On Freud and Yoga
Freud and Yoga (by Kruschke and Desikachar):
I appreciate the intention of this book to bridge Eastern (yoga) and Western (psychoanalysis) healing modalities. Although I haven’t undergone psychoanalysis formally, I’ve read a lot of materials from Freud and Freud-informed authors that have taught me a lot about the psychology of colonialism and, in turn, has informed my work on the process of decolonization. I realized that the psychic projections of the western colonizing mind onto the colonized were coming mostly from the colonizer’s own sense of alienation and fragmentation as their world gave way to the scientific and industrial revolutions of the late 19th and 20th century. Values like hyper-individualism, pursuit of self-interest, competition, survival of the fittest, adventurism, control and conquest of resources and territories came to define this era. This was also deeply rooted in the belief that the Earth was made for “man” by a God in heaven and, therefore, can be exploited as a resource. This modern era is the context of the birth of psychoanalysis in Europe.
This is how I came to understand myself as a colonized person who capitulated to the colonizer’s version of history and yet deep in my soul was a refusal to be a container of those colonial projections. Psychoanalysis helped me to understand how colonization “screwed me up”. It helped to uncover repressed memories of trauma, fears, thoughts, and conflicts that were a byproduct of historical trauma. It is prakriti, yes, but this is the part of my life that I had to work through to eventually heal my body, mind, and spirit. I am grateful.
Where psychoanalysis doesn’t go deep and far enough in Freud and Yoga has to do with its absence of attention to this subtext or context as influenced by western concepts of individualism, patriarchy and the subjugation of the feminine (and how this impacts relationships within the nuclear family). There is so much reckoning going on with these modern values today that have also come to be associated with white supremacist culture. While I had hoped that this book would address these issues from the point of view of Yoga, it helped me to contextualize the shortcoming of psychoanalysis…and to then be able to draw from Yoga so that the gaps can be bridged.This then helps me to avoid spiritual bypassing.
While the 8 limbs of yoga are ancient concepts that might seem universal and timeless, I think when Yoga ‘travels’ to other cultures, it gets re-shaped or adapted to fit in the receiving culture. This book tries to find common ground and points to where divergence happens. I wish the book had a good editor who could have made the dialogue flow more easily. As it is, it feels a bit disjointed as each author would sometimes pose a question that doesn’t get answered and the conversation shifts to another topic. I re-read these chapters a couple of times to try to get a sense of that flow.
I feel that my understanding of yoga is intuitive. When we talk about “Yoga is Relationship” I know that in my blood as “Kapwa” — our Filipino indigenous core value. So when Desikachar is talking about his culture, or explains Yoga concepts, I get what he’s saying. And I also get that this intuitive sense of knowing has been disrupted/fragmented by my modern mind…which am now trying to make whole again. I am getting to know my Prakriti and Purusha more and more.
Sometimes I wonder if all this self-analysis/decolonization process would have been unnecessary if I went on the path of yoga 30 years ago instead of 30 years later. Would it have been possible to unlearn my personal and cultural identity simply by seeing them through the lens of avidya? Would I have understood the cultural conditioning and historical trauma? Would samadhi be sustainable without the reconciliation and integration of the intellectual mind with the body? When my body got sick I understood that it’s because my mind was causing me stress. I needed something else — yoga — to release everything that I had worked for. To release means to change the way I have been perceiving. It means getting to know the tricks of the mind that kept me from seeing the Self/Purusha.
So it has been a developmental process, I suppose. Yoga showed up on my path because I asked for a teacher. My sangha and the resources (ayurveda, books, videos, etc) brought into this practice by my teacher, Monica Anderson, have been my teachers. It is also true that I am and have always been the Self/Purusha.
