NOT A BAD WORLD IS IT? by Edward Ruscha

by Nina

During the first year of the pandemic, Barrie Risman and I said the same thing to each other about what was helping us the most getting through that very challenging year: yoga philosophy! Now just this morning I saw a short video clip of Barrie’s friend and co-teacher Bill Mahony explaining in very simple language exactly why that can be true for so many of is. Please watch it now—it’s only 1 minute long—and then I’ll explain more about why I like this video clip so much.

(If you’re getting this post via email, to watch the video, click on the title of the email to go the post that’s on the blog, where you can play the video, or go to this link on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvsmYTjKHT0).

Now I’ve been explaining why I think yoga philosophy is so valuable for cultivating equanimity and contentment for many years (see Why You Should Study Yoga Philosophy from 10 years ago!) in a similar way. But I’ve always used English terms and phrases.

In my book Yoga for Healthy Aging, I put it like this:

“Yoga philosophy includes wisdom that can change your entire perspective on life.”

And in my new book Yoga for Times of Change, I put it like this:

“Learning about yoga philosophy provides you with alternative ways of thinking about your life, enabling you to be more content with what you have and what you don’t have, and to become more comfortable with change. This in turn can make you a better citizen of the world.”

So I was excited to learn from Bill that there was a traditional Sanskrit word that meant exactly what I was trying to say in English: darśana. In the video, Bill defines darśana as “seeing,” “a perspective or a way of looking”, and “a way of seeing the world.” In fact I was so inspired by learning this new word I quickly looked up the term in two books I have in the house and found that Georg Feuerstein defines the word as “a viewpoint” and Christopher Wallis says:

“Darśana means worldview, vision of reality, and way of seeing”

I love this! In Yoga for Times of Change I used the world “mindset” to describe this but I really like both “worldview” and “vision of reality” better.

So that’s our little Sanskrit lesson of the day. However,  you may be asking yourself how can the worldview and vision of reality provided by yoga philosophy help us during difficult times?

While Bill doesn’t get to that in this short video clip, for me, what helped during the early days of the pandemic was accepting impermanence, the yogic philosophy that change and uncertainty are intrinsic aspects of life on earth. As T. K. V. Desikachar says in The Heart of Yoga:

“Although in yoga everything we see and experience is true and real, all form and all content are in a constant state of flux. This concept of continual change is known as parinamavada.”

See The Greatest Yoga Lesson of Them All  for more information about impermanence.

The ancient yogis understood, however, that even though continual change is the nature of reality, it can be challenging to live through all the ups and downs change causes and also to experience the uncertainty that change brings. But I believe that accepting impermanence is a necessary first step to finding equanimity. Refusing to accept this truth, or “engaging in a fight against reality” as my friend Scott Lauzé says, only increases our suffering because we will always be angry, frustrated, or depressed that things aren’t the same as they once were and that the future is uncertain.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna reminds Arjuna of this by saying:

From the world of the senses, Arjuna, comes heat and comes cold, and pleasure and pain. They come and they go: they are transient. Arise above them, strong soul. (2.14)

—trans. Juan Mascaro

And I think that right now, two and a half years after the beginning of the pandemic, this philosophy about impermanence—this darśana—is as helpful to me as ever. Even aside from the pandemic—will we ever be able to go back to the way we used to live?—these days both my personal life and the world around me are still full of uncertainty and change.

If you, as I do, want to see hear more of Bill’s talk about how yoga can help us during challenging times, you can take the three-week course he is giving with Barrie Risman called “The Triumphant Heart: Lessons from the Bhagavad Gita for Yogic Living in Challenging Times”. The course is designed to make the wisdom of yoga accessible and relevant for people who haven’t ever studied yoga philosophy before. To learn more, see here. Hope to see some of you there!

 

• Follow Yoga for Healthy Aging on Facebook and follow Nina on Instagram • Order Yoga for Times of Change here  and purchase the companion videos here • Order Yoga for Healthy Aging: A Guide to Lifelong Well-Being here.