On Freedom for All: What Advaita Vedanta Knows That Our Politics Has Forgotten
— Erika Smith Iluszko
At the end of almost every class I teach, I say the same words: may all beings be free. Not just peaceful. Not just happy. Free. Students sometimes ask me afterward why I choose that word, when peace and happiness feel softer, easier to receive, easier to want. I have been sitting with that question for years, and the honest answer is that freedom is the only one of the three that cannot be faked, cannot be imposed from outside, and cannot exist for one person while it is denied to another. Peace can be the peace of resignation. Happiness can be the happiness of distraction. But freedom — real freedom — has a structure to it, a body to it, a politics to it. And Advaita Vedanta has been telling us this for thousands of years, long before anyone wrote a political philosophy about it.
In Advaita, the word we reach for is moksha — liberation. But it is worth noticing what moksha is liberation from and what it is liberation into. It is not simply the absence of suffering. It is not merely the removal of ignorance, avidya, as if clearing away a fog leaves us automatically free. The clearing of the fog — what some Western political writers would call negative freedom, the freedom from — is only ever a precondition. What Advaita insists on, and what I think contemporary political thought is slowly rediscovering, is that liberation is also a positive presence. It is the recognition of atman as Brahman, the felt, lived, embodied knowing that the self and the ground of all being are not separate. That is not an absence. That is the fullest possible presence. Sat-chit-ananda is not a vacancy where suffering used to be; it is being, consciousness, and bliss actively realized.
This is exactly the trap I see when I listen to how freedom gets talked about in the world right now, especially in the country where one of my parents come from. Freedom gets reduced to “no one is stopping me,” to the absence of a hand on your shoulder. And so we build a politics around removing barriers and call it liberty, while never asking what we are removing barriers for. Advaita would call this confusing the de-occupation of the field with the planting of the seed. Yes, the occupying army must leave. Yes, the oppressive structure must be named and dismantled — decolonization is real work and it is not optional. But after the soldiers leave the village, the village still has to be fed, educated, healed, governed by people who know they belong to each other. Freedom-from is the war. Freedom-to is the peace, and peace, in this sense, is not passive — it is the harder and longer labor.
This is where the body enters, and where Advaita’s teaching becomes, to me, inseparable from the most basic political fact: no one is born sovereign. The Sanskrit traditions distinguish between the gross body, the subtle body, the body as instrument — and Western phenomenology has its own version of this in the distinction between Körper, the body as object, and Leib, the body as living, feeling, willing presence. A baby arrives entirely as Leib, entirely dependent, entirely incapable of sovereignty. Sovereignty, the capacity to choose, is not a birthright that simply unfolds — it is cultivated, the way a teacher cultivates a student’s capacity to sit in stillness, the way a mother cultivates an infant’s capacity to trust the world enough to reach for it. In yoga, we call this svadhyaya, self-study, but self-study was never meant to happen in isolation. The guru-shishya relationship, the sangha, the community of practice — these exist because Advaita already knows what Western liberalism keeps forgetting: you cannot become free alone, in a room, by yourself, through sheer willpower. You become free through care, through relationship, through the slow apprenticeship of being met by another consciousness that recognizes you as Leib and not as Körper, as subject and not as object, as someone and not as something.
And this is also why I think Advaita has something sharp and necessary to say about the algorithms we now live inside. The teaching of pratyahara — the withdrawal of the senses — was never meant to be a withdrawal from the world into numbness. It was meant to be a withdrawal from compulsive reactivity, from being yanked around by every stimulus, so that we could choose our responses from a place of awareness rather than conditioning. This is precisely what the platforms that now organize so much of our attention are engineered to prevent. They do not want our devotion. They want our predictability. Intermittent reinforcement, isolation, the manufactured loop of scroll and react — this is samskara production at industrial scale, grooves of habit cut so deep that we mistake the groove for the self. Living in truth, acting from a felt, examined value rather than a programmed reflex, is not just a political act of resistance. It is, almost exactly, what the eight limbs of yoga were built to train us to do. Unpredictability, in this sense, is not chaos. It is sovereignty.
I think about this every time I teach yogasana, every time I talk to my students about pra/qi moving through channels/nadi that connect the whole body, because the body itself refuses the lie of separateness that the free-market myth depends on. The idea that a person can be free while disconnected from everyone else — that liberty is a private possession rather than a shared circulatory system — is, from a non-dual perspective, simply incoherent. If Brahman is not divided, if the self that watches my breath is not separate from the self that watches yours, then a market that treats human beings as obstacles to the movement of capital is not just unjust. It is a metaphysical error. It mistakes maya — the world of appearances, of separate, competing things — for the whole truth, and forgets the substrate underneath where we were never actually separate at all. Solidarity, then, is not a moral nicety layered on top of individual liberty. It is what liberty looks like once you stop mistaking the appearance of separateness for the reality of it.
This is also why truth-telling — satya — matters so much to me as a teacher and as someone who writes in public. Satya is not a minor yama, a small rule about not lying. Satya is the discipline of staying in right relationship with what is actually real, even when a more comfortable story is available. The big lies of nationalist nostalgia, the manufactured catastrophes used to justify control, the erosion of the local and the human in favor of the nationalized and the algorithmic — these are not just bad politics. They are a mass refusal of satya, a collective avidya we have allowed to be manufactured and sold to us.
So when I close a class by asking for freedom for all beings, I am not asking for something soft. I am asking for what Advaita has always pointed toward: sovereignty rooted in the body, cultivated through care, sustained through truth, and made real only in solidarity, because none of us reach moksha alone, and none of us are free while the field we share remains occupied.
The Comfortable Consolations: Why I Don’t Wish You Peace
Let me say something that might be uncomfortable to read in a yoga context: peace and happiness are not the “original goal”. I know how that sounds. I know that every meditation app, every wellness brand, every yoga retreat brochure in existence promises you exactly those two things. And I am not saying they are worthless — I am saying they are contingent. They depend on circumstance. They depend on outside conditions meeting you in a particular way. You can be peaceful because you are numb. You can be happy because you have chosen not to look. You can be both, genuinely, sincerely, and still be living inside a system that is grinding other people into dust.
Peace and happiness, as inner states, are entirely compatible with injustice. History has proven this over and over. The slaveholder could be at peace after the harvest. The colonial administrator could be deeply happy in his garden while the people whose land he occupied were not permitted into it. The patriarch who controls every aspect of his household can feel a profound contentment that no one inside that household is allowed to disturb. Inner peace is available to the oppressor. That sentence should stop us cold every time we are tempted to make peace the highest aspiration of a spiritual practice.
Happiness is perhaps even more slippery, because it is the state most easily manufactured by privilege and most easily confused with goodness. If the conditions of your life have been arranged — by ancestry, by race, by gender, by the country your passport is from, by the body you were born into — such that the world meets you with relative softness, then happiness is not a spiritual achievement. It is a circumstance. And a practice that asks you to cultivate and protect that feeling, while the structures that produced it continue to operate, is not a liberatory practice. It is a comfort practice. There is nothing wrong with comfort. But let us not dress it in the language of liberation.
This is why I reach for freedom instead — because moksha, properly understood, cannot be a private achievement sealed off from the conditions of the world. The Advaitic non-dual teaching does not say: realize the unity of atman and Brahman, feel very peaceful, and leave everything else unchanged. It says something far more radical and far more difficult: if the self is not bounded, if I am not separate from you, then your unfreedom is not your problem alone. It is a distortion in the field we share. And no amount of my sitting peacefully inside it changes what it is.
Avidya Is Not Private Ignorance — It Structures the World
Avidya, the primal ignorance that Advaita identifies as the root of all suffering, is usually taught as an individual condition. We each carry the misidentification of atman with the small, bounded self. We each mistake the wave for the ocean. But avidya does not stay private. It gets built into laws. It gets organized into economies. It gets taught in schools, enforced by police, encoded in medicine, written into the constitutions of nations. When avidya becomes collective and structural, we give it other names: patriarchy, racism, colonialism, homophobia. These are not metaphors. They are systems — historically constructed, materially enforced, still operating today — that determine whose body is sovereign and whose is not. Whose grief is legible and whose is not. Who gets to move through the world as Leib, as a living, feeling, choosing subject, and who is reduced to Körper, to a body managed, policed, exploited, or simply discarded.
Patriarchy is the avidya that mistakes dominance for strength and control for care. Racism is the avidya that divides the indivisible field of humanity into hierarchies of worth based on the melanin in a person’s skin. Colonialism is the avidya that names the theft of land, labor, and knowledge as civilization, and then passes the accumulated wealth of that theft down through generations while insisting the ledger is clean. Homophobia is the avidya that reads the magnificent plurality of human desire as deviation, that criminalizes love, that denies safety and dignity and self-determination to people whose way of being in the world disturbs a particular story about what is natural. Each of these is a form of collective not-knowing — a shared refusal to see others as what they are, which is: Brahman, looking back at itself.
To pretend that yoga philosophy has nothing to say about this — that we can sit in a room, breathe together, and leave these structures at the door — is itself an act of avidya. It is a choice to not-know, which is always a choice made from a position of enough privilege that not-knowing is survivable. For people living inside the specific violences of patriarchy, for queer people denied the right to exist safely, for people whose ancestors were colonized and whose descendants are still living the material inheritance of that theft, for people whose race makes their body a target rather than a sanctuary — not-knowing is not an available luxury. The body will not let them forget. The world will not let them forget. And a yoga that asks them to set aside what the world is actively doing to their body in order to achieve a peace that the world then immediately dismantles the moment they walk out the door — that yoga is not offering liberation. It is offering a brief, expensive vacation from oppression, and then calling it spiritual progress.
Maya Is Collective Before It Is Personal
The second thread I want to pull is maya — the veil that makes the separated, hierarchical world seem real and necessary and natural. In classical Advaita, maya is often taught as a kind of cosmic illusion, the appearance of multiplicity where there is only unity. But if we take this seriously in the world we actually live in, we have to ask: what are the most powerful illusions operating right now? What are the stories that make an unjust arrangement of the world seem inevitable, God-given, biologically fixed, or simply the way things are?
The belief that some bodies are inherently worth less. The belief that women’s autonomy is a negotiable social grant rather than an inalienable condition of their personhood. The belief that gender admits only two positions and that queerness is a deviation from nature rather than part of its abundance. The belief that the wealth accumulated through colonial extraction is now legitimately held and that the poverty it produced is a natural consequence of the inferiority of the people it impoverished. These are not truths. They are maya — but they are maya with teeth. They have militaries. They have legislatures. They have psychiatric diagnoses and immigration enforcement and property law behind them. Lifting the veil here is not a private meditation achievement. It is a political, intellectual, and ethical project that requires study, solidarity, and the willingness to be changed by what you find.
This is why knowledge — not just practice — matters. The tradition has always known this. Jnana yoga, the path of knowledge and discernment, exists precisely because viveka, discrimination between the real and the unreal, is not something the body accomplishes on the mat alone. It requires rigorous inquiry into how things actually are, including how this very practice of yoga was extracted from the soil of South Asian culture, re-packaged by colonial and capitalist logics, sold back to a predominantly white, predominantly affluent market, and stripped of the very philosophical commitments — including its critique of ego, hierarchy, and the illusion of separateness — that made it dangerous and therefore valuable. You cannot practice authentic yoga without knowing this history. You cannot teach it without taking responsibility for it.
Ahimsa and Satya Are Political Vows, Not Just Personal Virtues
Which brings me to the yamas, and specifically to the two that I think are most urgently misunderstood: ahimsa, non-harm, and satya, truthfulness. These are almost always taught as personal virtues — be kind in your speech, be honest in your relationships. And they are that. But they were never only that. Ahimsa as a political commitment is what moved Gandhi to resist an empire. It is what moved Ambedkar to insist that a non-violence that did not dismantle caste was not non-violence at all — just the polite face of oppression. There is no ahimsa that looks away from patriarchy. There is no ahimsa that is comfortable with the caging of Black and Brown bodies. There is no ahimsa that tolerates a system that denies queer people safety, dignity, and the right to self-determination. If it tolerates these things, it is not ahimsa. It is etiquette.
Satya as a political commitment is what requires us to name things correctly — to call patriarchy patriarchy, to call racism racism, to call homophobia homophobia — rather than retreating into comfortable euphemisms that protect us from the discomfort of knowing what we are complicit in. Satya is the vow that makes spiritual bypassing impossible. You cannot be committed to truth and simultaneously committed to not-looking. You cannot practice satya and also maintain the fiction that your yoga practice exists in a depoliticized space, untouched by the systems that determine who has access to it, who feels safe inside it, whose body is held with care within it, and whose is not.
When I ask for freedom for all beings at the end of class, I am invoking ahimsa at its full scale — not just the absence of cruelty in this room, between these people, for the length of this practice, but the active dismantling of every structure that makes harm the condition of other people’s lives. And I am invoking satya — the commitment to see and name clearly what stands between any of us and genuine liberation. Peace that is built on the silence of the people being harmed is not peace. It is the quiet surface of an ongoing violence. Happiness that is purchased at the cost of other people’s dignity is not happiness. It is the comfort of the unseeing. But freedom — the freedom that non-duality actually points to — cannot coexist with these structures, because it is structurally incompatible with the belief that some beings matter less, that some bodies are more eligible for sovereignty, that liberation is a private achievement available to those with the right passport, the right gender, the right skin, the right desire.
This is what it means to say that none of us are free while any of us are not.
An Invitation: Module 13 — Roots & Reckoning: History, Ethics & Decolonization of Yoga
Everything I have been working through in this essay — the difference between circumstantial peace and structural freedom, the systems of collective avidya that organize our world, the political dimensions of ahimsa and satya, the history of yoga’s extraction and the responsibility of everyone who teaches it — this is the exact territory I explore in Module 13 of the Manas Yoga 200-Hour Teacher Training: Roots & Reckoning: History, Ethics & Decolonization of Yoga.
This 50-hour module traces yoga’s lineage from the Vedic seers to the global studio floor and asks teachers to sit honestly with what that lineage carries — its philosophy, its ethics, its ruptures, and its ongoing politics. We move chronologically through Vedic, classical, medieval/tantric, colonial, and modern periods, and then we turn to the present: what does it mean to teach yoga today with integrity, in a Western studio, in a body and culture not indigenous to the tradition? We read scholars like Mark Singleton, Andrea Jain, and Rina Alluri alongside the primary philosophical texts. We sit with the Yoga Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita not as timeless self-help manuals but as historically situated documents whose wisdom is sharpened — not diminished — by knowing the context that produced them. We work with Thenmozhi Soundararajan’s writing on caste trauma, with Punam Mehta’s framework for moving from critical to cosmic consciousness, with Susanna Barkataki’s concrete, practice-level guidance on what decolonized teaching actually looks like on a Monday morning.
This module is taught in cohort discussion format. Expect real conversation, genuine disagreement, and shared reflection — not information delivered from the front of the room and absorbed in silence. Every historical unit closes with a “what do I do with this in my actual teaching?” practice, because the point is never just to know more. The point is to teach differently. To hold space more honestly. To bring the full weight of the tradition’s actual commitments — non-harm, truth, the irreducible dignity of every being — into every class, every pricing decision, every choice of language, every body you invite to the front of the room.
Module 13 runs December 11–19, 2027 and January 15–23, 2028 at Manas Yoga Studio, Vienna. Early bird enrollment is €950 (until October 1, 2027); regular price is €1,050. This is a Yoga Alliance registered Continuing Education module — 50 hours (36 contact, 14 non-contact) that can be taken as a standalone course or as part of the full 200-hour YTT program. Manas Yoga members receive a 10% discount. An easy payment plan is available.
If you are building a teaching life and you want it to mean something beyond the performance of wellness — if you want to understand why freedom is the only thing worth asking for, for all beings, without exception — I would love to have you in the room.
The conversation this essay is part of is a long one, and it does not end at the edge of the mat. It starts here!