Maitri: A Path to Ahimsa Laureen Smith
"...unless we practice and integrate [maitri and compassion] into
our everyday lives, it will be utterly impossible to attain enlightenment
and liberation."
Ven. Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche
As I sat on a bench near a coffee shop a couple of months ago, I thought to myself what a radical thing it is to love yourself. The thought came to me as I sat watching people walk by me. Young and old. Professional. Students. Women. Men. People from all walks of life, and seemingly from all cultures. Even as there was this diversity of humanity passing one another on the sidewalk, I couldn’t help but think that what we have in common is so much more profound than that which divides us. For so many of us, we go through our days with deep hurts and insecurities, demanding inner critics which drive us on, and outer veneers which cover up the fact that many of us live our lives covering up basic hurts and deep insecurities about ourselves. Through material purchases, incessant cell phone chatter, bad relationships, and work-aholism, we try to show the world that we’re o.k., when in reality, our psyches are bruised, our emotional lives fragile, while our bodies reflect the truth of our lives: hunched shoulders, rounded backs, closed-up hearts, and darting, evasive glances.
In his Yoga Sutras, Patanjali reminds yoga practitioners that by practicing the limbs of yoga, our lives can move from the sufferings that overtake our daily lives to a place where the light of wisdom leads to discriminative discernment and freedom(1). The first of the eight limbs of yoga which help us navigate this life journey is the Yamas or restraints. The first yama is Ahimsa or non-violence/non-harming. In many ways, throughout yoga’s history, the moral observance of ahimsa has been understood to be the restraint or the practice of refraining from harming other beings physically, mentally and vocally – with our words, our thoughts, and our actions. The focus of ahimsa is usually on others, outside of ourselves. But building on the wisdom of the ancient scriptures, The Upanishads, which reminds us that the Self is in all(2) , we must acknowledge that when we do ahimsa to another, we do violence to ourselves, and perhaps equally as important, when we do ahimsa to ourselves, we do violence to other beings.
Historically, in many ways, Western culture has laid more emphasis on humanity’s badness than on our goodness. We focus on sin and depravity, and the part of us that is not good enough and constantly needs "improving." We move through our lives disbelieving that we are connected to the Source of All, therefore separate from one another and from the Loving Energy of the Universe, or God because we are bad. Many of us feel as if we can never get to a place of "being good enough," caught in the cycle of always trying to prove ourselves in order to be loved. And in this proving, we strive harder and harder, digging the hole of our own emptiness deeper and deeper. Advertisers know this. Marketing professionals who want you to buy their products know that at our core we feel we are fundamentally lacking in something. They know how to subtly manipulate these feelings of unworthiness so that if we just buy their product, we might feel the "ok-ness" we’ve been seeking after. The right car, the right smell, the right outfit all promise a sense of worthiness that if can just buy it, somehow we will be ok again and good. Good becomes something we buy, and feeling loved is something for sale.
Some time ago, I remember reading an interview with the Dalai Lama in which he mentioned how surprised he was by the self loathing and hatred of self that seems to pervade the emotional lives and psyches of individuals in the West. Completely absent, he noted, from most eastern cultures (who, he said, had their own problems), this sense of unworthiness and aversion for ourselves is a huge spiritual problem for us. Not only are many people suffering and unhappy because of a true lack of self love, in addition, as many spiritual masters including the Dalai Lama have claimed, actions which come out of this suffering are, at best, laden with hatred in some way, with ahimsa. To paraphrase Mahatma Ghandi, to build peace, we must be peace. To have a just world, we must live justly in our lives. To be kind to others, we must be kind to ourselves. The ends and the means cannot be separated. To love others and God, we must by necessity, love ourselves.
Yoga itself, and our relationship to our yoga practice, is not exempt from the challenge of ahimsa, as too often we push ourselves into yet another challenging pose not out of a great love for ourselves, but out of the deep sense of not being enough. If we constantly critique ourselves, hurt ourselves, or in someway distance ourselves from the deep truth that our Self is holy and eternal, our yoga is laden with himsa/violence. For yoginis/yogis to take the moral precept of ahimsa seriously, we must peer very closely into the crevices of our being where self loathing, sense of unworthiness, self disdain may reside in order to heal that which holds us back in our practice. We must find ways to truly love ourselves, truly accept ourselves and cherish our lives with honor if we are to deepen our yoga practice. In essence, our actions and our practice are laden with harm, if we can’t find ways to love ourselves in our yoga.
The praxis of maitri is one path that can lead yogis/yoginis from feelings of deep unworth and self-hatred to ahimsa, through a practice of befriending ourselves. Maitri is usually defined as friendliness or friendship(3). Patanjali says that maitri, along with karuna (compassion) and mudita (gladness) and upeksha (equanimity) allow our mental modifications (chitta vritti) to abate (I.33) and our journey of yoga to unfold. At a meditation retreat I attended a couple of months ago, American Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron suggested that maitri is more accurately translated as "loving-kindness," since we don’t really have an exact word in English which is equivalent to maitri (which, I think, is rather telling). Chodron suggests that loving-kindness is a quality of heart that we can all practice. And note the word "practice." Maitri is something we choose, something we value, something that changes lives, something that we practice. Adopting a practice of maitri each and every moment of the day, which encourages loving-kindness towards ourselves and towards others is maitri. Approaching all situations, including our yoga, with loving-kindness (maitri) brings us deeper along the yoga journey into our self awakening.
Maitri is a practice of getting to know ourselves intimately with love, respect and kindness. Chodron cautions that maitri isn’t about trying to get better or trying to "improve" ourselves. As she says, "...maitri towards ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything... the point is not to try to change ourselves...it’s about befriending who we are already."(4) It’s getting to know and accept those things that aren’t too pretty inside of us: our fears, our insecurities, our judgements, our nastiness, our pettiness, etc. It’s choosing to shine maitri on ourselves just as we would shine maitri on another. By this practice, we eventually treat ourselves with as much ahimsa as we would another.
It is a challenge for some practitioners of yoga to fully embrace the notion that yoga is not a practice to "make us better," or to "make us more enlightened." While there may be extremely wonderful outcomes of our practice which allow us to grow and change and deepen and blossom towards full enlightenment, the goal of trying to change ourselves is, according to Chodron, a violence in and of itself.(5) As she says,
"The problem is that the desire to change is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself. The other problem is that our hang-ups, unfortunately or fortunately, contain our wealth. Our neurosis and our wisdom are made out of the same material. If you throw out your neurosis, you also throw out your wisdom. Someone who is very angry also has a lot of energy; that energy is what’s so juicy about him or her... The idea isn’t to try to get rid of your anger, but to make friends with it, to see it clearly with precision and honesty, and also to see it with gentleness. That means not judging yourself as a bad person, but also not bolstering yourself up by saying, ‘it’s good that I’m this way...other people are terrible and I’m right to be angry all the time’....[Maitri] involves learning how, once you have fully acknowledged the feeling of anger and the knowledge of who you are and what you do, to let it go....so whether it’s anger or craving or jealousy or fear or depression - whatever it might be - the notion is not to try to get rid of it, but to make friends with it. That means getting to know it completely, with some kind of softness, and learning how, once you’ve experienced it fully, to let it go."
The practice of maitri in yoga leads us from an attitude of what I call, "should-asana", where yoga is purely a goal-oriented activity, where we simply force ourselves to "master" poses, thus doing violence towards ourselves in thought, emotion, and action. In yoga, the practice of maitri can be a path to loving ourselves fully by befriending our very complicated nature warts and glory and all. In our asanas, in our pranayama practice, in our meditation time, to show maitri to ourselves is, in a sense, to be to ourselves as we would imagine the Source of All Life is to everyone, and to care for ourselves with all the tenderness that each soul needs. With curiosity instead of condemnation, and inquisitiveness instead of judgement, in maitri we embody the Brahman for our own hurting selves. We embody love, not as something "out there," but as a quality of being, where maitri becomes not necessarily something we do, rather as something we are and something we choose to let come forth in trust.
The Buddha said, "Investigating the whole world with my mind never did I find anyone dearer than oneself. Since oneself is dearer than others, one who loves oneself should never harm others." In the practice of loving-kindness, we must begin with ourselves. While some wrestle with this idea, believing that self-love is the same as selfishness, Bante Henepola Gunartana reminds, "One who does not love oneself can never love another at all. By the same token one who loves oneself will feel the impact of loving-kindness and then can understand how beautiful it is if every heart in the whole world is filled with the same feeling of loving-kindness."(6) Similarly, the Great Commandment of Jesus’ was to love God and love your neighbor as yourself.
I, myself, am practicing maitri, loving-kindness, on myself as I deal with what I like to call "the inherited trait of judmentalness." In my family, we have this great history of being critical and judgmental. Through generations -- from before my great-grandparents down to me (and I’m waiting to see how my niece is) - this trait has shown itself to be a rather complicated quality in our lives. In me, it has shown up as both a rather helpful. When I am trying to assess a project or get better at a task, being critical can be being discerning. But being critical can also mean that I can be pretty hard on myself, even in yoga. I can cavil with the best of them, tearing apart what’s wrong with me at every turn, demanding that I "get better" in my poses.. As I practice maitri with myself, I find that the part of me that is petty and critical and judgmental is really a part of me that is scared and hurting. When I turn loving-kindness on myself, I notice that instead of beating myself up, I can smile at my hurts and try to imagine love coming from my heart and enfolding me. As I imagine God would do. When I take a moment in silence and let the swirling/critical/sharp feelings around me die down for just a second, I notice that beneath all the upheaval and bad feelings, is a deeper truth that is the core of me. It is the reality that I am a unique creation of the Holy Creator and at my Self is that Source of Love that is connected to all other selves.
In the maitri that we can bring to our yoga practice, a path towards ahimsa is laid down. Each time we practice maitri in our yoga, we bring ahimsa into our bodies as well as into our minds and souls. The radical self acceptance that is maitri can then lead almost imperceptibly to a transformation both of ourselves and our yoga. Our yoga practice becomes a place where experiencing a deep love that transforms us on the inside and the out, we become the yoga we practice
In the presence of one firmly established in non-violence, all hostilities cease. Patanjali II:35.
Endnotes
(1) The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Translation and commentary by Sri Swami Satchidananda. Yogaville, VA: Integral Yoga Publications, 1987.
(2) The Kena Upanishad. The Upanishads. Translated by Eknath Easwaran. Berkeley: Nilgiri Press. 1987.
(3) Georg Feurerstein. Shambhala Encyclopedia of Yoga. Boston: Shambhala. 1997.
(4) Pema Chodron. "The Places That Scare You." Meditation Retreat, May 2001. The Omega Institute, Rhinebeck, NY.
(5) And, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche reminds us that it’s important to take the "...opportunity to practice maitri in non-stressful, delightful times, so that " the gradual integration of these qualities comes about, so that in times of frustration, fear, and aggression, you are able to transform the situation."
(6) Bante Henepola Gunaratana. http://www.bhavanasociety.org/articles/bg009.htm