Yoga and Lessons from Gandhi

Bougainvillea in bloom, one of my favorite plants in Hawaii. Spring makes me smile!

50501 Protesters on Madison Avenue earlier this month. As far as I could tell, folks were respectful and peaceful.

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Last month, I wrote about the yama Satya, which is the yoga practice of avoiding lying, speaking the truth. One cannot leave out of any discussion about Satya without mentioning Mahatma Gandhi. I read somewhere once that Gandhi is considered by some to be the greatest yogi that ever lived. He spent his whole life fighting against injustice. But most importantly, he did so by first cultivating his own powers and perfecting his own ability to practice Satyagraha, which as I will share further below is a practice often translated to mean non-violent resistance. 

In to my inbox recently arrived an email with a link to an article in Psychology Today by Zoe Weil entitled: What Can Gandhi Teach Us Right Now? It was a captivating and topical read. Indeed, during this time of upheaval in our country and all the ripple-effects they’re having in the larger world, there is a lot we can try to emulate from the way Gandhi lived his life that may help us now.

Zoe, the article’s author, said a friend posed this question: “Do we just be still without any action to what is happening in this country?” Zoe’s response was: 

“Gandhi would hardly want us to keep still. After all, he worked tirelessly. He also worked strategically, wisely, and forcefully, with force embedded in his guiding principle of satyagraha, often translated as ‘nonviolent resistance.’ But satyagraha means so much more than this. The word combines satya, meaning truth, and agraha, meaning insistence, firmness, and adherence. In other words, Gandhi’s force for change was an unshakeable commitment to opposing injustice with truth.”

The key practice for us as yogis is to cultivate a deep insistence on knowing what is true and what is not. The firmer we are in our pursuit of truth, the bigger challenges we can take on, and the better will be our chances for success in cracking open doors that will lead to systemic changes that alleviate suffering in the world.

Apparently, Gandhi had worked on himself so much that he got to the point where he was able to say:

“I hold myself incapable of hating any being on Earth. By a long course of prayerful discipline, I have ceased for over forty years to hate anybody. I know this is a big claim. Nevertheless, I make it in all humility. ….”

All I can say is “Wow.” I don’t know that I will ever be able to make that claim in my current lifetime, but perhaps through my yoga and meditation practices I can at least crack open some inner doors in order to move in that direction.

Just as importantly, Gandhi goes on to say:

“… But I can and do hate evil wherever it exists. [For e.g.,] I hate the systems of government that the British people have set up in India. … But I do not hate the domineering Englishmen ….” 

Gandhi worked on himself and achieved extraordinary abilities. Chief among them, perhaps, was his ability to separate people from their actions and the institutions that influenced them so that he could hate the actions and the institutions while still being able to love the person. He was able to make to make that critical distinction between the person and the evil acts themselves, and the systems and institutions that caused people to do evil things.  

Similarly, yoga encourages us to separate who we really are from who we think we are. From the yoga perspective, we are not really the thoughts we think or the body we inhabit, but rather we are the observer of all these human experiences we are having. Practicing meditation, particularly, can help us to separate out the act from the actor, the thought from the awareness of the thoughts. Importantly, it can help us to still be able to love ourselves and others more while still not always loving everything that we or others do.

Gandhi said: 

“I have learnt through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.”

And to add to this, Zoe said:

“… truth for Gandhi meant never doing evil to combat evil; never using violence to oppose violence; and never succumbing to hate to resist hate. It meant no less than living, acting, and teaching with an abiding core of love.” 

Just as the heat of our yoga practice of tapas helps us to burn away the impurities in our mind and body, so too can the heat of our anger be mixed with our capacity for love to transform the unjust situations we are trying to change in an almost alchemical kind of way. The key practice: Control your Anger. If one can do that, then metaphorically speaking one can use the heat from one’s anger to compost any unjust situation one sees into a rich soil that will produce positive outcomes and change systems and institutions for the better.

A key point of the article is that Gandhi is someone we can try to live in the spirit of, similar to how Christians may try to live in the spirit of Jesus or Buddhists in the spirit of the Buddha. We may not be able to attain the same level of enlightenment that Gandhi, or Jesus, or the Buddha achieved, but we can be inspired by them enough that we can keep taking baby steps forward rather than backward.

If you’d like to delve a bit deeper and perhaps gain further insights, here again is the link to the article: What Can Gandhi Teach Us Right Now?

Keep moving towards an unshakeable understanding of the Truth. The Truth is there in plain sight if you can slowly clean away the fogginess from the lens through which you perceive reality. This takes work. Fortunately, yoga and meditation – and prayer even, if that’s your thing - are things that can help get you there. 

Zoe reminds us to “do the inner work as tirelessly as the outer work to achieve all of the above.” 

This is not easy. I bow down to your courage. 

May you be happy, …
May you be healthy, …
May you practice truth-telling with a firm insistence, ...
May love be at the core of your resistance, …
May the rich compost you create through your sincere and humble efforts benefit All Beings Everywhere. 

Aloha and Metta,
Paul Keoni Chun

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These sightings in April resonated.

Three views of the Hawaiian sky at different times of the day invites the question: who are we really - the menace of the dark clouds? ...

Or the promise of the puffy white clouds? ...

Or the clearness and immeasurable possibilities of the unobstructed deep blue sky? Remember: where you put your attention is how you'll perceive reality.

Or perhaps the joy of a happy Hawaiian Gecko?!