Sutra Friday: a yogi looks at violence and sees her life.

II-35 Aminsa Pratisthayam Tat Samnidhau Vaira Tyagah: In the presence of one firmly established in non-violence all hostilities cease.

One might think that being a yogi would make the practice of non-violence fairly easy, well that would be wrong. Oh so very wrong. In order to elaborate on this wrongness I’ll start with the word ahimsa. The root himsa means ‘injustice’ or ‘cruelty’ so by the addition of a that would suggest the opposite of injustice and cruelty, so already delving far beyond the depths of simple violence. By abstaining (which the yamas, the first step on the 8 limbed path of yoga, are all practices of abstinence) from these qualities a yogi tries to counter them by cultivating traits of kindness and consideration and even friendliness.

For me this yama really brought to light not just the ways in which I have violence in my life but more the way I practice all yoga in my life. But first the ahimsa stuff, which goes far beyond on day one when I looked up to see a mosquito (yep, a mosquito in November) on my window and out of pure reflex squashed him. Not very cruelty free. And that’s just the outward violence the place where I noticed the largest amount of violence was internally. Literally, the things I put into my body as well as the way I treat my body. When I think about the things that can harm a body internally like alcohol, overly processed food, sugar then I have some major work to do. I work part-time in environments that are crawling with sweets and good wine and not having the best will power in the world I tend to indulge a little. Especially now with the winter sunset of 4:30 in the afternoon my SAD (seasonal affective disorder) really works me into a funk, so often I self medicate, or rather anesthetize, myself in the evenings and wind up in bed by 8 o’clock. Not the nicest thing I could be doing to my body, in fact a very harmful thing to be doing. So how do I change this, this is where I stopped seeing this week’s sutra practice as an individual practice and a great introspective to my entire yoga practice.

When you get down to it it’s is a sort of half full half empty thing, people are usually one or the other. For some the idea of practice abstaining or doing without works and they can start to trim away the unwanted behaviors, sort of a spiritual, diet. For me that doesn’t work, the best way to get me to do something is to tell me I can’t, I don’t work well with restrictions. So instead I think of adding instead of eliminating. I think ‘I want to add these behaviors to myself’ and the result of this addition is a decrease in the opposite behaviors. For instance instead of telling myself; no more wheat and refined sugars, I say; I really want more rice and yummy fruit sugar in my life, so by adding these more ahimsa types of foods there is less room for the himsa type foods. That’s it. That’s my practice, my yoga, my life.

I don’t want to be keeping things out, I want to be gathering in; always growing, always learning, always experiencing. By bringing in the positive attributes of life I crowed out the negative; if my heart if full of compassion I have no room for jealousy, if my mind is full of kindness I have no room for judgment, if my body is full of nutrients and flexibility I have no room for disease and pain. Two thousand pounds of poo and two thousand pounds of gold both weight a ton, but which would you rather spread around your life.