Do No Harm

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Do no harm.  This is the Hippocratic Oath that doctors take prior to practicing medicine.  It defines the path that many yoga and religious devotees' travel.  It is a journey that I myself walk, not only as a vegetarian and yogini, but also as an animal rights activist.  Perhaps it is because of that last label that I am brought to life by the thought of nonviolence and its application in the yogic lifestyle and the animal rights movement.

 It was this thought that I was pondering this morning as I drove to work and listened to National Public Radio.  Frank Deford, a commentator on Wednesday’s Morning Edition program, gave a moving commentary on horses being sold for slaughter.  “In some parts of the world, they eat dogs and cats,” declared Mr. Deford.  “Would we permit slaughterhouses for our fidos and tabbies so that their meat could be exported to faraway dinner tables?”  A chill ran the length of my spine.  Why is a companion animal more sacred than any other animal?

That is when it hit me, and I felt the true basis of my activism and lifestyle.  There is no difference.  All animals- ourselves included- are sacred.  There is no determining the greater level of sacredness because there isn’t one: we are all the same, connected by an invisible thread, created by and joined with the Divine One.  When an animal is abused or harmed, we are damaged as well.  Perhaps not in a way that is apparent to those who choose not to see but damaged, nonetheless.  It is easier, many times, to blind ourselves to the cruelties we don’t wish to see or feel that we cannot change.  This blindness, in and of itself, is violence.  Refusal to act is the greatest brutality.

Vimela Thakar in Glimpses of Raja Yoga best explains ahimsa, the yogic doctrine commonly translated as nonviolence: “When you are dedicated to the awareness of the wholeness of life, to the interrelatedness of everything you see in life, naturally your life becomes a dedication of nonviolence…” Our yogic life is more than life on the mat.  It is a mindset and a mentality.  While we pick and choose the doctrines to focus on, yoga opens our mind and allows us to see more clearly.  It is in this clearness that we are able to see more completely and in looking at life in its fullness, we find that, regardless of if our gaze is into the heart of a lover, the bud of a tree, or the eyes of an animal, we see a familiar spirit staring back.

Yoga means “union with self”, but it goes much deeper than that.  Anyone can take a class and stretch one’s body.  Some people can even meditate and take nothing more away from it than physical well-being.  True Yoga is more.  It is a way of life that opens you to a realm of connectivity like nothing you’ve ever known.  Without ahimsa, it is vacant; it is a sham and a false sense of security.

Frank Deford ended his segment with “end the slaughter”.  What a noble call to action!  But first let us do no harm.  If we embrace ahimsa- truly make our lives a devotion to this principle of peace- we allow Yoga to become a living and breathing member of our society.  Without that, it becomes nothing more than an exercise class at the local gym.  Will there come a day when the yoga of our grandchildren bears little resemblance to the Yoga of the great teachers?  

Carl Jung wrote: “That I feed the hungry, forgive an insult, and love my enemy- these are great virtues.  But what if I should discover that the poorest of beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me, and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness; that I myself am the enemy that must be loved- what then?”  What then indeed. 

This article was initially published in the January/February 2006 edition of Yoga Living.