Practicing Yoga / Embodying Feminism / Shape-shifting Suzanne Bost (bio) For only through the body, through the pulling of flesh, can the human soul be transformed.1 As in my yoga practice, I begin with a dedication. With these words I honor Gloria Anzaldúa, whose writings jarred my political body out of stasis. Rereading Anzaldúa continually expands my ideas about writing, knowledge, and bodies. Yoga has brought me a comparable sense of expansion and transformation, and there is much resonance between Anzaldúa’s theories and yoga, particularly in her writings about Aztec nahualism, or shape-shifting. Both yoga and shape-shifting involve mental and corporeal movement between worlds and species. Aztec priests achieved mystical detachment from their individual bodies, often assuming the forms of other animals, in sacred rituals involving dancing, masking, self-bleeding, and intoxication. Anzaldúa invokes these traditions to suggest ways of transcending limiting (static, singular) notions of body and identity.2 For years Anzaldúa and yoga have been circulating separately throughout my work; here they come together. I incorporate Anzaldúa’s words throughout this introduction to form a shared textual space; her words appear in italics to highlight the friction and collaboration between our ideas. I stretch alongside her words here in an extended partner pose, using the tools of my professional discipline to simulate the lived present of a yoga practice.3 I have this visionary experience where I’m flying in the sky as an eagle. . . . We’re going to leave the rigidity of this concrete reality and expand it. I’m very hopeful.4 Yoga is intellectually thick. In yoga asana, sensation is visible in vibrating muscles, and intangible ideas (impatience, imbalance, joy) become concrete in balance postures. Subject and object interchange where the body folds in on itself; the chest touches the legs and the legs touch the chest. Mind and [End Page 191] body become indistinct as practitioners thrust their intentions into the space around them. The generic article the is often used to refer to body parts in yoga; at the same time, we feel these generalized parts intensely connected to our brain, our nerves, and our breath. Pronouns and articles, the/your/my, fade in and out as we alternate between the specific materiality of the moment and the effort to stretch beyond our particular limits to a universal script. My calf muscles ache when I push my heels toward the floor in downward-facing dog; they might never make it. The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended.5 Yoga is regulated, following pre-scripted poses, but also anarchic, with practitioners getting the poses wrong, making them up differently, falling down, or lying down. Individual and community blend in yoga. Practitioners line up their mats, move together, chant “om” in unison, and do it differently. Commonalities cross back and forth across differences: the different shapes and strengths of individual bodies, our different feelings and different emplacements in the room. Like this heterogeneous community, each body itself is an aggregate, both coherent and fragmented, with parts pulling in opposite directions, sharing and shifting the weight. As one of my yoga teachers recently said, “our bodies are diverse societies.” Conocimiento es otro mode de conectar across colors and other differences to allies also trying to negotiate racial contradictions, survive the stresses and traumas of daily life, and develop a spiritual-imaginal-political vision together. Conocimiento shares a sense of affinity with all things and advocates mobilizing, organizing, sharing information, knowledge, insights, and resources with others.6 I came to yoga for balance; I wasn’t after a new ontology. I literally stumbled upon what was, for me, a new way of being. This being, to a degree, is a species of my own invention, not a replica of the spiritual ideal originated in India. Instead of thinking about nothing, I think about individual resistance within regulatory discourses and the relationships between mind and body, self and society. My spiritual conversion, in the light of my readings in Foucauldian feminisms...