Non-Harmful Transformation & Consumption

ॐ नमः शिवाय, Aum namah Shivaya!

In the last post we explored an introductory interpretation of the foundational tenets of Yoga philosophy as a starting point for a discussion on sustainability, and how the practice of Yoga can reduce our individual and societal impacts on the planet which sustains us. The intention of this post is to delve deeper into both the global environmental crisis as well as Yogic and other Eastern philosophies which offer us a path of practice and mindfulness to steer us off of our current course of overconsumption, lack of fulfillment, and environmental destruction.

Returning to the discussion of ideal types from the last post and using that as a departure point, I´d like to share a video from Ajahn Chah, a Thai Buddhist monk in the Forest tradition of ascetic meditation in the forest, who passed away in 1992 but left behind his teachings for the benefit of all beings:

Ajahn Chah – Mindful Way

As Venerable Acarya Chah says, “Here in the forest, you can learn to be in harmony with the way things are in Nature.  You can live happily, and peacefully. Buddhist monks don’t practice meditation for selfish reasons; we practice in order to know ourselves so that then we’ll be able to understand and teach others how to live peacefully and wisely…A monk’s work is hard, he works to free his heart so that he begins to feel loving kindness which embraces everything. He sees that all life has the characteristic of the breath: it rises and it falls. Everything that is born expires, so his suffering diminishes as he realizes that nothing belongs to him. To help people contemplate the true nature of the body we have human skeletons in the assembly hall, because when one doesn’t understand death, life becomes very confusing. Buddha made a distinction between ultimate truth and conventional truth. The idea of ‘self’ is merely a convention. ‘Foreigner’ ‘Thai’ ‘You the interviewer’, these are all conventions. In ultimate reality, there isn’t anybody, there is only Earth, Fire, Water, Air, elements which have combined temporarily.”

Venerable Acarya Chah shows us two things in his teachings here which are relevant to our previous discussion of sustainability: firstly, that we must strive ardently in our practice in order to live peacefully and wisely, and secondly, that we must understand death if we are to live mindfully.

In order to understand death, which is at the root of the global environmental crisis, we must understand that our lives generate death, and this is the great disharmony which we are seeking to rectify through practicing yoga. We are currently undergoing the sixth great extinction event of planet Earth’s 4.6 billion year history, called the Holocene Extinction. Biologist E.O. Wilson estimates that we are currently at a rate of extinction of plant and animal species that is 10,000 times greater than the background rate of extinction. This accelerated rate is a direct result of human activity as we derive our wealth and comfort from the extraction, transformation, and consumption of natural resources from forests, farmland, mines, oil and natural gas wells, and so on. Our way of life is predicated on extracting or harvesting goods and services that Mother Nature gives to us free of charge, then artificially pricing it according to its value on the capitalist market, then selling or purchasing it for consumption. The resources that are most consumed are energy commodities, namely oil (petroleum), natural gas, and coal. The combustion of these are also the greatest contributors to global warming/global climate change as their production and combustion release the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide as well as other pollutants. The world currently consumes around 28 billion barrels of oil per year, 110 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and over 7 billion short tons of coal. That all adds up to around 32 gigatons (32 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide released into the earth’s atmosphere per year. But what in Krishna’s name are we doing with all of these resources? A good answer come from a short educational movie made by the Tides Foundation of San Francisco called “The Story of Stuff”:

The Story of Stuff

So basically all of those fossil fuels are turned into consumer products sold at prices that don’t reflect any of the environmental and social harm that they cause, and then we throw 99% of them away with 6 months and more fossil fuels are consumed to ship them over to China, India, or Africa where they sit in a landfill and leach chemicals into ground water tables or are burned for electricity production resulting in more greenhouse gas and toxin emissions. Consuming in this way is clearly contrary to the practice of ahimsa, or non-harm.

As we aim to more fully embody an equanimous state of mindfulness in our daily lives we must necessarily seek to reduce our consumption and to the contrary, learn how to produce. How do we learn this? Model Nature! By sitting in nature and observing the phenomenal complexity of interrelation and interaction going on in a given ecosystem we see that in nature there is no consumption, no taking. The sun is giving its photons to the plants, the Earth is giving its nutrients to the plants, the sky and rivers are giving rain and water to the plants, then the plants give their fruits to the birds, and the birds give the fruit’s seeds back to the Earth who nourishes the seeds and the process of giving and producing starts over! How can we become like this? Observe and interact, monkey see, monkey do. This is the first principle of Permaculture, a scientific approach to building a sustainable human culture. We’ll leave this to our next post.

Finally, as this is not the only discussion of yoga and sustainability going on at this moment, we’d like to point you to a lecture being given by Yogi, Ayurvedic practitioner, and founder of the organic Ayurvedic herbal supplement company called “Organic India”, Prashanti de Jaeger, called, ahem, “The Yoga of Sustainability”…(we swear we weren’t aware of this before we started writing!). Click the link below to see the lecture, much of which echoes what is being discussed here.

Prashanti de Jaeger – The Yoga of Sustainability

ओम् तत् सत्, Aum tat sat!

After graduating from school in January of 2009 from Harvard University with an AB in the Comparative Study of Religion I moved back home to the San Francisco Bay Area and worked in a variety of trades from college test preparation to coaching a high school rowing team. I later co-founded and spent a year working as the Director of Logistics and Operations for Quetsol S.A., a micro-scale solar company in Guatemala aiming to provide 500,000 families without electricity with access to LED illumination and cell phone charging systems. I also served as a consultant for Core Foods which produces an organic, whole food meal replacement bar called the Core Meal, now available in Whole Foods and Costco in the Bay Area. The path of spirituality kept calling me and so I earned RYT – 200 Yoga Teacher certification at the end of February 2010, which I did through Laura Camp’s Camp Yoga at the Monkey Yoga Shala in Oakland. After moving to Guatemala I continued to pursue the path of sharing yoga with others and earned RYT-500 hour certification in July 2010 with Vedantin Ping Luo of School Yoga Institute in San Marcos la Laguna, Guatemala. I was blessed to live and teach/facilitate two yoga teacher trainings in Guatemala on Lago de Atitlán from July-December of 2010 where I began studying ayurveda, herbalism, Sanksrit language, Mayan cosmology, and shamanic energy healing with Vedantin and Mayan Elder Tata Pedro Cruz as well as through personal study. I have now returned to the San Francisco Bay Area and my mission is to share my experience in entrepreneurship, business, yoga, meditation, ayurveda, shamanic energy healing, and Buddhist studies with businesses, start-ups, NGOs, and yoga studios around the Bay.