Ahimsa

Yoga Sunday School

Exit message at Black Fox coffee shop in Midtown Manhattan

There were other things I wanted to write about this week. But when I thought about writing one word kept flashing through my mind, and that word was ahimsa.

A Sanskrit word, ahimsa means non-violence. I first learned about ahimsa during yoga teacher training.

One of my favorite lines in our yoga teacher training manual (for context, the manual is 214 pages, so there are many lines) is attributed to Donna Farhi, and she said “Yoga is for those who have discipline, tenacity, and devotion.”

I love that especially as it relates to ahimsa because as my yoga philosophy teacher said “violence is inherent in society and human history.”

Ahimsa isn’t only to do with physical violence it’s also about the violence that can live in our thoughts. Violent thoughts about others, about ourselves. The root of violence begins in the mind.

Ahimsa asks that we are non-violent AND that we act with compassion, kindness, peace, love, respect, tolerance.

Ahimsa is written about in the yoga sutras, and those were written over 2,000 years ago. The yoga sutras were a written compilation of practices that had already been around for a thousand or more years.

All to say, one constant throughout these thousands of years has been violence. Another constant has been yogis and other like-hearted humans practicing non-violence as an antidote to the external society around them.

I don’t know if we should find comfort or terror when we realize that violence, and the stress we experience because of violence in society, is literally a tale as old as time. I think I find both - as another favorite yoga teacher says “it’s bothing.”

Ahimsa is not passive. If “yoga is skill in action”* - ahimsa is one of those skills. Inaction can also be considered a form of violence.

Ahimsa asks us to consider what we can do within ourselves and for ourselves to feel more safe, and then extend that offering outward to make space where others can feel safe.

People all over the world do this - make and hold space for others to help them feel safe. Whether through religion, or school, or family, or community, or art - or in yoga class. These people and these places exist. We are not doomed to a violent eternity but we have to do the work, do the practice of ahimsa.

A modern space maker I admire greatly is Tricia Hersey, the Nap Bishop. Her lesson that we have to first be able to imagine a better, different world to create a better, different world is powerful. Her movement, Rest is Resistance, insists that without rest we have no space to imagine or dream a better reality.

Lately it feels like we often live in a reality dreamed up by very violent minds. I find some solace knowing that the quantity of more peaceful and more loving minds far outnumber the violent ones. A more peaceful world is waiting for us when we make more space for the realities imagined in those minds to exist.

The possibility of more peaceful realities is as infinite as ever. To conjure these realities will take more work than ahimsa alone. It will take truthfulness and clearing out ignorance. It will take setting egos aside to lead from a place that is more honest and loving. It will take healing trauma at the individual and collective level. It will take releasing scarcity mindsets and an acknowledgement that there is space for everyone. It will take discipline, tenacity, and devotion.

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*From the Bhagavad Gita: “‘Yoga is evenness of the mind:’ detachment from the dualities of pain and pleasure, success and failure. Therefore ‘yoga is skill in action,’ because this kind of detachment is required if one is to act in freedom, rather than merely react to events compelled by conditioning.”

Skill in Action is also a book about yoga and social justice by Michelle C. Johnson.