Yoga, a Reunion, and Reflections on a Maniacal Superpower

After fifteen years of off-and-on teaching across the world, I’ve returned to the mat. This time, I’m at YogaSole, a charming studio with two locations in Brooklyn.

The return has stirred up a lot, reawakening the muscle memory of teaching yoga in Sierra Leone during times of chaos and upheaval, and of using it as a tool to reclaim some semblance of peace during Ebola, COVID, and the shit show that was the first Trump administration

I taught yoga regularly in Central America, but it was in Sierra Leone that my teaching practice truly came alive. I arrived in 2015 during the Ebola epidemic, just after a beloved local yoga teacher had passed away. He’d come down with appendicitis but couldn’t access medical care in the overrun hospitals.

The atmosphere in the country at the time was heavy with panic, grief, stress, and impossible workloads. People craved the kind of release yoga offered, and they’d go out of their way to attend the few available classes, taught by a handful of dedicated teachers. Freetown didn’t have a yoga studio, which felt like a big ask in a city without traffic lights, paved roads, reliable electricity, or supermarkets. Classes happened informally, outdoors or in homes.

I taught all over Freetown—on Lumley Beach, in makeshift rooms, and in borrowed spaces. The yoga community was small but committed, and over time it grew, with more local teachers offering classes and new ones joining the scene. Teaching felt like a modest contribution I could make in a place where people were seeking movement, connection, and tools to support their mental health. It also gave me a reason to disconnect from the daily stresses of my own job.

A few weeks ago, I posted my teaching schedule on my long-neglected “Yoga with Michael” Facebook page, just in case someone happened to be in New York and wanted to drop in.

As it turned out, someone did.

Claudia (a pseudonym), a friend I met in Sierra Leone, messaged to say she’d be passing through New York for work and hoped we could meet. I said yes without hesitation.

There’s something particular, something sacred, about reuniting with people I met in Sierra Leone. When “Salone” friends reach out, I tend to drop everything. Maybe it’s nostalgia. Or maybe it’s the bond forged through the sheer absurdity of what we lived through. Like taking a riverboat to spot elusive pygmy hippos, only to be greeted by furious, full-sized African hippos intent on crushing us with their massive jaws. Or getting a 4×4 stuck in a river on an up-country trip to a remote jungle. Or dressing in drag on Halloween during an Ebola-era party, wearing wigs we bought off the street—only to break out in rashes the next day wherever the synthetic hair touched our skin.

Some of us had to extract mango fly worms from our bodies after they burrowed in, their larvae passed from our drying laundry into our skin. Others nursed wounds from champion flies—beetles that, when squashed, secreted a chemical that burned skin. (I had the misfortune of getting one on my face.) Many of us battled through malaria, typhoid, or other sicknesses.

There was Ebola, then COVID, and everything in between. Mudslides. Floods. Fires. People who died suddenly in tragic accidents. Near misses that could’ve ended differently.

Somehow, we made it through.

As challenging as it was, I felt lucky to be there. To interact with Sierra Leoneans who were finding solutions to their own problems, to work at a place that could help in a meaningful way, and to witness the country’s natural beauty, hidden from the world’s gaze.

The moments of grace felt extraordinarily special. Walking the white sands of Tokeh Beach between yoga classes. Sipping wine in the evenings at Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, laughing among friends as our closest genetic relatives shrieked in the distance. Tasting freshly caught fish and lobster by the sea as a bright pink sun slipped below the horizon.

Claudia was there for some of those moments. She always radiated warmth and light. She never complained about the daily stress of life in Sierra Leone. In fact, she seemed to thrive in it. She was a regular at my classes and retreats, always showing up with calm energy and a kind directness. German-style truth-telling that never felt harsh.

I suggested we meet at a Caribbean restaurant I’d found in Brooklyn. It looked vibrant, full of colorful lights and life, and the reviews were solid.

We hugged the moment we saw each other. Claudia arrived early—not, she clarified, because she was German, but because, as she put it, “I’m always nervous dining out in the States. American restaurants are so strict about time. They’re always trying to kick you out.”

She’s not wrong. In much of the world, meals stretch for hours. Coffee is sipped, not gulped. Conversations unfold slowly. Servers don’t hover like your table’s a piece of real estate.

Ah, the joys of unbridled capitalism.

We ordered fish and wine. After catching up on life, we shifted to a heavier subject: the genocide in Gaza. We talked about how absurd it is that U.S. politicians still can’t—or won’t—distinguish between legitimate criticism of a state (Israel) and antisemitism. How outrageous it is that they continue to tiptoe around the word genocide, even though that is precisely what we are watching unfold in real time.

Claudia shook her head and took a sip. “It’s crazy being here. This country produces some of the smartest people in the world…and also some of the stupidest.”

I wasn’t offended. If anything, I agreed.

There’s a deep, disturbing current of anti-intellectualism running through American political life—one I haven’t encountered with such intensity anywhere else I’ve lived. It elevates faulty gut instinct over evidence, filtered through racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and religious fundamentalism. Politicians and the media gaslight us daily. The result? Over 400,000 unnecessary deaths during Trump’s catastrophic COVID response. And now, an entire country unable, or unwilling, to name what’s happening: genocide, apartheid, settler colonialism.

Democrats flounder, too slow, too inept, too complicit. Republicans line up behind a convicted felon who incited an insurrection. And AIPAC-funded politicians worship their true god, Israel, even when it means betraying the people they were elected to serve.

As I write this, all eyes have shifted to Iran. The U.S. has just entered into an illegal war, bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities shortly after Israel, backed fully by the U.S., launched its own attack. These bombings distract us from Israel’s ongoing, U.S.-funded genocide and have upended years of diplomatic progress. Netanyahu continues to manipulate U.S. leadership—Biden before, Trump now—bombing with impunity, killing children and civilians, and calling it defense.

We’re told we must support our allies. But we should never stand with anyone who bombs children. That’s not patriotism. It’s fascism.

Claudia and I talked about the visible poverty in New York. Nearly 25 percent of city residents live below the poverty line. People struggle to access food, housing, and healthcare. Meanwhile, from October 2023 to October 2024, the U.S. gave $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel. That’s our tax money—funding the annihilation of families, sustaining a regime far more interested in its own survival than in peace or justice.

Now, the same war drums are beating for Iran, just like they did for Iraq. Remember George W. Bush’s fictitious “weapons of mass destruction”? At least 200,000 Iraqi civilians died for that lie, likely many, many more. We’ve been here before. We should never be here again.

And yet here we are. Watching Ted Cruz tell Tucker Carlson that his stance on attacking Iran comes from biblical passages he can’t properly cite. A relative in Texas recently sent me a video of a white preacher calmly declaring that Israel’s war with Iran will trigger the end times. That Jesus will descend from heaven, return to the battlefield, and end the war. (The screen for that video fades to: “Pray for Israel. There is hope.”)

Knock, knock, America. You’ve lost the plot. Is anybody home?

This is a major problem, now with globally catastrophic consequences. When political ideology merges with religious fervor and is wrapped in nationalism, it stops being thought. It becomes cult. Whether that cult is Trumpism, Christian Zionism, or blind allegiance to AIPAC, it demands uncritical loyalty to survive.

We must not, cannot, hold ourselves hostage to such dogma.

We need critical thinking. We need clarity. And we need Americans to wake up—to recognize that we are waging an illegal war that serves no one but an insidious Israeli Prime Minister wanted by the International Criminal Court. That we are financing a rogue state committing horrific atrocities. That we are funding genocide and terror, not diplomacy. We should be strong enough to demand accountability from Israel, not kneel before it like a cowering dog.

This is what fragile democracy looks like. These are the cracks. The unraveling of an ideal that, perhaps, never fully existed in the first place.

My dinner with Claudia ended after two hours. A bright restaurant light flashed in our faces. Claudia’s glass of wine was still half full. Our server came over and said, “When will you be leaving? The restaurant closes in thirty minutes.”

We looked at each other, stunned.

But we shouldn’t have been.

We were in America, after all.