The Orongorongo riverbed. This year has been the hottest, driest summer in Wellington on record.
I don’t practice asana daily, which might be a strange thing for someone who teaches yoga to admit. In Sanskrit ‘asana’ literally means to take a seat, but is often used to describe yoga postures generally. But that’s only one aspect of yoga. For me, a daily physical practice doesn’t feel right for my body – I feel best when I have rest days from yoga in addition to my practice.
One of the core elements of yogic philosophy are the yamas and niyamas, a set of ethical rules for living that comprise the first two limbs of yoga according Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. (Asana is actually the third limb). The yamas and niyamas offer guidelines for behaviour such as non-harming, truthfulness, non-stealing, and self-study, among others.
In yoga teacher training, we spent a significant amount of time discussing the yamas and niyamas, considering them in relation both our practice on the mat, and our lives off of it. The fourth of the five yamas is brahmacharya, which literally means celibacy, but is often interpreted as moderation, or correct use of energy. Of the 10 yamas and niyamas, brahmacharya tends to be framed as perhaps more important to to the ancient yogis than for modern practitioners. When discussing brahmacharya in relation to ‘correct use of energy’ there’s often some reference to not sweating the small stuff, and then the conversation moves on relatively quickly to the final yama, aparigraha (which I’ve written about here).
A year or so back, I came across Shannah Kennedy’s book, ‘The Life Plan – Simple Strategies for a Meaningful Life’, while I was window shopping on a trip to Sydney. It had been labelled as a staff pick, and as I thumbed through the introduction, I found myself relating to a lot of what she had written and made the impulse buy. When I got back to Wellington, I began working through some of the exercises in the book — reflecting on the milestones of my life so far, thinking about the things that bring me sheer delight, the times when I’ve felt I was at my best, and the mistakes over the years that I’ve learnt from. I worked my way through the first couple of chapters and then took a break from it until recently.
My friend Mara and I have a tradition of coming up with rhyming mottos for the year ahead. We’ve done this for ages now, and really only hit a snag this year, the sixth year in a row of having to come up with a motto that rhymes more or less with ‘teen. (‘Living the dream in 2013’, and ‘No drama queens in 2016’ are two of my favourites from recent years.)
Anyway, as I was thinking about my motto for 2018, I pulled The Life Plan from where it was sitting on my bookshelf, and began reading it again. One of the exercises in the book asked you to define and prioritise your values based on a list of 30 possibilities. The final step was to evaluate what you needed to add or remove from your life, or change, in order to live by your top three values.
And I realised that this was possibly the best way of thinking about brahmacharya, specifically the interpretation as “correct use of energy”. Because it’s not as simple as moderation, or not sweating the small stuff. As the ads here in New Zealand like to remind us, “Little can be huge”.
There’s such power in really thinking about the ways in which we spend our energy. And while it’s not a resolution per se, and certainly doesn’t rhyme with 2018, my intention for the year of brahmacharya has already changed the way I think about things, and my responses to situations and the constant cycles of terrible news. Because the hours in a day and the amount of energy that we have to do things are not infinite. And the dry riverbed that we hiked to in December serves as a reminder to acknowledge that the resources around us are not limitless, and to use our time and energy in the best ways we can.
My Life in Aotearoa New Zealand 