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It’s that point of the yr. As midterm elections near, our news feeds overflow with political ads, candidate debates, and nonstop punditry. For some people, these are exciting demonstrations of democracy in motion. It makes others want to twist up in Child’s Pose.

For Reggie Hubbard, it’s just a little little bit of each. He says was a hard-driving political operative who lived on cigars, whiskey, and adrenaline. Now, he’s still a high-energy political operative, but his energy comes from one other source. He’s also the founding father of Lively Peace Yoga, a platform for political strategy, yoga instruction, and other “cool projects” that intersect each.

Because the Chief Serving Officer of the organization, he’s a task model for the way civic life and yoga can come together within the service of fine.

Bridging the political divide

The US has had political differences since before the states were united. What’s latest is the width of the chasm over which persons are shouting–and the interior fractures forming on both sides.

Research shows that America was becoming increasingly divided—and that polarization inside parties can be on the rise. Such divisions result in high emotions on the one hand and a way of hopelessness on the opposite. A rising variety of persons are saying they feel like strangers in their very own country.

The divide shows up within the yoga community, too, where some people think that yoga principles offer the best guidelines for addressing social and political issues, while others are adamant that politics has no place within the practice devoted to private peace.

Do yoga and politics mix? If anyone has a powerful opinion on the perpetual query, it’s Hubbard. For him the reply is an obvious yes…and it’s complicated.

“We’ve got some work to do civically,” he says. “I don’t imagine yoga is a practice of comfort. I feel it gets us comfortable with discomfort and from that comfortability with discomfort we will ask audacious questions and transform the world.”

Gratitude for gifts of adversity

Hubbard was trying to remodel the world well before he got into yoga. “I got involved in politics to assist people. I didn’t become involved in politics to backstab and social climb,” he says. He describes his early experience with political life as extremely destructive.

After an unsuccessful bid for a post within the Obama administration, he took a break and vowed to only do things that lowered his blood pressure, were “artsy,” or that he’d never done before. When someone invited him to a yoga class, it checked all three boxes. He enjoyed it enough to maintain at it, nevertheless it wasn’t until he found himself in a difficult work situation that he fully understood the facility of his practice.

He had moved from DC to Colorado for a job that turned sour fast. “Daily it was just microaggressions and extreme racism,” he says. “Yoga gave me space to be on this horrific environment with equanimity.”

When he got a message (via text) telling him that he’d been fired, he says, “I responded by saying, ‘Blessings and peace to you. Thanks for the gift of adversity and the lesson on find out how to handle that with grace and wisdom.’” That response surprised even him. He realized that something concerning the yoga practice was working.

Mining mindful muscle memory

Almost immediately after the Colorado job ended, the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign called; they needed his help. Hubbard was reluctant to get back into the political world. But one in every of his teachers identified the unique opportunity he was being given to practice his discipline in what he calls “the guts of darkness.” He said yes.

To keep up his equilibrium and his commitment to his yoga practice, he drew some lines within the sand. “If this job impacts my practice or my health I’m out,” he told Sanders’ campaign managers. He cut meetings short in the event that they interfered along with his meditation, and made time for yoga during his travels. He turned his work into dharana, a practice of intense focus.

Traveling the country to provide campaign events that draw 1000’s of individuals creates an environment that’s rife with potential for frayed nerves and conflict. As a substitute of using his yoga as a non-public practice to get away from the stress, he brought his practice to work–greeting individuals with peace and blessings, guiding his direct reports away from grind culture, and calming tense meetings by having people do breathwork. When things went fallacious—as they inevitably do if you’re managing so many individuals and moving pieces—he leaned into “mindful muscle memory” as an alternative of the standard yelling, blaming, and panic.

“When someone would come at me [with a problem] I’d be like, okay, shoulders back, head level, breathe in through the nose, out through the nose. Then, okay, what’s occurring?…What are we gonna do about it?”

(Photo: Leigh Vogel/Getty Images )

Yoking yoga and civic life

When he returned to his home base in Washington, he dove headlong into each yoga and political life.

“I took my 200-hour teacher training while flipping the House of Representatives, and took my 300-hour while being the strategic advisor for the impeachment of the president,” he says. He taught occasionally as a sub in studios. “But pre pandemic, there really wasn’t space for me, and I actually wasn’t seeking to do it.”

“The primary official public class I taught by myself was April 4, 2020,” he says. By then the world was within the midst of a pandemic layered over national political turmoil and racial justice protests. But he had developed the tools to have interaction in politics in a latest way. He saw how he could use yoga principles as the idea for the way he worked in political circles—and help guide the yoga and wellness communities to be more engaged residents.

In these politically polarized spaces, closing gaps means constructing the bridges first.

Finding common ground

“It starts with talking to people–even those that may not agree with you,” he says. But across-the-aisle dialogue doesn’t just occur; you could have to create the conditions for it.

“We’ve got to rest people’s nervous systems in order that they don’t feel under attack, under threat, under duress, offended,” he says. That’s where yoga and contemplative practice is available in. It prepares the bottom for seeding latest ideas. And even that must be done fastidiously. “I’m not only dropping things or throwing ideas at people. I’m placing them,” says Hubbard.

“From a yogic perspective, we’ve got way more in common than we expect that we do,” he says. “And we just must speak about what we share versus what we don’t share.”  Looking for out commonalities is a component of yoga practice, Hubbard says. It’s how we embody the common translation of namaste—to see and honor the humanity in each other. “As we come together, we realize there really isn’t that much separation. The one separation is the one which we create.”

Our  yoga practice provides direction. “The identical cues that somebody might offer in an asana practice are applicable to the hard conversations; they’re applicable to the intractable nature of things as they appear without delay,” he says, likening the method to following the cues to melt right into a pose. “If we will do it in asana, why can’t we do it in life?”

Making an impact

This sentiment has opened doors for him personally and professionally. He says he never thought it will be possible to meld yoga, meditation, grassroots activism, and political work. “However the promise and the blessing of yoga is the merging of these items together. And as those things merge, they blossom into a ravishing hybrid,” he says.

“I view my teaching practices as a way to liberate suffering for all across my path,” he says. The practice shouldn’t be just what happens on the mat or on the cushion and even within the halls of power. “It might probably just be a smile in traffic. It might probably be [a nod] on the subway. But should you take that seriously, you then begin to see how that shifts the environment around you.”

His impact is being felt.

“Among the best compliments I’ve received in my life is from Ayana Pressley [the U.S. representative from Massachusetts],” he says. “She was like, ‘Brother, you’re so cool that if you walk in, blood pressure drops.’ That’s the reason I do what I do.”

Mapping the trail forward

Hubbard is currently working with leaders within the contemplative community on a project called Mind Our Democracy. “We’re seeking to encourage the spiritual community in civic engagement,” he says. They’re taking a direct motion against the concept there’s no room for political or civic motion in contemplative space.

The group, including Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield, Konda Mason, Maya Breuer, and a complete who’s who of leaders in meditation, mindfulness, and yoga communities, “recognizes voting as an extension of contemplative practice.” Mindfully casting a ballot is a begin to changing the world.

“We are able to’t forecast the long run, we will just do one of the best we will with the current,” he says. And yoga will help.

“If yoga can transform us individually, why not collectively?” Hubbard asks. “I stand by the notion of the transformational power of yoga,”