Non-violence of a 5 Year Old

I have, in the past, posted a few times about doing yoga like a 5 year old. For example; Sacred 5, in which I talk about my inner child but not in a boring therapy kind of way. So why bring up blogs from the past well because I was thinking about ahimsa, you know ahimsa one of the yamas, the one about nonviolence. No? Well here’s a quick definition via Wikipedia (don’t judge, we all use it):

Ahimsa (Sanskrit: अहिंसा; IAST: ahiṃsā, Pāli: avihiṃsā) is a term meaning to do no harm (literally: the avoidance of violence – himsa). The word is derived from the Sanskrit root hims – to strike; himsa is injury or harm, a-himsa is the opposite of this, i.e. non harming or nonviolence.^[1][2]

It is an important tenet of some Indian religions (Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism). Ahimsa means kindness and non-violence towards all living things including animals; it respects living beings as a unity, the belief that all living things are connected. Indian leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi strongly believed in this principle.^[3] Avoidance of verbal and physical violence is also a part of this principle, although ahimsa recognizes self-defense when necessary, as a sign of a strong spirit. It is closely connected with the notion that all kinds of violence entail negative karmic consequences.

So that’s ahimsa and before that I referenced being 5 and now I will tell you how they got mashed together in my brain. I was in a yoga class, a really good yoga class and at the beginning while we were setting out intentions for class I thought “boy do I need some ahimsa!” See I’ve been going through a pretty rough couple of weeks and I did what I lot of us do when we go through rough patches, I self medicated. I let creep back in some bad habits I used to indulge in, so before imaginations run too wild I mean I started drinking a lot of wine and smoking cigarettes, yep a smoking yoga teacher. I’m not thrilled but I’m also human. So I set my intention to practice ahimsa during class and maybe even after class and for a while. And it was lucky I did because it was a hard class, the kind of class that you might find yourself pushing your body past its limits because you really want to get into that cool arm balance. I did really want to get into that cool arm balance because I’m good at arm balances and I hadn’t done this one in a long time and I wanted to impress my new teacher.

really cool huh? Astavakrasana (Click to go to the Yoga Journal pose discrpition page)

So after some very deep hip openers we started working our way into Astavakrasana; I got it! I held it! then I face planted and giggled like a 5 year old. In fact I’d been grinning and giggling like a 5 year old all class. Because what became apparent to me as my face landed on my yoga mat is that the best way to practice ahimsa in asana is to practice asana like you are 5! Seriously have you ever been out playing with a kid at the park and you pushed them too high on the swing? They don’t grit their teeth and bare it, they yell or cry for a second and when you ask if that was to much they say yes! It’s kind of amazing. In fact there was a living room, easy chair headstand contest going on the other week at my friends house, it went like this: one kid did a head stand over the back of a chair, then the rest did the same thing, then a different kid did a different kind of headstand or the same one but with a different leg/arm position and then the others did that one. So the cool things is that if one of the followers did said variation and it didn’t feel good they came down and said “I don’t like that one” or “that hurts” and then did something else instead! Amazing! Try teaching an adult to do this, man do we the over 5 crowd hate it when we can’t do something.
So that’s it, that’s what I discovered about ahimsa and 5 year olds, where the asana in concerned they have it figured out. You can’t do yoga like you are 5 and NOT be practicing ahimsa. And good for me you can’t be practicing ahimsa like your 5 and not drink and smoke!

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.