Yoga as Sacred Resistance: Weaving Activism Through Ancient Wisdom

A reflection on pluralism, resilience, and the radical reimagining of liberation

There’s a passage I keep returning to, one that echoes through my work as a yoga guide and activist: “We are all deeply, viscerally, and spiritually interconnected sentient beings infused with consciousness.” This isn’t just philosophical poetry—it’s the foundation of every justice movement I’ve poured myself into, whether fighting for women’s liberation, LGBTQI+ rights, or environmental and social justice. These struggles aren’t separate threads but part of the same luminous tapestry, woven together by our shared yearning for freedom from suffering.

The Many-Splendored Path

When I first encountered the idea that yoga is “a many-splendored thing,” it resonated with something I’d always sensed but couldn’t articulate: that liberation cannot be monolithic. Just as ancient traditions diverged—the Upanishads speaking of union with universal consciousness, the Yoga Sutras pursuing discernment and separation, and the tantric paths celebrating the body as an alchemical vessel—our movements for justice must honor multiplicity.

My feminism was learned from queer theory. My environmentalism deepened through Indigenous wisdom. My understanding of oppression was sharpened through the lens of caste abolition frameworks. Each tradition, each voice, each lived experience adds essential color to our collective understanding of what freedom can mean.

The text reminds us that “yoga is not a single idea but a concurrence of many teachings.” Similarly, social justice isn’t a singular ideology but a convergence of struggles, each approaching liberation from different angles, each valid, each necessary.

Dukka and the Quest for Collective Liberation

“Dukka or human suffering is inevitable,” the ancient teachings tell us. But while suffering may be inevitable, its sources are often not. The suffering caused by patriarchy, by heteronormativity, by environmental destruction, by caste supremacy—these are human-made systems. They can be unmade.

The yogic traditions offer us this truth: “The solutions for liberation from suffering, though varied, are available to those who seek with dedication through sadhana.” My activism is my sadhana. Every march, every meeting, every difficult conversation, every moment of speaking truth to power—this is my practice of seeking liberation, not just for myself but for all of us.

I think about this passage often: “Most of us are seeking to reduce and transcend dukka, our suffering, in some way. We long to be happy, to be healthy, to gain clarity of purpose and meaning in our everyday lives. We long to belong.” This longing to belong—isn’t this at the heart of every liberation movement? The trans youth seeking safety and recognition. The women demanding bodily autonomy. The earth itself, groaning under extraction and exploitation, longing to be treated as sacred rather than as resource.

Embracing the Luminous Threads of Pluralism

What strikes me most powerfully is that insistence on pluralism as resistance. “Pluralism does not mean we are all the same, or even that we agree all the time. It means we are cognizant of our differences, and we acknowledge the unique contributions and perspectives of diverse lived experiences.”

This is the north star for my activist work. How often have movements fractured over the demand for sameness rather than celebrating our differences? How many times have we mistaken unity for uniformity?

The historical example of Islam and yoga coexisting, influencing each other, creating something beautiful together despite conflict and tension—this offers a model. The Muslim and Hindu yogis, the Nath ascetics and Mughal princes, the syncretic spirituality that emerged from genuine encounter rather than erasure—these are not naive narratives of harmony. They acknowledge violence while refusing to let violence be the only story.

In my environmental justice work, I’ve seen this play out. Indigenous activists, queer organizers, faith leaders, scientists—we don’t always agree on tactics or terminology. But when we lean into our interconnectedness rather than our divisions, when we let our differences sharpen rather than splinter our vision, we become unstoppable.

The Complexity of Indigeneity and Appropriation

This is something that I have to make people understand, when I get asked about Yoga, Hinduism, and the Vedas. India is a land of many migrations, intermingling, integration, invasions, and conflicts between those who arrived in the land as nomads, traders, invaders, or colonizers. Most of its people are thus of mixed ancestry.

It refuses simple narratives. It rejects the comfort of “us versus them.” And it demands that we sit with complexity.

As someone engaged in social justice work, I’ve watched well-meaning activists stumble into the trap of binary thinking around cultural appropriation. The text offers crucial nuance: “In the context of yoga, the opposite of appropriation is not only appreciation; it is also unraveling the threads of power and hegemony that run through the tapestry of yoga.”

This is the work. Not just calling in or calling out, though those have their place. But the deeper labor of examining how power moves through our practices, our spaces, our movements. How Brahmanical supremacy operates within South Asian communities. How white supremacy commodifies and sanitizes. How capitalism extracts and packages. How patriarchy determines whose voices are centered and whose are erased.

Sacred Resistance as Changed Behavior

Let me share the four models of accountability I live with:

Self-reflection: I ask myself constantly—How is my attachment to comfort as a cisgender person preventing me from fully showing up for my trans siblings? How does my position as someone without disabilities shape what access looks like in the spaces I create? How does my identity blind me to ongoing oppression?

Apology: A real apology isn’t performance. It’s the beginning of transformation. When my environmental organization failed to center Indigenous leadership, apology meant more than words—it meant restructuring our board, our funding priorities, our entire approach.

Repair: This is where I see yoga’s teaching on interconnectedness become most practical. Repair isn’t transactional. It’s relational. It’s the long, patient work of building trust across differences, of creating spaces where dissent is welcomed rather than punished.

Changed behavior: This is the heart of it. “True accountability is changing your behavior so that the harm, violence, abuse does not happen.” Every yoga teacher training I facilitate, every resource I redirect toward marginalized-led initiatives, every time I step back to let others step forward—this is changed behavior. This is yoga as radical practice.

The Resilience of Radical Reimagining

What keeps me going in this work—through long nights, through backlash, through the seemingly endless nature of these struggles—is the same thing that kept our ancestors practicing: the belief that liberation is possible.

“There is a yearning to find our ways out of intertwined oppressive systems that are desecrating the earth and dehumanizing each other in every way. Many of us are seeking a radical reimagination of the world we live in.”

Yes. This is the sacred resistance. Not resistance as mere opposition, but resistance as the practice of imagining and building something new. The yogic concept of moksha, kaivalya, mukti—liberation—doesn’t have to mean escape from the world. It can mean liberation within the world, transformation of the world.

The godhadi metaphor—the quilt, the tapestry—keeps appearing in my mind. Each movement I’m part of is a thread. Women’s rights, LGBTQI+ liberation, environmental justice, caste abolition, disability justice—these aren’t separate patches sewn together. They’re interwoven, each thread strengthening the others, each color making the others more vibrant.

When I practice yoga now—and I mean practice in the fullest sense, not just asana but the entire project of seeking liberation—I carry this understanding: “Every act of understanding furthers our own self-knowledge. Each glimpse of a new possibility is also an understanding of our own possibilities.”

Every time I learn from a “Dalit” activist about Brahmanical oppression, I understand my own complicity better. Every time a queer elder shares their story, I understand resilience differently. Every time the earth reveals another consequence of our extraction, I understand interconnection more deeply.

This is yoga as I’ve come to practice it: not the sanitized, commodified version sold in expensive yoga pants made of plastic, but the messy, challenging, transformative work of recognizing that my liberation is bound up with yours, with theirs, with the earth’s, with all of creation.

A Practice of Ongoing Inquiry

I end with questions rather than answers:

How can I speak up about supremacy in all its forms—caste, race, class, gender, ability—in the spaces I move through?

How can I acknowledge harm I’ve caused, even unknowingly, even with good intentions?

How can I help build communities that nourish rather than punish, that welcome dissent as sacred practice?

How can I shift resources, share space, center marginalized voices—not as charity but as recognition of our fundamental interconnectedness?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re my daily practice. They’re the sadhana of social justice, the yoga of sacred resistance.

The ancient teachings tell us that liberation is available “to those who seek with dedication.” I’m seeking. We’re seeking. And in that seeking together, in that collective yearning for a world where all beings can be free, I find the resilience to continue.

This is yoga. This is resistance. This is the work of our lives.

In solidarity and struggle, with gratitude to all the ancestors—named and unnamed, celebrated and erased—whose wisdom lights our path forward.