Beyond Binary Heteronormative Spirituality

I had a yoga teacher who would always talk about yoga as “the union of opposites” — inhale merging with exhale, “male strength” merging with “female receptivity”, “above” merging with “below”, “right” with “left” and on and on. He would talk literally about the left side, top and front of “the body” as “female”, and the right side, lower half and back side as “male”.

For someone who claimed to teach “non-dual tantra”, there seems to be an awful lot of dualism at work in his teaching. As I’d come to learn, this kind of binary heteronormative language isn’t confined to the niche world of neo-tantra. It shows up in many psycho-spiritual practices that are popular these days including yoga, astrology, tarot and depth psychology.

Anyone who spends time exploring these often overlapping scenes will immediately encounter the concepts of “divine masculine” and “divine feminine” which form the foundation of many new age practices and teachings. Before I met my yoga teacher, I’d never considered categorizing my body, psychology, or the natural processes like my breath in terms of gender, and from the beginning it never felt right (or even useful as a thought experiment). 

Maybe it’s because I’m from a generation (x) that prides itself on rejecting cultural norms, or maybe it’s because I’ve never felt comfortable putting myself into standard categories of sexuality. Or, maybe it’s because this way of thinking is based on patriarchal heteronormative ideas about sex and gender that were wrong in the first place. 

I spent years trying to resolve the conflict between the traditional ideas of “masculine” and “feminine” and what I felt to be true and real. I was caught between accepting the authority of my teacher and the traditions he and others drew from, and accepting the authority of my own experience. Maybe there was something I just wasn’t getting? Maybe more practice would help me see the validity of what he (and so many others) preached? 

But, if my practice has taught me anything, it’s taught me to trust my own experience.
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And my life as a yoga teacher, writer, and podcaster has taught me to speak from my heart — because if I’m feeling it, then someone else is probably feeling it too. And hearing that we’re not alone in what we feel to be true can be the support we need to take the leap into a new, more free and authentic way of being in the world. And I think many of us are feeling like we’re on a precipice, not just in the yoga and spirituality world, but in our culture at large. It’s a scary place to be, in the space between the “known” and the unknown, the old and the new. But hey, no one ever said birth was going to be easy.

So, at the risk of going out on a ledge and further distancing myself from the yoga and spiritual community, I’ll just come out and say it: 

I think it’s about time we move beyond binary heteronormative thinking in spirituality. Because, what (or who) does it really serve? And is there really any truth to it anyway?
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When teachers in the yoga and new age spirituality communities talk about “receptivity” and “strength”, “nurturing” and “protective” etc., what they’re really talking about qualities of being. What do we gain by forcing these qualities into binary categories like “masculine” or “feminine”? Personally, I can’t see any benefit.

To my mind, it only creates unnecessary exclusion and division. In the labelling and categorization of qualities of being, I feel that we lose something of the ambiguity and complexity that makes life so wondrous and mysterious. I’d even go so far as to say that ambiguity and complexity is what makes life so wondrous. So why do we feel the need to separate things out and put them into neat little boxes?

The moment we put natural processes like “inhale” and “exhale” or qualities like “strength” and “receptivity” into oppositional, gendered categories, we create division where there wasn’t any previously.
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A false goal is then created to “go beyond” or “dissolve” the opposites, which sets up a whole system of disempowerment that itself relies on the binary of the “haves” and the “have-nots” — that is, the mighty heroes that have transcended dualism, and the rest of us poor slobs. When we buy into these ideas, we feel like we have to look to these spiritual heroes to pull us up out of the muck. In the process, we end up spending a lot of time and money spinning our wheels trying to get out of a predicament that was never there in the first place.

This way of thinking is based on old ideas by old men who were desperately trying to create order out of the chaos of existence. Dualistic thinking and the categorization of natural phenomenon is, I believe, the foundation of patriarchy. It’s a way of seeing the world that is so ingrained in our culture that even men who speak against the patriarchy (like my yoga teacher) end up reinforcing it through the language and concepts they expound. 

Consider Jordan Peterson, who has built a worldwide platform and multi-million dollar business selling us the “antidote to chaos”. Who said chaos needs an antidote? Instead of desperately trying to create order, couldn’t we expand our mind to accept the richly complex and diverse nature of reality? And isn’t that the real goal of spiritual practice? Our body certainly doesn’t care about categories and logic — it just goes about doing its job of living. So what are we afraid of? The answer points toward some uncomfortable truths about the patriarchal fear of the body and nature.

“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.”
Paul Valéry
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Nature doesn’t conform to binary gender categories. 

I have a hard time believing that a flower thinks of itself as “male” or “female”. I’m pretty sure it just does the job it was meant to do; either creating pollen or creating fruit. Many plants do both jobs. The same can be said of the animal kingdom. Animals don’t think of themselves as “male” or “female”, they just play their particular role in the work of procreation. Some animals, like the earthworm or Hamlet fish who create both sperm and ovum, resist categorization into ideas of “male” or “female”, forcing the creation of yet another man-made category: “hermaphrodite”. No other entity in nature — plants, animals, the sun, the moon — has any need for such limited gender categories, and I suggest that we don’t either.

 [Coincidentally, as I was writing this, a friend shared an article about the oldest tree in England that is apparently undergoing a gender transition .] 

I think that the current transgender movement might be a stage in our evolution as a culture — a sign that we are outgrowing the old binary ideas about gender that we’ve inherited and (for the majority of people) accepted without much resistance. I’ll even go so far as to suggest that it might even be a kind of echo from the future, foretelling a radical change in our biological evolution.

Who knows? But I think transgenderism is perhaps the most radically “yogic” shift we’ve seen in our culture, because it’s a movement that rejects inherited patriarchal categorization on the most fundamental and personal level.

After all, yoga and tantra are about breaking free of the conditioned mind and expanding our capacity to enjoy the wonder of life in its fullest expression.
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Whether this is a signal of a cultural evolution or biological evolution, time will tell. What I can say for certain is that forcing any of life’s processes into oppositional categories is the root of opposition on every other level. I believe this is what Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti was getting at when he said: 

“When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else (emphasis mine), you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known

But even Krishnamurti, who is seen by many as a radical thinker, never went the extra step to challenge gender categories. Perhaps it’s because he was a heterosexual male who enjoyed a great deal of privilege and power? I’m reminded of a quote I read that speaks to white privilege but could easily be applied to heterosexual privilege: “Trying to understand white privilege and power is like trying to explain water to a fish.” 

A fish can’t begin to know what water is until they are no longer immersed in it. I think our heteronormative culture as a whole is at the “fish out of water” stage, gasping for breath on the shore of realization that the binary categories that have been overlaid on our direct experience of life no longer hold water. 

As with any stage of transformation, whether on the personal or collective levels, there’s going to be a lot of resistance to change — especially when it challenges current power structures. The people in power resist change more than anyone because they have the most to lose. As the larger collective, we only have something(s) to gain — greater equality, peace, harmony, and distribution of resources.

I hate to lean on an inspirational cliché, but we really do need to be the change we want to see in the world.
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If there’s any hope of creating a more harmonious and egalitarian society, we need to start by dismantling the authoritarian patriarchal structures in our own minds. We have to be bold enough to challenge the categories and labels by which we self-identify and, like our ancient ancestors, leave the comfort of the waters we were born into and bravely step onto the shores of a new world. It may be a radical proposition, but I think this level of evolution is what’s required if our species is going to survive.