Greetings Reader,

Holiday lights. Holiday music. Holiday shopping. Holiday movies. Holiday travel.

We’ve officially entered “Holiday Season” here in America-land, an annual pageant that acts like a cultural amplifier for one of our most basic needs: the need to feel included.

‘Tis the season for belonging.

It’s a season with an unspoken script — gathering, gratitude, ritual meals, shared stories, music, memory —that invites us to participate in a choreography of connection.

Even when family situations are strained, holiday season carries a symbolic promise: “This is the time of year when we come back to one another.”

Or not.

We may have a good reason to maintain a safe distance. Just the same, this season can tug on unresolved grief, childhood traumas, or relational fractures that have yet to heal.

‘Tis the season for mixed feelings.

For people who feel included, loved, and connected, seasonal gatherings affirm and validate a sense of identity: “I matter to these people; my presence has a home.”

For people who feel excluded, unloved, or estranged, seasonal images of warmth and unity can create a hollowing effect: “Everyone has somewhere to be . . . except me.”

I’ve been in both places.

Nowadays, I greet holiday season with a mix of gratitude and cringe, reflecting on my good fortune while feeling totally out of place in a society where inflatable plastic Santas are considered normal.

Yoga communities can offer us a sense of belonging, but one could rightly question whether yoga itself has any communal attributes.

According to Patanjali’s Yoga-sutras, the ultimate goal of yoga doesn’t offer anything resembling a communal experience; it offers kaivalya: isolation; the experience of one’s true self being conscious of one’s true self being conscious of . . . one’s true self?

Some people interpret this as absolute unity, the experience of oneness with everything.

Except there’s no “everything” in oneness. Our instinctive desire for communion often keeps us from noticing the illogic of absolute Oneness and the incompleteness of Patanjali’s conclusion.

There is, however, another way to understand kaivalya that supports the experience of both unity and diversity at the same time.

When we think of kaivalya as the experience of pure eternal spiritual identity untouched by — or isolated from — illusory and temporary material identity, the idea of self-realization expands to include the possibility of spiritual relationships.

In other words, the extraction of consciousness from the influence of illusion is tantamount to the awakening of our spiritual senses. Spiritual perception is the natural condition — the true nature — of all conscious beings.

This implies a very different kind of oneness: qualitative oneness; a shared spiritual essence that makes us who we really are.

It also implies a quantitative difference: we also share the quality of individual personhood, each of us as a purusa existing in relationship to all other purusa-s.

Bhakti adds the connecting thread: the one Purusa who is the source and substance of all purusa-s, the Ultimate Person from whom our own personhood is derived.

Hence, we belong to one another in spiritual kinship: we belong because we are relational beings, connected to one another as infinitesimal parts of an infinite and complete whole.

Spiritual personalism establishes this sense of transcendental belonging as the ground of social belonging:

• The rituals of spiritual culture establish the rhythm of community life and keep communal celebrations from decaying into performative harmony.
• Collective spiritual values protect relationships from exploitation and ensure that power always bends in the direction of protection.
• Civic spirituality anchors everyone’s place in the social fabric in the unique contribution each person is designed to make, supported by structures that help them thrive.

Spiritual personalism even supports political belonging: citizenship as participation in a shared project of transcendental morality rather than as an ethno-national identity.

A society in which the dignity of each being is honored as part of the dignity of all is a society that lives in the spirit of the season all year round.

Seeing the spiritual personhood of everyone we meet — even my neighbors with inflatable plastic Santas in their yards — makes such a society possible.

It doesn’t mean I’m going to relish going to the grocery store for the next month (the seasonal soundtrack will inspire me to get in and get out as quickly as possible) and all the crass holiday hoopla will still make me wish I had a river I could skate away on, but I’ll do my best to cultivate an attitude of gratitude and look for the spark of spiritual personhood in everyone’s heart that connects us all to one another.

And that connects me to you.

Wishing you all good fortune,

- Hari-k