Inhabit Yoga

What BP really needs an answer from outside of their expertise, clearly! Do you have ideas? Check out InnoCentive-it’s the featured challenge right now. InnoCentive is where research and problems and the layperson and the non-expert or informal expert can help solve real problems.

Doesn't it look a little like a castle floating on the ocean? (photo from InnoCentive)

And this connects to yoga how? The Yamas are guidelines that pertain to how we live within the world. There are five. I’ll discuss two of them here:

Ahimsa (non-violence) – Dear BP-do what needs to be done to heal the animals and prevent further harm from the grand expanse of water and air and people and land that this oil spill will impact.

Asteya (non-stealing) – Dear BP-what is birdwatcher to do? Homes have been destroyed, these sacred places of marsh and these depths of ocean mystery where so many creatures reside. And the livelihoods of peoples, how far reaching the impacts of our actions (or non-actions) can be.

I think my heart reaches out to the animals because while I’ve been seeing lots of interviews with the people impacted by the oil spill, the animals are on my mind. There was a fantastic news piece about the people folks who are responsible for collecting up living, oily animals and cleaning them, rehabbing them, and releasing them to safe places. May these places stay safe.

There’s another set of guidelines, the Niyamas, that pertain to the inner life-how we live within ourselves. Those who work for BP, those who drill for oil, those who consider how we move into the future from this point forward, might reflect for themselves about the following:

• Shaucha or purity,
• Santosha or contentment,
• Tapa or austerity,
• Swadhyaya or self-education and
• Ishwar-Pranidhan or meditation on the Divine (or higher power, or higher self, however you relate)