Yoga and The Great Turning: Personal Practice Meets Planetary Change
Apr 16, 2025
Last week, I introduced the Three Stories of Our Time as a useful orientation to being alive at this moment: Business as Usual, Great Unraveling, and the Great Turning. In this post, I'll explore how yoga contributes to this third narrative—the transition from an industrial growth economy to a life-sustaining society committed to the recovery of our world.
Author and activist Joanna Macy describes the Great Turning as an "ecosystem of response" with three mutually-reinforcing dimensions that work together to create meaningful and lasting change:
- Holding Actions
The first dimension of the Great Turning encompasses actions that slow damage to our planet, protect our social fabric, and preserve ecosystems - buying time for deeper systemic changes. Examples include conservation efforts, mutual-aid networks, and local food systems like community gardens.
Yoga supports holding actions in several ways. The principle of ahimsa (non-harming) directly inspires nonviolence resistance strategies with Gandhi’s satyagraha (truth-force) representing its most powerful application. It can motivate protective actions for endangered species, vulnerable habitats, and climate stability.
Our practices build the resilience needed for sustained activism by maintaining well-being in body, mind, and spirit. Active postural practice builds strength, flexibility, balance, and agility, while inward practices like restorative yoga, calming breathwork, and deep relaxation restore our nervous system and foster the emotional equilibrium necessary for long-term engagement.
- Life-Sustaining Systems and Practices
The second component involves reimagining and redesigning the systems we live by—from energy and food production to education and elder care.
Yoga’s meditative practices foster the mental clarity and focus that creates space for innovative ideas and creative solutions to arise. The yamas and niyamas, yoga’s ethical principles, provide a framework for sustainable systems design and help us envision new ways of living rooted in equity, care, and sustainability. Specifically, the notion of simplicity (aparigraha, or non-possesiveness) can help inspire alternative economic models beyond consumerism
- Shift in Consciousness
Perhaps yoga’s strongest contribution to the Great Turning lies in the third dimension: the shift in consciousness necessary for lasting change.
At its heart, the yogic worldview is one of interconnection—our practices foster a deep recognition that we are not separate from one another or from the Earth, but part of a vast, interdependent whole. This shift has been called the most critical spiritual evolution of our time.
From this embodied sense of underlying unity arises a natural inclination toward choices and actions that serve the collective good.
As we navigate the uncertainty of this time, may our yoga practices strengthen our ability to participate meaningfully in the Great Turning in whatever ways we feel called to. May it help us become not only witnesses to this historic shift—but also conscious agents of transformation and renewal.