleading with us to fix something to actually make a change. The implication of not having these tools is that we blame other people for our problems because we don't think we have responsibility over them. We blame our sicknesses and emotional states on this, that, and the third because we haven't been taught how to actually influence those situations on our own.

When yoga tunes us into these subtle energies, we learn that we actually do have control over our situation because we can notice the first hint of friction or tension before it amplifies and becomes something too scary to change. We can nip toxicity in the bud because we know how to listen. That's what yoga teaches us: how to know ourselves.

Then our responsibility becomes infinite. What do I mean by that? Yoga teaches us that our responsibility is our ability to respond to something. Once we take responsibility for our physical, mental, and emotional state, our responsibility expands. We feel responsible for the whole planet because somebody who has never been introduced to yoga might not know where to begin when it comes to healing their own mental health or chronic pain. So how would that person even begin to imagine they have any ability when it comes to changing the world?

Little changes inspire big changes, and the only place to start with little changes is within our own body. Now that we have control over our emotions, our body, our digestion, our sleep, our words, we start to entertain the idea of having influence over our community and our whole planet. This is unity—the definition of yoga, union with the supreme soul, understanding there's no difference between you and me. That mentality can lead us to approach social issues with compassion, inner peace, and unity rather than the adversarial idea of us versus them.

We feel so beaten down by the world that rather than taking a deep breath and taking responsibility for ourselves, we project our anger onto institutions and make demands of them before we even take responsibility for our own peace. This leads us to villainize the other and create an enemy, making us think we're separate from the people we're fighting against.

While I agree there is a clear antagonist when it comes to all the social issues we're currently facing, let me ask you this: Should we hate those people or should we try to understand them? Ignorance is the cause of all suffering, and understanding is the cure for all suffering. If we tried really hard, we could understand why the oligarchy, the powers that be, behave the way they do. They're selfishly protecting their own best interests. What started as survival has become pure gluttony, but the intention is the same: self-preservation.

Of course we get angry at those people. Of course we resent them, and anger is definitely productive. Don't get me wrong—anger creates a sense of urgency that can get a lot of stuff done, and I don't want to invalidate all the anger that everybody on this planet is currently feeling. It's for a reason.

But if anger is unbalanced or untamed, it can be deeply destructive and divisive. This might be where I lose some of you, but I genuinely believe that the compassion we hold for victims will be incomplete if we don't also have a level of compassion for the oligarchy. We must see them as human beings, as part of our species. Then all our actions will come from the abundance of love rather than the insecurity of fear, hatred, and separation.

Speaking of fear, yoga also has this amazing power to vanquish fear, and we live in an era where fear is rampant. Fear of an impending climate apocalypse. In America, we live in fear of getting shot on the street. We live in fear that the people who are supposed to protect and serve us don't have our best interests at heart. We fear that our leaders might even feed us to the wolves if it helped their best interests.

But yoga eradicates this fear by getting us to ask deep existential questions. In yoga, we confront fear of death when our ego gets dissolved. Through meditation, we learn that our body is just a temporary vessel, but our consciousness is immortal. Our consciousness doesn't just exist in our body—our consciousness is everywhere and shared. So how can we die?

It's easy in theory, hard in practice, but stay with me here. What can we be afraid of if we know our soul never really dies? How can we fear discomfort or pain when we can see it all as an opportunity for expansion? How can we fear things not going our way when we know the universe has a divine plan for us all that's already been predetermined? We realize that what control we do have over our free will can be informed by love and not by fear, abundance and not scarcity.

What does it look like when yogis act out of love instead of fear? Non-violence, also known as ahimsa in Sanskrit, is the first principle of yoga. In Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, he says before you even roll out your mat, before you even try to breathe any differently, rule number one is non-violence—not causing any damage to yourself, the people around you, or the life around you. That's why a lot of yogis are vegetarian, why a lot of yogis are pacifists, and why you'll probably never catch a true yogi complaining.

Another way that Patanjali writes about love in the Yoga Sutras is through the idea of non-stealing. When we think of stealing, we think of robbery, but it's so much deeper than that. Patanjali says that to have more than you need is inherently stealing. If you are hoarding while somebody else is lacking, that is stealing. Therefore, all wealth inequality is an act of robbery. Imagine how different the world would look if everybody had that mentality. You can call me naive or overly optimistic, but I'm just dreaming here. Sue me for letting my inner child and imagination run wild with projections of love.

There's also this deep tradition in yoga of renunciation. On the extreme side, there are sadhus who never wear clothes, eat minimally, and don't have any material possessions to their name. Not all yogis take it to such an extreme level, but for every practicing yogi, the practice is going to make you think differently about consumerism. The oligarchy relies on our consumerism—think about how much power we take away from them if we limit our consumption and see it for what it is. If we realize that the things we buy at a certain point are not really changing the quality of our life. If you need to pay rent or buy groceries, that's different, but we all know consumerism goes much deeper than that. Is that pair of shoes going to change your life? Is that premium subscription going to change your life? Yoga leads us to think about why we even desire those things and can empower us to instead invest in education, in things that give us spiritual fulfillment and expand our love rather than expanding our ego.

On that note, yogis are also known to have so much love for nature and wilderness. Yogis have so much respect for other life—we see ourselves in a bug, in a tree, in a mushroom, river, and the other planets in the sky. The mentality of a yogi is very much about decentering humankind. Putting humanity on a pedestal above animals and plants is what has led us to completely degrade natural resources and cause the Anthropocene.

I know there's an elephant in the room here because not every human society acts in such a destructive way. There are places in the world where these values of centering nature, decentering humanity, limiting excessive consumption, and practicing non-violence are kept alive. Of course, I'm talking about indigenous populations and communities. Here in the United States, I think of Native Americans and how they have so much to teach us about how to interact with the world. That's as yogi as it gets. They may call it by a different name, but the principles are nearly identical—reverence for the natural world and recognized unity among all living beings.

So if there's any call to action to this essay besides just getting into yoga and studying yoga, it's that we should all look to indigenous traditions for inspiration, protect those lineages, and keep the beauty of their outlook and practices alive. I encourage us all to sit at their feet, protect their wisdom, and study from them. Go on YouTube, read a book, or if you have the ability, go somewhere in person where you can feel the tangible energy of a master.

I feel like the phrase "decolonize your mind" gets thrown around a lot these days, but that's what decolonizing your mind really means to me—studying the mentality that existed pre-colonialism because it contains ideas and truths beyond our wildest imagination. We can pick up tools from ancient traditions that we might never come across in our regular algorithm.

Start with improving yourself. Start with your individual responsibility and watch the effects ripple out. Listen, energy works in such subtle ways. Your thoughts and behaviors will have an impact on the people and spaces around you without you even trying to do anything. I've seen it happen time and time again. That's why temples and churches feel so sacred—they reverberate with this indescribable energy that changes the behavior of people who walk inside. If you walk around feeling as essential and precious as a house of worship, that energy will absolutely rub off on the world around you.

So lead by example. Take care of yourself and watch how others react. Of course, some will resist it, scoff at it, and not understand you, but your energy will reach the right people and others will follow your lead. That change will ripple out and cause a butterfly effect that we can't comprehend with our little human brain.

At this point, you might be saying to yourself, "Hold up a minute. Is this guy really telling us to just meditate away and pray away all the injustices of the world? What about getting organized? What about doing real community work?"

Of course, organization is necessary. That being said, the inner work of meditation, prayer, self-improvement, and self-fulfillment is, in my opinion, a necessary precursor to organization. Let me paint a picture of how much better that organization will be when everyone involved is a practicing yogi.

You and I can both think of several characters who set out with the best intentions and had their morals compromised—so many politicians who made idealistic promises and for some reason or another did not deliver, many activists with strong values who got corrupted by capitalism. Think about how much less ego, how much less power struggle, how much less competition and organizational disagreement would occur in a union of yogis.

Although I do believe that tangible change happens even when you just put your intentions and thoughts in the right place, that effort will be sped up and more effective when organization and physical action in the material world gets involved. In yoga, we call this karma yoga—the yoga of action, doing work for the betterment of the world without expecting anything from it.

Unfortunately, a lot of people want to do philanthropy and appear virtuous because they'll get something from it. But karma yoga teaches us to be totally unattached from the fruits of our labor. We're just doing work for the sake of work. We enjoy the process itself, not the outcome. A lot of the time it can seem pointless to be doing work to change the world because it feels so daunting, so impossible to even make a difference. That's because we're too focused on the outcome.

Focusing on the work and being present with it is totally different because it leaves us proud of even the smallest things we do. It actually comes full circle because it helps us realize that the work we do for other people is ultimately to help ourselves. As we've already established, that inner work is going to ripple out once again, so it just keeps going in a circle. We improve tremendously on a personal level by organizing and working together.

So don't be daunted by the sheer weight of all the world's injustices. That time is over. Focus on yourself until you feel your responsibility naturally expand, and you'll be capable of amazing things. I believe in you so deeply. The fact that you're already here, spending this time with me, tells me something. It shows that your intention is already aligned with making this world a brighter place. You are already having an impact just by wanting it, just by thinking about it. Your subconscious is already leading you to act in a way that reflects your desires, even if it feels passive.

Stay being you. Stay being perfect. Take that energy and dial it up to a hundred until it vibrates throughout every cell of your body. Understand that just by feeling this feeling, you are energetically having a positive impact on the world. Now think about how much more potent, how much more impactful any action you take will be when your passive existence is already having such a strong vibration.

Let's continue dreaming together. Let's continue being part of the mission that spreads yoga far and wide to the whole world. Let's daydream about politicians and world leaders practicing yoga. Let's daydream about bringing yoga into prisons and underserved communities, teaching people how to align their mind, body, and spirit, form a connection with the divine, and form love for everybody around them.

Take a deep breath to bask in this hopeful energy. Inhale through your nose and let this optimism enter every fold in your brain. Exhale through your nose and let this positivity ripple out into the world around you. Let's be part of the butterfly effect together.

Peace and love.