Respair: The Yoga of Hope

If your yoga practice has been a little (or a lot) more celebratory since last Tuesday, you aren’t alone. For those of us who value freedom, justice, and dignity for all beings, the outcome of the American elections brought a profound sense of relief. I, for one, wholeheartedly support reviving the word respair, a 16^th-century term meaning fresh hope or recovery from despair, to name what many of us have been feeling.  

Even as we celebrate this new sense of possibility, we know that this is just the beginning. Dismantling failing systems and addressing generations of inequity is slow work. It’s right to savor the joy and hope we feel. The question is how to sustain our hope along the long, uncertain road ahead.  

Hope that’s tied to a desired outcome rises and falls with circumstances. But yoga points us toward a more enduring hope, one that isn’t dependent on success or failure, winning or losing. It arises from the vast ocean of awareness beneath the surface waves of outer events, whether those waves are blue or red.

The Bhagavad Gita defines yoga as samatvam, equanimity, an “evenness of mind—a peace that is ever the same” (Bhagavad Gita, 2.48, trans. Juan Mascaro).

This equanimity isn’t indifference, passivity, or withdrawal from the world. We can care deeply, grieve, feel outrage, and celebrate meaningful change while remaining grounded in a stability that doesn’t hinge on things going our way.

Through practice, we come to recognize equanimity as an abiding stillness beneath the fluctuations of everyday experience. We may glimpse it in the peace of Savasana, in the moment the mind finally settles in meditation, or in the ease of a full breath. Over time, we begin to see that this stillness is more than a temporary respite from the busyness of our minds. It is an underlying awareness that remains present through all the changing circumstances of our lives.

At its source, this stillness is the field of pure consciousness, the underlying reality from which everything arises. It's inherently creative, dynamic, and alive with possibility. As we become more familiar with this ground of being, we learn to trust it. It doesn't mean trusting that everything will work out as we wish. It means trusting that we can remain grounded, responsive, and clear about what matters, even when it doesn’t. From this place of trust, we reconnect with the values that guide how we want to live and find the clarity to act in alignment with them.

Hope, then, isn't the certainty that things will turn out well. It's the capacity to remain open to possibility and to act on behalf of the future we want to see, even when we cannot know the outcome. It's something we cultivate through practice and express through how we live and relate to others.

The shifts that yoga engenders within us aren’t separate from the shifts we seek in the world. Every time we meet uncertainty with courage, respond to suffering with kindness, or choose connection over separation, we participate in shaping the world around us.

We can't know what the future holds. How freeing to realize that hope doesn't have to depend on outcomes. Perhaps this is the deeper significance of the respair we're feeling in this moment: not a guarantee of a particular outcome, but a renewal of our commitment to participate in bringing a more just and life-affirming world into being.