The Yamas & Niyamas

by Deborah Adele

  Courage and love are deeply connected. “When love became the Lord of my life, I became fearless.” These words were expressed by Swami Rama in his journey on this earth and are echoed by Jesus’ statement, “Perfect love casts out fear.” Where fear creates harm and violence, love creates expansion and nonviolence and the true safety that we seek. Nonviolence is woven with love, and love of other is woven with love of self; these cannot be separated.

  Violence to Others

  If we cannot find love for our self, it becomes easy to look outward and begin to focus on others, hiding our own sense of failure and fear under our blazing concern for others. It’s almost as if we are secretly saying, “My life is a mess; I’ll feel better if I fix yours.” If we are not honest with ourselves, we can even go to bed with a sense of pride in the amazing things we have done for others that day. We may even feel holy about our arduous feats of self-sacrifice. In reality we are hiding our own sense of self-failure by telling others how to live their lives. When we are unwilling to look deeply and courageously into our own lives, we can easily violate others in many subtle ways that we may not even be aware of, thinking that we are actually helping them.

  Thinking we know what is better for others becomes a subtle way we do violence. When we take it upon ourselves to “help” the other we whittle away at their sense of autonomy. Nonviolence asks us to trust the other’s ability to find the answer they are seeking. It asks us to have faith in the other, not feel sorry for them. Nonviolence asks us to trust the other’s journey and love and support others to their highest image of themselves, not our highest image of them. It asks that we stop managing ourselves, our experience, others, and others’ experiences of us. Leave the other person free of our needs, free to be themselves, and free to see us as they choose.

  The violence we do to others by thinking we know what is best for them is dramatically illustrated in a story from India. It seems a passerby witnessed a monkey in a tree with a fish. The monkey was saying to the fish, “But I saved you from drowning!” The monkey, thinking it had saved the fish, had taken the fish to a place that couldn’t meet any of the fish’s needs for survival or growth. We can’t save people, or fix them. All we can do is model, and that points the finger back at us.

  I experienced this well-intentioned “help” from my husband who, out of love for me, began to take anything heavy out of my arms and carry it himself. At first I thought this was sweet of him and appreciated the gesture, but over a period of time I began to notice that some of the strength was leaving my arms. By not occasionally carrying heavy things, I was getting weaker!

  Handling challenges gives each of us a sense of skill, self-esteem, and accomplishment. When we try to fix or save someone else, we are keeping them from getting the learning the situation has for them. Like the monkey in the story above, when we try to take someone out of their challenge or suffering, we take them out of the environment that offers them a rich learning experience. We are in a sense, cutting them off from the power of growing stronger, more competent, and more compassionate.

  It can often feel like torture to let a person we care about sit in the suffering and challenges of their life. We almost can’t help ourselves; if they are hurting we want to make them feel better. If they have a decision to make, we want to tell them how to make it. And yet, the only thing we have to offer that is truly of value is to sit with them, where they are, as they are. We need to trust suffering and trust challenge and trust mistakes; they are what refine us when we don’t run from them.

  Nelle Morton, a feminist writer of the ’70s spoke eloquently about the power we have to “hear each other into being.” Rachel Naomi Remen echoes, “Our listening creates a sanctuary for the homeless parts within another person.” There is nothing to fix or save in another; there is only the gift of listening. People need a safe place to “hear themselves.” To return to the monkey and the fish story, all we have to offer in the end is to get into the water with those in need, not to bring them into the tree with us.

  Worry is another way violence gets masked as caring. Worry is a lack of faith in the other and cannot exist simultaneously with love. Either we have faith in the other person to do their best, or we don’t. Worry says I don’t trust you to do your life right. Worry comes from a place of arrogance that I know better what should be happening in your life. Worry says I don’t trust your journey, or your answers, or your timing. Worry is fear that hasn’t grown up yet; it is a misuse of our imagination. We both devalue and insult others when we worry about them.

  I’d like to discern the difference between help and support. For me, help carries the connotation that I am more skilled at life’s decisions and challenges than the other person is. Help is a “one up” on the other person. Whereas support meets the other person on equal playing ground with equal ability and is able to sit with more awe and respect than answers. The Chrysalis Center for Battered Women in Minneapolis, Minnesota has a beautiful motto that embodies the concept of trusting over worry and support over help. The motto states, “Every woman has her own answer. Every woman has her own timing. Every woman has her own path.”

  It comes down to this: Do I go to my child, my friend, my partner, myself, with love or with worry? Which has more breath, more space, more efficient use of energy, more building power? What would happen in the lives of others if we could choose love over worry and carry this kind of trust and belief in our loved ones. When we can truly love and accept all of our self, compassion begins to blossom in our hearts, and we begin to see others with different eyes.

  Developing Compassion

  We learn compassion as we dissolve our personal version of the world, and grow gentle eyes that are not afraid to see reality as it is. We learn compassion as we stop living in our heads, where we can neatly arrange things, and ground ourselves in our bodies, where things might not be so neat. We learn compassion as we stop trying to change ourselves and others and choose instead to soften the boundaries that keep us separated from what we don’t understand. We learn compassion as we do simple acts of kindness and allow others’ lives to be as important as our own.

  When we begin to expand the boundaries of our heart, we can see clearly to act in ways that truly make a difference. Compassion is a clear response to the needs of the moment. We see this truth lived out in the lives of the great ones. They act with a compassion and skill that truly changes things.

  In the New Testament, the Greek word that gets translated into compassion is splagchnizomai. This word literally means to have feelings in the bowels or other inward parts. We tend to think of the heart as the place of compassion, but in Jesus’ day, emotions were understood to be centered in one’s bowels. Because compassion was understood to carry a very visceral, gut wrenching, inner reaction, it was used sparingly by the New Testament Gospel writers. When the Gospel writers did use this word, it was to portray a person that was touched so deeply and profoundly by the situation of another, that they were moved to take immediate action on behalf of the one who was suffering. These Gospel writers understood compassion to be more than a sorrowful feeling; it was a powerful inner response leading to an immediate outward action that took a risk on behalf of the other.

  A friend tells of an incident that happened to her many years ago. A woman with a new baby from the apartment next door began frantically screaming that her husband had locked himself in the bathroom and was killing himself. My friend, after dialing 911, broke all the rules of keeping herself from danger by somehow getting into the bathroom and beginning to hold this man who was by now lying on the floor bleeding profusely. My friend risked all precautions to soothe and comfort this man as they both waited for help to come.

  Compassion is like this. It moves us across the boundaries of established norms and often past the boundaries of safety, rushing headlong to do what it can to ease another’s suffering. Compassion forgets itself and the standards of protocol to answer the cr
ies of another. We may not yet have the kind of courage and depth of compassion that my friend displayed, but we can, in all of our encounters, begin to practice acts of kindness.

  When my husband was eleven, his dad was killed in a car accident, leaving seven small children and a stunned wife behind. My husband continues to tenderly tell and retell how one of his uncles began to periodically stop by the house, coaxing himself and his siblings into the backyard for a game of softball, taking them to their very first Viking football game, and on the best of snow days, driving them to a secluded road with a fabulous hill. From there the uncle would haul them in his station wagon up the hill so that they could ride their sleds down that hill, only to repeat the action again and again. Seeing seven bewildered nieces and nephews, whose father had been suddenly killed, this uncle had compassion. No one had asked him for anything. This uncle, moved by a visceral gut feeling, took unsolicited action on behalf of the whole family. It made all the difference for my husband.

  Lucille Clifton once said, “Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.” Every human being walking this earth has painful stories tucked in the corners of their hearts. If we could remember this truth, perhaps we could see with the eyes of compassion rather than the eyes of our own judgments and preferences.

  While attending a workshop at Esalen, I met a man from Tokyo who epitomized the compassion and gentleness of nonviolence. He had a certain light about him, and I observed that others were as attracted to him as I was. I was delighted one afternoon to find myself in his company during lunch and being privileged to hear his story. He had been on the fast track in Japan, an entrepreneur of great talent and dedication, moving up the success ladder at a rapid pace. In one swift moment his life changed when his best friend, who had been paralleling this life of high success, suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack.

  I sat mesmerized as this man across from me at the table, spoke in low and certain tones that at that moment he saw his life unfold before him and instantly retired from business to begin running marathons. More incredibly, he had never trained. He just began to run for the love of running and for the love of life. Now in his late 40’s, he has been running a marathon a week for the past five years. To look at him, I had to marvel because he had a stocky body with bowed legs. And yet, he had never suffered even the slightest injury. He flew all over the world to run a marathon a weekend and that was his training. When asked how he accomplished this kind of stamina with no injury and no training, he reverently replied, “With each step I touch the earth lightly to do her no harm, and she in turn does me no harm.”

  Whatever we find ourselves engaged in, this jewel of Ahimsa, or nonviolence, asks us to step lightly, do no harm, and to honor the relationship we have with the earth, with each other, and with ourselves.

  Questions for Exploration

  Living with these questions, taking time for reflection, and journaling will give you new insights into your life and the practice of nonviolence. For this month, frame your exploration in the following statement by Etty Hillesum, a young holocaust victim:

  Ultimately we have just one moral duty:

  to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves,

  more and more peace,

  and to reflect it towards others.

  And the more peace there is in us,

  the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.

  Week One: This week practice courage by doing one thing daily that you wouldn’t normally do. If you’re feeling brave, make that one thing something that scares you. If you’re feeling really courageous, get excited about the fact that you’re scared and you’re doing it anyway. See if you can discern between fear and the unfamiliar. Watch what happens to your sense of self and how your relationships with others might be different because you are courageously stepping into unknown territory.

  Week Two: This week guard your balance as you would your most precious resource. Don’t find your balance from a place in your head of what it should look like. Instead, find guidance from the messages of your body. In this moment do you need more sleep? More exercise? Do you need to eat differently? Do you need to pray? Do you need some variety in your life? Act on the messages of your body and explore what balance looks like for you this week. Notice the effects on your life and on others.

  Week Three: This week, watch where you are running interference on others’ lives. Are you a worrier? A fixer? Discern the difference between “help” and “support.” Notice what you might be avoiding in your own life because you are so interested in others’ lives.

  Week Four: For this whole week, pretend you are complete. There is no need to expect anything from yourself or to criticize or judge or change anything about you. No need to compete with anyone, no need to be more than you are (or less than you are). Note your experience. Notice how much pleasure, kindness, and patience you can allow yourself to have with yourself.

  For this month, ponder the words of Etty Hillesum and bring more and more peace inside you.

  Satya

  Is my “yes” coming

  From a dark corner or from

  The light in my heart?

  ~ C.L.

  Truthfulness

  Satya

  Perhaps you have read The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. This delightful series has certainly been a favorite in my family over the years. In a passage from the first book of the series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, four children are about to be introduced to the mighty King Aslan by Mr. and Mrs. Beaver. Mr. Beaver lets them know that Aslan can right wrongs, banish sorrow, drive out winter and bring spring to the land. When asked if Aslan is a man, Mr. Beaver sternly declares to the children that Aslan is definitely not a man – he is the King of Beasts and anyone who approaches him should go with their knees knocking. The children are afraid that Aslan isn’t safe and their fears are confirmed by Mr. Beaver. But he also assures them that, although the King of Beasts isn’t safe, he is good.

  Like Aslan the lion king, the jewel of Satya, or truthfulness, isn’t safe, but it is good. Truth has the power to right wrongs and end sorrows. It is fierce in its demands and magnanimous in its offerings. It invites us to places we rarely frequent and where we seldom know what the outcome will be. If we don’t approach truth “with our knees knocking,” we haven’t really understood the profoundness of this guideline. We may think that truth means simply not fibbing to our mom when she asks if we ate the forbidden cookie. But truth demands integrity to life and to our own self that is more than not telling a simple lie.

  When we are real rather than nice, when we choose self-expression over self-indulgence, when we choose growth over the need to belong, and when we choose fluidity over rigidity, we begin to understand the deeper dynamics of truthfulness, and we begin to taste the freedom and goodness of this jewel.

  Be Real Rather than Nice

  Carl Jung writes, “A lie would make no sense unless the truth was felt to be dangerous.” Why do we lie? Are we afraid to hurt someone’s feelings or afraid if we told the truth we would not be liked or admired anymore? I have a friend who says, “I pick the right-sized box, put myself in it, wrap it with pretty paper and a bow, and then ‘present’ myself to the other person.” I have another friend who states, “I always show up differently with different people. My biggest fear is that everyone I know will be in the same room at the same time and I won’t know who to be.”

  And then there is the whole topic of “nice.” I once heard Yogiraj Achala say that you have to watch out for nice people. Being a nice person myself, I was at first offended and then confused, so I took this statement to heart and began pondering its truth. I began to see the distortion that sits between nice and real.

  Nice is an illusion, a cloak hiding lies. It is an imposed image of what one thinks they should be. It is a packaging of self in a presentable box, imposed by an o
uter authority. People who are “nice” hold truth inside until they reach a breaking point and then they become dangerously inappropriate; I know because I used to be such a person.

  Real comes from the center of our unique essence and speaks to the moment from that center. Real has a boldness to it, an essence, a spontaneity. Real asks us to live from a place where there is nothing to defend and nothing to manage. It is a contact with the moment that is not superimposed or prepackaged. Real is something we might not always like in another, but we come to know there will be no surprises. Real, though not always pleasant, is trustworthy. When I met my husband, I mistook him for a gay man. As a result I didn’t display myself as I normally would have if I had thought there might be a chance for romance. I know now that the deepness we have in our relationship has been built from the foundation of that first experience of showing him the real, authentic me. And he in turn, has given me the same gift of realness.

  What is driving you to distort yourself or silence yourself or say yes when you mean no? Or as Carl Jung would ask us, what is so dangerous in the moment about the truth that you are choosing to lie? These are questions that merit our pondering.

  Self-Expression vs. Self-Indulgence

  When we habitually silence and distort ourselves, we begin to lose our lust for life and look towards other things to fulfill us. We forget that we are here on this earth to self-express in a way no one else ever has or ever could. We can feel this urge within us wanting to bubble up and say to the world: I’m here! Our self-expression can find its way into the world in many forms, but when the process of our self-expression is imposed on for whatever reason, we can easily turn towards self-indulgence. Most often this imposition comes in the form of should’s or should not’s, either from our own self messages or from others’ messages to us. The result is always a misdirection of energy. There is a settling for less than we had hoped for, a kind of resolution to things as they are. Often we find ourselves hiding by overeating or overworking, rather than doing what we really want to do.