Ahimsa

I started Whole Life's yoga instructors' training this past Thursday with a three-hour class, and since then most of us involved in that enterprise have been somewhat immersed. There was a five-hour session at the studio on Sunday, and yesterday I traveled across the water again to do a professional class observation there. There's travel to and from, assigned reading and writing, personal practice, and reflection.

What I've found during this short but intense involvement is that yoga is a lot more than physical therapy, and goes a lot deeper than what might be called "attitude adjustment." If one takes the yoga handed down from Patanjali and Krishnamacharya at all seriously, it offers the possibility of transformation of one's life at all levels of being: in the material body, in the tangible functions and processes of that body's parts, and also in the invisible body of the intellect and rational (or maybe not) apparatus of mental reflection and decision making.

But it doesn't stop there. The yoga of Patanjali is a dynamic, interactive philosophy capable to retooling and reordering the fundamental building blocks of one's personality -- the arrangements that compose the ego itself. And make no mistake, I like my ego (I never leave home without it), but I'm not going to defend one of its main constituents -- fear -- against the non-violent assault from that intrinsic philosophic gentleness implied in yoga, known as ahimsa.

Just in this short immersion period, I've noticed occasional changes in the way I relate to others; I'm quieter and more accommodating than usual. And if this continues, I can imagine this philosophy penetrating to the deepest level of being, that of the heart and soul, the center of one's existence and source of all which is better about us, and all which is worse.