The Wintery Tree
Concepts of abeyance in yoga and sociology (updated January 16, 2025)
The yoga tradition offers a teaching called the Wintery Tree teaching or nyāya. It's really a metaphor for not just the season of winter, but also for seasons of our practice that may feel confusing, challenging or uninspired. And it says that even as the wintery tree seems bare and lifeless, indeed, it is in a process of renewing, restoring, resting. Without their leaves and foliage, deciduous trees belie their vibrancy. But it's this temporary dormancy that allows for the springtime blooms and buds. Indeed, if the winter is mild, then maple trees don't have a robust harvest of the sap that can be turned into syrup. They need the strong frozen snap of winter to produce the sweetness that runs through the veins of the trees.
And the yoga tradition says, so too, our practice. At points, it may seem like nothing is happening. We may feel like we're in a plateau of understanding or experience. We wonder if our practices are in fact doing anything. Perhaps we even wonder if we should just stop. But, this might be akin to cutting down a tree in winter because it looks dead. Regardless of how it might look at a particular point in time, something powerful is happening to be sure.
To use another metaphor for our spiritual practice, when I observe my child, it feels like he's always been this age, this expression of being, this developmental stage. I somehow forget that he will grow and change. I look at the growth lines we've placed over the years on the wall in the kitchen threshold, marking his new growth over time. And sometimes he stays the same for many months. And then, seemingly overnight, there's a change. Just as in the late winter/early spring, all of a sudden, we notice a bud on the branch, or we notice the fresh new green sprouts erupting from the cold earth. There was life all along, but it was turned inward, rejuvenating, nourishing the inner life.
So when your spiritual life feels uninspired, know that something may be deeply shifting, reorganizing, healing. Keep going. Keep taking time to breathe, heal, rest, listen, feel. It is the ground for future blooms
#winterytree #keepgoing #goingwithin
Last time, I wrote about the practice of “memorying,” and on one such excursion, I found the quote above, about nyāya, “the wintery tree.” It reminds me very much of the concept of abeyance1 in the social movement literature. This “…delineates a process in social movements that allows challenging groups to continue in nonreceptive political climates….” I think this describes well the process by which social movements may spring to life into a rapid mobilization. It is an idea to which I shall return in the overall scheme of things. But for now allow it to link once more the personal and the social, the project of the sociological imagination.
That is, I suppose, the point of the post, for there is another Instagram post that appeared in my memories that speaks even more directly to the overall project.
Have you seen how hard it is to vaccinate and boost every person in a community? Now imagine how hard it is to get them to eat well and exercise for their lifetime. Solutions must be accessible, not just educational in nature.
—Dr. Mauricio Gonzales Arias, Internal Medicine & Emergency Physician.
Further, in the same post, Nini Muñoz argues the following:
Encouraging vaccination doesn’t preclude support for other interventions or lifestyle habits that improve health….
Vaccines and better lifestyle habits are not mutually exclusive, they both constitute public health responses.
@niniandthebrain, January 12, 2021 (slide 4)
These statements are intended to undo the false dichotomy between wellness and vaccination. In this case, it is a response to the specific comment “I see you are ‘pro-vaccine’.” It could stand as a response to anyone who claimed that they didn’t need a vaccination because they are “healthy” or “have a strong immune system,” because of their wellness practices. This casts wellness practices also as a matter of public health. Given my encounters with scholars and students of public health at university, I’ve always sensed a deep affinity between sociology and that field. Indeed, Dr. Nirav Shah, former Maine CDC chief, and now Principal Deputy Director of the US CDC, argued that public health was a combination of biology and sociology. Like sociology, public health looks at people in aggregate. US hyperindividualism misses this.
Casting wellness as public health then, avoids the individualist trap into which I often argue my Conspirituality friends fall. As such, it also undoes the snarky dichotomy they frequently draw between wellness and liberatory politics.
It all returns to the question of abeyance. What happens when social movements demobilize? Joseph Gusfield articulated a view over forty years ago.2 While I shall explore this further in a future post, allow me to argue for now that there are continuities, or rather dialectics, where others propose unhelpful dichotomies. Here, instead of drawing a dichotomy between wellness and politics, we instead locate the disconnect of anti–vax conspiracism in individualism rather than wellness. Further, I will argue as I did in my earlier post that locating explanations for conspiracism in individual psychology does nothing to resolve the disconnect. Truly resolving the disconnect requires modes of mobilization towards which we have thus far made only halting steps.
Taylor, Verta. 1989. “Social Movement Continuity: The Women’s Movement in Abeyance.” American Sociological Review 54 (5): 761–75.
Gusfield, Joseph R. 1981. “Social Movements and Social Change: Perspectives of Linearity and Fluidity.” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts & Change 4 (January): 317–39.
