A Note from Tracy: As many of you know, as a community, we are taking a look at yoga's ethical guidelines. We are reading what we can, researching, and coming together once a month to talk about our perspectives on yoga and its philosophical teachings.
Many of us are reading Deborah Adele's Book: The Yamas and Niyamas. You can get it on Amazon, or pick up a copy when you're in the studio next.
It was Janet (today's guest blogger) who initially brought this book to my attention, and I am grateful to her for not only sharing the book with our community, but also for sharing her personal essay on ahimsa, yoga's first yama.
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Ahimsa: Taking My Own Ripe Journey
by: Janet Johnson
The eight yamas and niyamas are a set of yogic guidelines that are similar in purpose to Christianity’s Ten Commandments. Both serve as a set of rules or laws that support the functioning of relationships and society through tasking the individual to act in certain ways. However, the yamas and niyamas are not undergirded by the threat of “Thou shalt not…” with the implication being “Or else!” There is nobody to be afraid of with these restraints, whereas the Ten Commandments are based on the fear of God’s—and by extension, society’s—wrath.
This is a good thing, because if ahimsa, which is often translated to “nonviolence,” were an actual law, I would be on Death Row. I violate it multiple times a day toward myself, hopefully less often toward others. For me, this translates into the fear of not being good enough and not doing enough. One result is that I have become a slave to my planner and email inbox. Deborah Adele talks about this very thing: “I had created a violent inner world of pushing, overdoing and under-sleeping…” which leads to this: “…how we treat ourselves is in truth how we treat those around us. If you are a taskmaster with yourself, others will feel your whip.”
I believe that these pressures are not just personality traits that she and I share, but are also deeply political. The emotions I feel are partially internal, but they are also external, resulting from gendered and cultural forces outside myself. For example, there is the guilt for not meeting certain expectations for professional women, like being good at my job, having a clean house, and being nice, all on the same day. That pressure, and then the subsequent anxiety, anger, and guilt at not living up to some invisible, unreachable standard, are socially driven. Thus, that violence I commit against myself, and subsequently others as I take the role of stern taskmaster, is fed upon by socially constructed cues about what it means to be a woman, a teacher educator, a wife, a sister, a daughter, a friend.
Ahimsa, and other elements of yoga practice, provides a counternarrative to these pressures. The idea that I am okay—not just okay, even, but perfect--just the way I am, is radical in western thought. How can I be perfect when I forgot to shave my legs, dirty dishes are in the sink, and there are 114 unanswered messages in my inbox? Self-acceptance feels Stuart Smalley-ish: “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.” This seems faintly ridiculous because our culture provides archetypes of perfect women, wives, mothers, etc., and it is clear that I most certainly am not “good enough.” Instead, yoga tells me that the external does not matter; that I am indeed a worthy human being, just like everyone else.
Running and yoga are good lessons in ahimsa, as my expectations are necessarily limited by my physical body. My lungs, heart, and legs can only be taxed so far, so fast. My hips and hamstrings will only stretch to a certain point. Wise coaches and yoga teachers tell me to listen to my body. This listening has become part of my running and yoga practice, and as a result, I have been able to push my own perceived boundaries in unexpected ways.
If I am to practice ahimsa, this acceptance of my physical boundaries will necessarily carry over to the rest of my life by recognizing and respecting my personal and professional boundaries as well. I have a job in which, as one colleague said, there is no end. I could work 24 hours a day, and there would still be emails to answer, proposals to write, papers to grade, classes to plan, ideas to consider, students to support, colleagues to share. This is what drew me to this work in the first place: it requires engagement of my mind and my heart. I cannot imagine a better fit for my personality than this profession.
In order to have the energy to do my life’s work, then, it seems I must try to understand and appreciate all that is mine to do, and all that is others’ to do. One of the ways I violate ahimsa is that I try to fix things for people instead of letting them figure it out for themselves. Deborah Adele suggests that being a fixer and worrier is a violation of ahimsa, because when we worry about others, we imply that they are not capable of, as one of my student teachers said, “taking their own ripe journey.” When I consciously withdraw my worries and fears on behalf of others, I have more positive energy to give to the world.
In this way, ahimsa is both personal and political. It is personal, because it means living with integrity through recognizing and respecting my own boundaries. It is also political in that it asks me to resist gendered and classed pressures that are implicit and explicit in this culture. However, ahimsa does not require that I withdraw from the world; just that I make deliberate, thoughtful, and compassionate choices. It is both freeing and frightening to step outside the familiar zone governed by fear and judgment. Like everything, this will be a nonlinear, recursive process, in which I get it right sometimes, and fail miserably at other times. I may not have Stuart Smalley’s confidence, but at least I can get off my own personal Death Row.
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Janet is a writer, runner, yogi, teacher and researcher, not necessarily in that order. She started practicing yoga at Bristol Yoga Studio when it opened and feels blessed to be part of such an accepting and inspiring community. For Janet, yoga is a physical, spiritual, and intellectual practice, and she aspires to match her commitment to social justice with yogic principles.
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