page thirty-six: Ahimsa: The Practice of Peace

I was recently honored to join the faculty at Reach Yoga in Glencoe, training future Yoga teachers. One of the areas I was invited to share was Yama and Niyama: the ethical guidelines in yoga philosophy. These are so much more than mere moral concepts; they were intended as the roots of personal responsibility for the practitioners before receiving the spiritual teachings that powerfully enable them to co-create a new reality.

As I prepared to teach this material, I revisited each of these principles with fresh eyes and was surprised to see how much deeper my own understanding had grown since I first studied the Yama-Niyama years ago.

It struck me, too, just how urgently these ancient teachings speak to our times—times when our outer life is filled with conveniences and constant stimulation, while the inner life is neglected. Yoga, in its truest sense, is more than what happens on the mat; it is a way of living that calls us back to presence, integrity, and intention. Without that inner accountability, it’s all too easy to be swept along by endless distractions, and to forget the quiet work of tapping the potential within and participating in bringing heaven on earth, as the ancient teachers had envisioned.

That is precisely what the Yama-Niyamas invite us to do: to build inner guardrails so that we can direct our free will toward what is life-giving — both for ourselves and for the world around us.

And it all begins with the first of the principles: Ahimsa, or non‑violence. At its essence, Ahimsa is a commitment to walk through life with awareness and restraint, in the spirit of not adding to the aggression in the world — not through action, not through speech, not even through thought.

As we look around us today, we are painfully aware of how absent this principle has become. Wars erupt around the world. Nations once known for neutrality now consider violent force. And here at home in the U.S., we’ve already witnessed over 250 incidents of gun violence this year alone. The energy of violence seems to seep into everything, even the animal kingdom—a recent study documented squirrels in a California park exhibiting unexpected carnivorous behavior.

Many of us find ourselves asking: Is this the beginning of the end for humanity? Is there any hope that we can come back from this?

The ancient yogis believed that we could. Not through policy, policing, or punishment, but by an unequivocal commitment to become the change we wish to witness in our environment. Humanity's evolution—or devolution—hinges on our personal choice to embody non-violence, in the big and small moments of daily life.

There is even empirical evidence to support this. In a remarkable experiment conducted by the Transcendental Meditation Program, a significant reduction in violent crime was recorded in Washington, D.C., during a period when a large group of people meditated regularly, with the intention of making a difference to world peace.

Ahimsa, then, is not passive wishful thinking. It is an active, courageous, moment-by-moment choice to interrupt the cycle of violence, whether directed at another or even at ourselves. To pause, breathe, and remember who we are —especially when it’s tempting to lash out, blame, or retaliate. It’s in those very moments, when our emotions are stormy and our egos aflame, that we are given the opportunity to do something radically different.

And each time that we choose, we plant a seed that ripples outward in ways we may never see, but which matter deeply. If enough of us make this vow—not just once, but again and again—perhaps we can help tilt the balance. Perhaps we can reverse the spiral and help make our world a legacy that future generations would thank us for.