Devotion as Disruption

For those who tremble, and speak anyway

Oct 31, 2025

Author’s Note: Samhain, 2025
Yes, I’m posting this on Halloween. Mostly because it felt thematically true. This season is more than ghosts and costumes. It’s also the things we bury and the truths that refuse to stay quiet. Samhain has always been a time when the veil thins, when what has been hidden steps forward and asks to be witnessed. I am honoring that invitation here.

I am sharing something I have carried quietly for a long time. Thank you for reading with care, for meeting this moment with presence, and for allowing this offering to be what it is: a shedding, a summons, and a step toward what feels honest and alive.

“I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts.”

– Audre Lorde, The Uses of Anger (1981)

A few weeks ago, I had a panic attack during my work day. It wasn’t the usual flavor I was used to. This one came with tunnel vision, nausea, and the inability to breathe. There were no known visible/active triggers. It was scary. And it was a signal. My body was communicating something to me, something I’m still working to understand.

There are many things I could point to that explain this new panic: the military stationed on our streets, masked agents apprehending neighbors and friends, food insecurity, economic uncertainty. The world is anything but peaceful right now, so of course it made sense. But that wasn’t the whole story.

Underneath it was my own decision-making and the disorienting question: who the fuck am I?

As the world pressed in, I began to ask: who am I if I turn away from this?

I carry the memory of a family who survived what happens when silence becomes policy. My parents survived a genocide. At some point, I had to answer the question that has followed me my whole life: what would I have done then? Well, I am answering it now. Terror is real. So is obligation. The cost of looking away has been written across my bloodline. I refuse to abandon myself or my people again. Not in this lifetime.

Here’s the long and short of it: I’m pulling out of next year’s Bhakti Rising yoga retreat and I’m changing the way I show up. Not for approval or validation, but so that I can live in alignment with my actual values. I’ve contributed to harmful systems of oppression, all while immersing myself in anti-oppressive theory. That gap, between what I believe and what I live, has become impossible to ignore. Once again, I found myself hovering above, thinking my way through injustice while refusing to feel it. Disregarding the very essence of yoga: union.

What I share may make some of you uncomfortable. That’s not my aim, though I understand it may be a consequence. I’m not here to punish anyone. I don’t believe liberation comes from harm. I’m here to speak honestly about why I decided to pull out of a yoga retreat I agreed to co-lead, and to honor what’s true for me without abandoning anyone, including myself.

I’ve been called righteous, shameful, and delusional for telling the truth of my own lived experience. Despite that, I am still choosing to live with nuance, knowing there are no perfect answers and that what I’m about to say might disappoint or anger some of you.

At a different time, I would’ve let the fear of perception reshape my tone, beliefs, and voice. But not now. Not at this moment in history.

You may know me, but you don’t. Not fully. You’ve likely only known the palatable version of me. The version who performs for the white gaze. The version who bends, just enough, to be allowed in.

For much of my life, I’ve curated a self that would be praised, accepted, assimilated. (This pattern worsened after the events of 2020 unfolded, but more on that later). The more I anointed what was acceptable and buried what wasn’t, the more I lost my own center. Afraid of abandonment, I abandoned myself. I told myself that shrinking was a form of strength. That if I just kept going, one day it would all feel aligned. Even when my choices felt miles away from my own morality.

The cost is enormous.

I don’t claim to have it all figured out. Though I know this much: I’m starting to show up in ways that are disruptive. Disruptive to my past self. Disruptive to old patterns of conditioning, to comfort, to relationships that demanded my silence.

It might sound strange, but feeling doesn’t come naturally to me. I’ve spent years perfecting vulnerability that’s tidy: relatable, well-timed, easily consumed. The deeper stuff? The yearning for validation. The ache of still wanting approval from people who were never meant to define me. The internalized racism and depression that hum beneath the surface. The dark thoughts that still visit when life buckles.

Those parts rarely see daylight. I learned to tuck them away, to appear steady, strong, “doing the work,” even when it costs me.

Recently, I asked a professor how she stays present when the flood of theories and historical knowledge threaten to drown out actual connection. She looked at me and said, without hesitation: “Feeling.” Lean into what it feels like to think, to relate, to simply be with another human.

I laughed. The kind of laugh that knows the truth and wishes it didn’t.

Anger, I know. Rage, I know. Isolation and mistrust, I know. But feeling? Trust? Those are muscles I’m still learning to use, especially with myself.

In a world that tells women of color to be “less,” I’ve spent years shaping myself into someone I could tolerate. Someone others could too. I’ve yoga’d my way into spaces that wanted the performance, not the whole person. Spaces that treated my body as a part of the decor, up for grabs, and punished when I say “no.”

So, who am I? A human. A political body. A person in recovery learning to feel.

I’ve contorted myself so many times I hardly recognize the girl who once dreamed of becoming a human rights attorney at the ICC. She would be disappointed. She would also understand. What we do to survive rarely matches who we are.

In my silence, I softened my language. I made oppression digestible. I stayed quiet in rooms that demanded race neutrality while never offering neutrality back. I surrounded myself with white friends I thought could hold the full spectrum of who I am. And I have been heartbroken over and over when empathy ran out in the face of fascism.

I was supposed to be nice.

I was supposed to be kind.

I was supposed to be quiet.

I can be all those things and disruptive.

I’ve always been disruptive. But I turned the disruption inward. The shame built up in my body and taught me that speaking my lived experience was dangerous. That saying “no” would cost me everything.

Since completing my 200HR Yoga Teacher Training in 2016, I’ve remained relatively silent in yoga spaces. I’ve seen the lack of South Asian presence, the abundance of Buddha heads and Ganesha figurines, the $100+ mala beads. I’ve bought them too. I remember asking the white woman who sold me my first mala how to use it. She said, “Just wear it with your outfit. It’s a great accessory.”

At the time, I accepted that. Later, I learned otherwise from South Asian teachers and voices I sought out myself.

Over time, I witnessed the same pattern. Yoga directors brushing off calls for equity. Students telling me to skip the stories, ignore the history, “just kick my ass.” I internalized the message: don’t make it political. Keep it light and marketable.

In 2019, I began studying decolonization with intention. I read Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor. I engulfed Susanna Barkataki’s work. I listened to Yoga Is Dead. I learned from Zarna Joshi’s series on Hindu colonialism. And still, I stayed in my head. I treated decolonization like a syllabus, rather than a lived practice. Because feeling into it, really letting it take root, meant confronting my own role in it all. That was terrifying.

Feeling meant reckoning with my complicity, my shame, my silence. It meant admitting that even in a practice that saved my life, I had helped uphold the systems that hollowed it out.

As I reflect now, I see how deeply problematic my time in Vail, Colorado really was. I arrived in October 2019, and by March 2020, the world shut down. I was isolated. Cut off. And then came the racism, hatred, and disgust. The constant reminders that I didn’t belong were equally quiet and loud. It happened in “safe” spaces, both public and yoga. In my body. In my grocery store. In my job. In my home.

Over time, that violence shaped the version of me many of you came to know: quieter, more palatable, always trying to prove I deserved to be there.

In May 2020, a disgruntled longtime Vail resident said to my colleague, “someone who looks like her doesn’t belong here.” Years later when I shared how deeply that wound landed, how much it echoed every moment I’ve been made to feel small, a therapist told me, “you’re too intelligent to hold onto a moment like that.”

As if intelligence could protect me from racism.

As if intellect should override pain.

That moment stayed with me. I was being told, again, that the violence done to me was less important than the comfort of those around me.

And now here I am. Four months into my move from the mountains of Vail to the streets of Chicago. I don’t yet know who I am. But I do know something’s been off in how I’ve moved through the world, and especially through the yoga industry. If there’s anything I’ve learned about Chicago in my short time here, it’s that this city demands that you bring all of yourself or nothing at all.

There’s never a perfect time to change. Though I’ve heard that it’s easier when we don’t do it alone. So as I figure out who I am, I’m also getting clear on who I no longer want to be.

I want to name something I haven’t said out loud yet: This transition has felt like a rupture, a chaotic unraveling. It brought me closer to recurrence of use than I’ve been in a long time. Too close. And the truth is, I had no business making big decisions or commitments in that state. Therapists tell me that all the time. But I kept going. I kept performing. Kept trying to prove I could hold it all.

As a person in recovery who has worked in the field, I often feel like I’m expected to embody some impossible version of neutral stability, even while constantly saying “recovery isn’t linear.” I can say that until I’m blue in the face, but the reality is: people in the helping professions are rarely given space to be messy. And when we falter, we’re seen as bad clinicians and untrustworthy.

The grace extended to others in recovery doesn’t always reach me. More painfully, I often don’t extend it to myself. I hold these expectations, too, despite everything I’ve learned, despite everything I teach. That’s the hardest part to admit.

So when I think about why I’m stepping back from this retreat, yes, it’s political. Yes, it’s about complicity. And it’s also personal. It’s about mental health. Sobriety. Survival. Ancestry. It’s about naming what is real in my body, not just what looks right on paper.

I want to name this, too: I feel genuine remorse for saying yes to something so large, something that asked me to hold sacred space across borders while I was in one of the most tender, destabilizing transitions of my life. I made that commitment without therapy, without recovery support, and without truly checking in with myself about what I could hold. In hindsight, it was a decision made from pure survival.

Now I know that leaving a yoga retreat won’t single-handedly stop fascism. However, fascism is built in the same way resistance is: one decision at a time. Every refusal to comply with silence matters. Every disruption of comfort matters. Neutrality is the soil oppression grows in. I’m no longer interested in watering it.

This retreat asked me to split myself in two: to teach liberation while pretending everything was fine.

What clarified things for me wasn’t the retreat itself. I had already been moving toward this decision. It was happening slowly, quietly, and with increasing certainty. But the reactions I received when I tried to speak honestly about what was happening in my neighborhood made one thing explicitly clear: I couldn’t keep splitting myself to make others comfortable.

When I expressed fear about the militarization of my neighborhood, I was mocked. Told I was delusional. Told to “take off my tin foil hat.” When I named my discomfort with leading a retreat while agents were detaining people outside of schools, I was told that everyone is in crisis, not just me. That I was “robbing” someone of money. That I always “make it about race.”

I had already been asking myself hard questions about alignment. Those moments confirmed my decision.

To stay would mean abandoning myself. Again.

What I asked for was empathy. What I received was rage and contempt directed not at state violence, but at me. At my voice. My body. My refusal to be complicit.

That kind of gaslighting is corrosive. Especially as my neighbors continue to be terrorized by the federal government.

Yet, those moments weren’t outliers. They reflected a pattern I’ve seen across many yoga spaces: when whiteness is uncomfortable, it turns outward and lashes out. It transforms insecurity to defensiveness. And from defensiveness, violence becomes justified. Instead of looking at the system, it attacks the human being in front of them.

The realization didn’t arrive all at once; it was something I’d been circling for weeks. The reactions just stripped away any remaining illusion that I could keep participating without harm. If I continued forward, I would be betraying myself. Just as I have in every moment of silence, in every re‑packaging of decolonization to make it consumable, in every polite smile I offered when someone said “I don’t care about politics.”

So this is my line in the sand.

I am withdrawing from the Bhakti Rising retreat because I refuse to silence myself any longer. I know what it feels like to stay quiet in favor of acceptance. I’ve done it for years. But silence only delays the inevitable collapse. I will not co-lead a space that demands I be digestible while the world burns. I will not teach yoga that bypasses pain or sells healing as an aesthetic. And I will not pretend that fascism can be fought with vibes on faraway beaches.

This decision doesn’t feel powerful. It feels like grief. Necessary grief.

I’ve spent nearly a decade trying to be seen in the yoga world as a whole person. And the irony is, Bhakti, the yoga of profound divine love, isn’t supposed to be an escape. It’s a call to stay close to what matters. It’s about devotion to something bigger than yourself. For me, that means devotion to justice, to truth, and to protecting what is sacred.

What gives me hope is this: I know I’m not alone. I see others asking hard questions, sitting in the discomfort, refusing to bypass what matters. I see neighbors organizing, students speaking out, teachers reimagining what care can look like. We are not separate from the world, we shape it. Oppressive systems are only maintained by individuals and their actions. And it happens one choice at a time. This is one of the ways I choose to stay devoted.

You might wonder how just a few months in Chicago have enlivened me this much. Since being here, I’ve been reflecting on what home really means. I keep returning to a line from Thor: Ragnarok:

“Home is not a place, it’s a people.”

These past four months have proven that true. I feel more at home here than anywhere I’ve lived, and it’s entirely because of the people.

I will leave you with the beloved Shanti mantra,

Lokāḥ Samastāḥ Sukhino Bhavantu

It is a mantra I return to again and again, because it has always felt like the ultimate guiding light:

May all beings everywhere be happy and free.

And may my thoughts, words, and actions contribute to that happiness and freedom for all.

A Note of Gratitude: Thank you to everyone who held me through the drafts, the shaking hands, the doubts, and the uncertainty. To those who listened without trying to soften my edges or redirect my fire: thank you for seeing me whole. Thank you to the writers, rebels, and witches who came before me, who taught me that language can be a lantern and a blade, and that creativity is essential in times of great injustice.