I just returned from a trip to India, where the sights, smells, and sounds are all very different from what we are accustomed to here in America. One sound in particular was conspicuous by its absence: sirens. If we live in an urban environment, we hear fire trucks, ambulances and police cars just about every day. The siren is an unfortunate sound – an indication that someone is suffering – and I didn’t miss it. In spite of the fact that there is no shortage of suffering in India, we didn’t hear any sirens at all. Except for once, in Jaipur.
A few days after arriving in Jaipur, my wife Elizabeth and I decided to visit the Amber Fort a couple of klicks north of the city. It’s a big local attraction and the area around the entrance was jammed with tourist traffic. As we weaved our way through the people, rickshaws, motorcycles, cars, and buses, we were offered a chance to ride an elephant up the long fight of steps to the fort. We politely declined: it didn’t seem like it would be any faster or more comfortable than walking and it certainly didn’t seem like a nice proposition for the forlorn-looking elephant who was clearly feeling the misery of exploitation.
As we crossed the street on the way to the entrance I heard a siren in the distance to the north of the motionless traffic.
When we returned from the fort our rickshaw driver informed us about the reason for the siren: just prior to our arrival two elephants had gotten into a fight and one of them knocked the other to the ground. Tragically, the elephant that fell toppled onto a vacationing couple from Korea. They were in just the wrong place at just the wrong time; one lived, the other didn’t. They probably expected to go home after their trip and tell their friends and family about their exotic vacation. I doubt that they expected to be crushed by a falling elephant.
Similarly, I’ll bet that people who lived in beachfront property in Aomori Prefecture in Japan didn’t expect their lives to be ruined by a natural and subsequent nuclear disaster. And I’m sure that the people riding down Interstate 95 on a bus that was taking them back to New York City from a casino in Connecticut weren’t expecting to die in a horrible crash that night; 15 of them did.
We all live with an elephant in the room; the uncertainty of how long we have to live.
What does this have to do with yoga?
Traditionally, yoga is defined as the stilling of the agitations of the mind. Nothing agitates the mind quite like the uncertainty of when and how our lives will end. That’s why we don’t think about it very often. Generally we think about bodily comforts and how we hope to enjoy our lives in the future. For most people, yoga usually falls into this same category: aspirations for health and happiness, both for ourselves and for others.
At the time of death, if we have the luxury of a moment to do so, we’re likely to think of our loved ones; of how they’ll live and who’ll take care of them after we’re gone. We’re never prepared to give up our body; we want to continue to live in our body to serve our family, friends, society, and so on. And why not? We have a natural propensity to be of service to others in loving relationships. But if our life’s preoccupation is the pursuit of happiness, immediate or extended, without an accompanying knowledge of who and what we truly are beyond our temporary bodies, then how can we know what to do in order to achieve lasting happiness for ourselves or anyone else?
One symptom of progress in our yoga practice is a feeling of compassionate detachment that’s very different from attachment based on temporary, bodily conceptions, compassionate or otherwise. And, ironically perhaps, it’s from such detachment that real freedom and happiness flow. “May all beings be happy and free” really means “may all beings become detached from material conceptions arising from illusion, from mis-identifying the self with the body”, not “may all beings have their material desires fulfilled”.
By practicing yoga we come to understand what we are. And once we know what we are then we can know what to do in order to achieve the happiness we desire. Once we act on the basis of what we are then who we are becomes self-evident; we see our true selves reflected in the calm pool of the still mind. And in that state of being we don’t react to death in quite the same way.
Procrastination is a source of anxiety. Believe me, I know; I’m a master procrastinator. But when I think about my yoga practice as preparation for death, that’s when I feel like I’m doing the most important thing on my to-do list: solving the problem that really needs to be solved. For me, yoga is about solving the problem of death, of directly addressing the elephant in the room.