Over the last year (ONE YEAR!) of Always a Student, I’ve talked about many lessons I’ve learned from observing plants and nature. Today is no different. I believe that when we touch the earth, we’re touching deep wisdom spanning billions of years. It’s old, just like yoga, and to me the practice of yoga and the brilliant system of our earth are inextricably linked.

If you’ve been following these emails for a while, you know the garden often serves as my teacher. I went to it wondering how a yoga practitioner should best address all the suffering we see in the world. There’s a fine line in yoga between going with the flow and getting steamrolled by harmful systemic issues. Some teachers will recommend not engaging with the problems we see at all. We don’t want to get caught up in meaningless melodramas, but at the same time, don’t we have a duty to act in certain situations?

The garden answers

About two weeks ago, I noticed aphids (which are basically like plant lice) congregating on my tomato plants.

I had a few choices as a gardener:

Ignore the problem. Even though aphids can zap plant immune systems and deprive them of their health and vigor, I could just pretend I didn’t see them.
Violate my ethics and do violence. I could spray the plants with a pesticide. My aphid problem would be resolved immediately, but I’d also eradicate everything else, thereby throwing the system out of balance.
Try my best to create the ideal conditions for my plants while operating within my power. This method may not eliminate the problem, but it would give plants support to survive this difficult time.

The best option for me was the middle way, the third one. I got out a 2-gallon sprayer, filled it with water, and knocked the bugs off. Sometimes that ends it, but not this time.

Every morning, I knocked back waves of aphids. It didn’t seem like I was making any progress. I was so disheartened by my lack of success that I considered giving up or spraying chemicals after all. I questioned if I was making a difference. Then something magnificent happened.

I caught a flutter of movement among plants that I’d never seen before. Could that be? Perched atop the plant was a beautiful little green insect with delicate iridescent wings. It was a green lacewing. I’d only ever seen them on the internet and heard tell of them in books. Lacewing larvae eat aphids…big time.

If I ignored the aphids, the plants may have gotten sick. If I blasted my plants with pesticides, I would have destroyed the chance of attracting lacewings. It was while teetering on this keen edge between success and failure that I’d rolled out the welcome mat for a garden ally. The answer wasn’t for me to try to control the entire situation, but I had to do something. In collaboration with creatures infinitely better suited to manage the situation, the pest problem is under control.

Action on the yogic path

I know I’ve quoted it before, but it’s worth repeating. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says to Arjuna:

“You have a right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction (BG 2.47).”

In very simple terms, we can’t get too attached to the outcomes, but we ought to still do something.

On the eight-limbed path of yoga, there are certain moral and ethical considerations. The yamas are the first of the eight limbs, and the very first yama is ahimsa (non-harming). If we are practicing all eight limbs, we’re committing to these yamas as well.

At first glance, ahimsa is simply not causing injury to others but there’s nuance here. If I dumped pesticides, I’d cause harm by throwing the earth’s balance out of whack. If I chose to ignore the problem, my complacency would be a form of violence against the plants.

As if to drive the point home, I later spotted a post by Jivana Heyman, an advocate for accessible and engaged yoga. He said:

“If the system that we’re living in doesn’t respect our basic human rights, then protesting that system is ethical. In other words, supporting oppressive systems is unethical, and it’s our job as yoga practitioners to speak up against suffering wherever we see it. That’s the heart of ahimsa, non-harm.”

Ethical Action

Complacency simply won’t do if we’re really practicing yoga. The famous quote by Edmund Burke says: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing.” I admit that I find this to be both a call to action and a paralysis-inducing statement. There are so many issues, and they're a lot more serious than whatever's happening in the garden. Heck, I’m pretty sure I started practicing yoga in part so I wouldn’t have to think about any of this.

At some point in our learning, we gain the capacity to hold this great compassion, but we can’t digest what we’re hearing with inaction. There will be times when we need to check out for our own self-care, and of course, we can’t fix everything. We can start to move the dial in the right direction, though, and if enough of us take up an engaged practice, I have hope for real change.

I’m really inspired by the work of Right to Be, an organization working to combat various forms of harassment, xenophobia, and homophobia. The idea is to make it so that EVERYONE can be safe. They offer free trainings on how we can learn to de-escalate and safely intervene when we see someone in trouble. (Today they’re having training to address/ intervene against the growing issue of violence against Asian Americans.) Nonviolent interventions to keep all people safe and reduce trauma sounds pretty yogic to me.

That’s just one example of how we can apply our yoga to real life. Notice that not all yoga comes with a mat... Perhaps you raise funds or volunteer for a cause that is meaningful to you. It may feel like you’re trying to stand against something so much bigger than your capacity to help.

When you reach the moment in your engaged practice in which it feels like the work is impossible, I hope you’ll look up and notice that you’re not alone. Even on the grimmest of days, there are many people working in their own ways to make the world better. They're right there with you.