Optimism, Action & Ahimsa Part 1

I was given a chance to speak at a yoga conference yesterday (Rasa-Lila by Yoga Tampa Bay) and prior to the event I flippantly asked a friend of mine what she thought I should speak about. She responded by suggesting that I think about what I would say if this was the last chance I would have to address people. The result is that I now want to share one of my key points with you. Initially the title for the speech was, “Transforming Stress” but it eventually became, “Optimism, Action and Ahimsa (non-violence)” because I think there is a lot of talk about how “stressed” we’ve become. I believe that the vast majority of this stress comes from the mistaken cultural assumption that we are really quite important and that our ridiculously full, faced-paced, non-stop days are proof of that very thing. I believe that we need, rather desperately really, to tone down our excessive self-obsession – yes, it’s true, you and I and everyone around us is a precious little snowflake, unique and wonderful and fragile and deserving of recognition for the wonder of our particular arrangement of atoms because it is awe-inspiring but let’s check the scale and make sure to put it into its relative context. Let’s remember that we inhabit the third rock from a largely unremarkable sun, in a comparatively small planetary system in an outer arm at the edge of the swirl of our oddly shaped galaxy that is suspected to harbor a black hole in amongst literally thousands of other galaxies in the cosmos. Given that, it’s worth noting that by virtue of our very existence, we are doing remarkably well at this moment. And then we narrow the lens and take a look around and any one of us can point to a veritable cornucopia of immensely serious and egregious issues that must be addressed – some of them immediately as they are time-sensitive and may be forecasting our demise (global climate change, mass extinction of flora, fauna, fungi, pollution, loss of arable land and potable water, an increasingly estrogen-enriched environment laden with ...