“Om”erica the Beautiful?

November 16, 2024

I awake often in the night to the sounds of Dave’s snoring as he sleeps deeply beside me. Rather than irritation, I practice non-reaction to release the grip of negative feelings. I teach this approach to my yoga students to help us navigate the world with greater ease. Heavy anxiety engulfs me each morning. My world has shifted. It is uncertain. It was undecided for the months leading up to the election. Now it is decided and tainted by a tincture of fear because Donald Trump will assume the mantle of leadership of our country.

I don’t know which is scarier, the prospect of his presidency turning into a reign of autocracy or the willingness of more than half our country to fall in step behind him. My anxiety driven fear feels a bit like doom. As though we are on the verge of acting out some dystopian movie with a tyrannical government at the helm- a Handmaid’s Tale or Post-Apocalyptic Dune where the world has been subsumed in hate and civilization as we know it blown to bits.

I know that I am not fully alone in my fright. Most of my friends think as I do. David does his best to detach and deflect. There is a wait and see gloomy fog in my circle of liberal Democrats. We find solace in the comfort of our “Blue State” of Massachusetts and whatever worth it holds. This comfort makes me wary to travel elsewhere. My apprehension makes me feel silly and small minded. 

I know good people who live in Florida and Georgia. Surely, there must be more good people who live in all the “Red States” but my level of trust is shaken. I’d like to move past my prejudice. I want to extend compassion to everyone, even extending it to those who do not share my political beliefs. Roadblocks thwart my mission. Here’s one: Last night as I surfed the TV channels for something decent to watch, an evangelist in a commercial, broadcast his commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ, soliciting ours. Bowing his head, he murmured a prayer to his savior, not mine.  

This transported me back to elementary school in assembly when a fair haired teacher with a silky voice ascended the podium to read to us from the New Testament. It’s a vague memory. More accustomed to the Old Testament recited in synagogue, I felt foreign, excluded and uncomfortable. Is that where we are headed? Backward in time when the line between religion and state was dotted?

Thank goodness for the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where we have some government assurance that inclusivity and basic human rights are secure. As a Jewish Democratic woman falling outside the confines of the male-dominated, Republican party spurred on by the Christian right, I sit shockingly in the minority. I am a foreigner in my native homeland. 

And so, I meditate and read and knit and exercise to combat the fog of fear. I stretch myself in the physical practice of yoga and stretch my spiritual self with yogic principles for steadier more harmonic living. I search my archive of knowledge for the philosophy that will root me in what is and not what I wish it to be. Not what we could have been. Not what we once were. I practice being present with body and breath, permitting that to be the only reality there is. In those moments, the dread lifts.

Only then does my heart open to the new day with the love I have for my husband, daughter, family and friends. To the love I have for community and yes, for the country I live in, which is difficult to love in this present moment. Each day I seek to practice equanimity, allowing in anger and grief over the outcome of the election, as well as adoration for our great land as extolled in the song America the Beautiful. I adopt this approach to arrive at what seems unattainable. Acceptance. Or perhaps, acceptance while continuing to fight injustice and exclusion. Are they compatible ideals? For that answer, I’ll dive deep into the yoga texts and perhaps the Constitution.