Sustainability is a series of choices, a confluence of action and attitudes. Initially, these may seem like common sense in the same way building a beautiful home happens by simply setting one brick on another. But in the modern world, we have destroyed our collective home more often than we have nurtured it. When we take the opportunity to read deeply into the wisdom teaching of cultures that have flourished for thousands of years, such as the culture of the Seers who wrote the sacred Vedas from India, we discover precepts that offer ways to develop healthy relationships with ourselves, each other and our environment to ultimately support long-term sustainability.
In my own study of the philosophical teachings of yoga, Jyotish, Ayurveda, Vastu Shastra (our relationship with our surroundings through Vedic feng shui) and the Puranas (collection of legends, myths, genealogies and scientific teachings), I have found that a disciplined formula for personal and global sustainability coalesces from the basic facets of these sciences. They guide us, individually and as a world community, toward the experience of sustained well-being.
Just as there are many ways to build a sound home, there are numerous methods for weaving together the multitudinous components of yoga to create a healthy and sustainable abode. Through my practice and contemplation, I have seen a mechanism, or path, emerge that weaves together six basic elements, or concepts of yoga. By practicing these with intention and focus, we can mobilize within ourselves and through mobilizing critical mass to sway the collective mind to act in ways that produce sustainability.
Six Vedic / Yogic elements of sustainability:
Abhaya: fearless certainty and conviction.
Sattva guna: clarity of mind giving the ability to perceive wholeness.
Ahimsa: win/win benefit to all beings through nonviolence and compassion.
Dinacharya: daily actions.
Abhyasa: accumulation of effect via repetition.
Dana: right or ethical giving.
Abhaya
Abhaya refers to fearlessness and the convictions we maintain with an intention of fearlessness. These can help us to choose the highest good, rather than make a decision based on fear or clinging. We can ask ourselves, in any situation: Is this action borne from fear or love? If we hold our intention, the sacred practice called in Sanskrit our sankalpa, on sustaining the highest virtue and the highest truth of the soul, which is love, we can nourish and support relationships on all levels.
Through unwavering convictions to satya, truth, we can follow dharma, righteous duty and virtuous path. Dharma rakshatih rakshatah: Protect the dharma and the dharma will protect you. Through setting our sights constantly and fearlessly on dharma we, individually and collectively, mobilize the energy that feeds everything in this world, and so we, individually and collectively, are responsible for what lives and dies in this world. Through making action in the right direction, with the right quality of action, we further nourish abhaya, which are our convictions that transcend and even defeat fear. Clarity of mind helps us to hold firm in a state of conscious abhaya.
Sattva
Clarity of mind allows us the penetrating and discerning vision that encourages our ability to live within the abode of the heart. The light of sattva is one of the triumvirate of the three gunas, the qualities which are described throughout the literature of yoga and Ayurveda. Guna means strand, like the strands that comprise a rope.
The three gunas are rajas (the quality of activity), tamas (the quality of inertia) and sattva (the quality of clarity). Through yoga and meditation, through choosing wholesome and fresh foods and through speech and action centered on satya and dharma, we cultivate and nourish sattva. In turn, increasing the sattvic qualities in our life support our ability to inhabit our heart allowing us to tap into a state of fearlessness. This further nurtures abhaya.
We live a sattvic life by eating fresh, wholesome, organic foods, rather than processed, genetically engineered, mass-produced fast foods. We live a sattvic life by listening to uplifting music, meditating, choosing a yoga practice appropriate for our bodymind and by following the precepts laid out in the ancient traditions.
The strands of rajas and tamas are essential to the braid of the cosmic rope, yet their best home is not the mind. Rajas and tamas belong in your mind as much as your compost heap belongs in your kitchen rather than in your backyard where compost can be left to rot and transform.
Living a sattvic life leads to a deeper understanding of the inherent interconnectedness of us all, motivating us to make choices to nourish sustainable relationships. By deeply understanding this connectedness, we naturally choose actions grounded in ahimsa, in nonviolence and compassion.
Ahimsa
Living a life committed to ahimsa, to nonviolence and compassion, entrains prana, the life-force that connects us all, the way an arrow entrains the air in its path. Prana that is charged then strengthens our ability to maintain all sankalpa, all intentions, including the sankalpa of ahimsa itself. We can ask ourselves in every moment, are we about to make a choice that encourages compassion and nonviolence. Cutting someone off on the freeway, constantly replaying critical thoughts, taking out our frustration on another person or throwing away cans in a landfill that could be recycled, are all forms of violence.
Dinacharya
Dinacharya is the practice of how we arrange our day, the mundane yet profound rituals that mark our passage through the hours, nanosecond by nanosecond. All the actions we perform throughout our day no matter how small or insignificant can have a profound impact on our personal and planetary sustainability. Whatever we cultivate in our own actions sets the tone for the relationships we have with ourselves and with our larger community. Making decisions with the vision of sattva, the sankalpa of abhaya and the farsighted compassion of ahimsa creates positive grooves in the world.
Abhyasa
Through repetition, our actions have greater strength. Abhyasa, the accumulation of effect through repetition is central to dinacharya since the accumulation of small things done daily is much greater than grand things done infrequently. Case in point: It is better to brush your teeth daily than to simply go to a dentist yearly or it is better to utilize a reusable travel mug each time you enjoy organic tulsi tea rather than using disposable paper cup.
Dana
Dana is the practice of giving the right energy to the right place at the right time. Giving optimizes sustainability. The right giving of energy in the form of attention, food, herbs, water, wisdom, lore, money and land are all part of dana. A sattvic mind provides clarity to support dana, individually and collectively.
The most worthy recipients of dana are the keepers of a society’s wisdom traditions who support a life in harmony with nature. We should make sure that the knowledge of how to sustain sustainability is the first thing sustained. Nourish institutions or governments that promote greater harmony with the environment. Nourish companies whose sankalpa, production, products and services are sattvic, pure, potent and nonviolent to Gaia and all her beings.
The nadir the lowest among the unworthy are those who are violent, untruthful, dysfunctional, destructive or hypocritical. Giving to people, institutions or corporations in these categories is not only unsustainable, but destructive and even criminal. For this reason, actions such as the boycotts of South Africa during the time of apartheid would be a righteous act, while supporting the government while it is involved in reconciliation promotes dana.
The Dana of Land
Giving land through gifts and through taking care of Mother Earth are some of the greatest dana of all. Just as one person gifts land to another, so one generation presents land to the following. Our current practices beg the questions: “What kind of land have we been given?” and “What kind of land will we give to the next generation?”
Multinational corporations like Monsanto spread poisonous chemicals across the Earth and endless miles of poorly managed topsoil degrade each day. Will we pass on lifeless land sterilized by the artificial life support of a vicious cycle of toxic chemicals? This type of land energetically resembles a person completely devoured by a heroin or meth addiction. This type of land is so dismal that hundreds of thousands of farmers per year in Southeast Asia intentionally kill themselves by drinking the same pesticides that killed their land. We have another choice. Will we choose sattva? Will we endeavor to give pure sattvic land on which we cultivate organic biodynamic permaculture?
We must give our attention, support and nourishment to those people, companies, ideas and techniques that ensure the land will be alive, powerful and pure, that will nourish us all because all that grows out of healthy soil will have greater vitality. Anything trying to live on weak, toxic or dead soil will end up weak, toxic or, like the thousands of desperate farmers per year, dead.
Market-Driven Sustainability
What survives in this world? The answer is where we direct our energy, where we choose to spend or not spend our money and give our resources. That is what survives and is nourished in this world. Sustainability is market-driven, fueled by what we purchase and pass on. Do we buy food from farmers offering their wares at local markets to support sattva? We can research conscious companies who are examples of dana, who support fair trade, clean water supplies, and a wholistic environment including living space for insects and birds.
Weaving the Fabric of Sustainability
Sustainability at all levels can be described by the following formula:The firm intention of fearless conviction, the abhaya sankalpa of accomplishing abhyasa, repeated, clear and sattvic right dana in the context of sattvic dinacharya nourishing prana, the potent and renewing life-force. Through unwavering convictions to satya, truth, we can follow dharma, righteous duty and a virtuous path. This, in turn, strengthens our own sankalpa.
In this season of giving, it becomes even more important for us to accept that we are powerful creators. With power comes responsibility. Will you accept the challenge to write down ten ways that the quality, quantity, motivation and recipients of your giving will change this year in an effort to produce more individual, tribal and global sustainability? Will you give dana to two new recipients who really deserve it and will you stop the crime (no worries, we all know we are guilty) of giving your energy to two recipients who are miscreants of un-sustainability. Will you tell ten people about your choices and then write your choices and mail or email the list to a significant amount of people, channeling the challenge and change onward?
In Ayurveda and Jyotisha, a Yoga is the confluence of two or more factors. As individuals we are elements of the Yogas of Sustainability, let us all take the call to action.
Prashanti’s dinachaya resolutions to support sustainability:
- I will bring my own container when I buy grains, beans, herbs, honey or other items.
- I will avoid single-use packaging as much as possible.
- I will give conscious gifts, present hand-made wholesome gifts, support ethical companies and, where and wherever reasonably possible, keep a day’s walk between me and un-conscientious and un-conscious corporations.
- I will make a website listing socially and environmentally friendly companies.
- I will teach more people how to use herbs and lifestyle to attain empowered health so that they resort less often to the slippery slope of pharmaceuticals.
Prashanti de Jagar came, he saw, he grew some herbs, raised his son and he loved his woman. Along the way, he was one of the founders of Organic India, based on principles of sustainability and dana. Prashanti is teaching a seminar on a farm in Skalka, in the Northern Czech Republic, March 24 – 29, 2009 titled Practical Ayurveda Aromatherapy for Health, Wealth and Beauty.
Earthdais.com; Dhanvantri.com; prashanti@igc.org
Eco Gift Festival
Tommy Rosen and the team at the second EcoGift Festival (December 12 – 14) screen participating companies to ensure that attendees can choose ethically produced, environmentally responsible items to live by the precepts of dana, of right giving.
Every time we hand over a coin, bill, write a check or swipe a card, we are engaged in an act that may be even more powerful than the choice we make inside the voting booth. In essence we are saying, “I support this company, I agree with the manufacturing process of this item, I am directly paying the person who assembled this.” By making a purchase, it is as though our hands sprayed the pesticides, or our hands lovingly tended the garden. Through making a choice, we can decide who we nurture and what values we support.
The practice of gift-giving is the practice of exchange, of gratitude made tangible. Along with that gratitude we can positively contribute to the type of world we want to live in. We can buy items which make our lives easier and contribute to a more sustainable world, such as reusable mugs, bamboo flatware within cloth containers, hemp scarves, solar-powered cell phone charges, fair trade chocolate, portable and reusable to-go containers (oh, wait, that’s what I bought at last year’s event).
Rosen and team have a high standard – or a low standard, depending on how you look at it – for waste. The Eco Gift Festival is a zero waste event with compostable packaging, compost bins, purified water, locally grown organic vegetarian food, linen table covers, recycled paper and recycling bins. Take the bus, carpool or bike.
To provide education, this year’s festival roster of speakers spans the three days and includes: Yoga activist Seane Corn, ecodesigner Linda Loudermilk, Rainforest Action Network Executive Director Michael Brune, Urth Caffe founder and owner Shallom Berkman, Huffington Post Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington, Tom’s Shoes founder Blake Mycoskie and David Crow, founder of Floracopeia and the Venice Learning Garden. Full list of companies on website.
Selected attendees include:
Arbonne International (arbonne.com/products)
Chivas Skin Care (chivasskincare.com)
Clothing of the American Mind (coatm.org)
Floracopeia (floracopeia.com)
Earth Rite (getearthed.com)
Dali Mama (dalaimamayoga.com)
ELF: Essential Living Foods (essentiallivingfoods.com)
Manduka (manduka.com)
Josie Maran Cosmetics (josiemarancosmetics.com)
Lotus Blossom Style The Inconvenient Bag (theinconvenientbag.com)
Theo Chocolate (theochocolate.com)
To-Go Ware (to-goware.com)
Tom’s Shoes (tomsshoes.com)
V-Dog Food (v-dogfood.com)
Vital Hemptations (vitahemp.com)
Yoga Works (yogaworks.com)
Proceeds support the nonprofit organization Global Green USA and their efforts to stem climate change through the creation of green buildings and cities, eliminate weapons of mass destruction and increase access to fresh water supplies worldwide: Globalgreen.org
Eco Gift Festival, December 12 – 14, Santa Monica Civic Center, 1855 Main Street, Santa Monica, CA. ecogift.com
By Prashanti De Jager
