Start your yoga career now: Yoga Alliance Certified Teacher Training in London Begins September
Problems & solutions
Bridget Walsh on 23 September, 2011 | 
What do you believe? It’s a pretty big question, and one that I’ve explored in the past. Belief systems, spirituality and an appreciation of where you fit into the proverbial ‘bigger picture’ are key ideas that you explore through yoga, and for people who have not really questioned these concepts before, I imagine it can be quite a philosophy to untangle.
My passion these days seems to lie in doing what I can to essentially save the world. No big deal, right? When discussing ideas surrounding things like sustainability, humanity, the environment, well-being, animal welfare, resource management, waste and recycling (amongst many other topics!), I tend to come across three general categories that people fall into: 1) they genuinely don’t know much about what I’m saying, 2) they do know but can’t be bothered to change and 3) they do know and, Hallelujah - they want to make some improvements!
We here in 'developed' society have become collectively detached from the interdependence and consequences of our lifestyles, and the impacts of our choices across the board. Our 'need' for abundance, our constant desire for instant gratification, our general laziness, our sense of entitlement and our lack-lustre appreciation of 'value' have all helped to cultivate a wide-spread acceptance of stress, mediocrity, cruelty, misery, filth and waste.
I’m under no illusion that big lifestyle shifts can be a lot to ask of some people. I also know that if you overload people with information, abrasive images or endless statistics, you run the risk of scaring them away and losing valuable window of opportunity. By engaging people on a more accessible level, allowing them the opportunity to ask questions, instigate thinking and further discussion, we can empower people to make those smaller, more ‘manageable’ changes in their lives that can add up to make a real difference across the board. To put this into a Yogic context, the Yamas and Niyamas are a great place to start. Fundamental ideas that are based around our inherent nature to do the ‘right thing’, ideas that have been practically conditioned out of us by modern media, politics, marketing and society as a whole.
Words like ‘optimist’, ‘idealist’ and ‘realist’ are often thrown around. To be truly open to change, one needs have to have a healthy dose of each. If you are too much of a realist, you can become bogged down in the perceived impossibility of improvements, and deny the potential for change. Cynicism can take over and although your heart might be in the right place, your intentions to contribute to solutions can be overshadowed by your constant need for ‘realism’.
If you are too much of an optimist, or simply unfazed by the problems facing the world today, you can head off in two extreme directions: the first being that you annoy people with your bubbliness, perkiness and the perpetual smile on your face, despite the fact that life can be a struggle for others. Or even worse, the other extreme: you choose to keep living your life how YOU want, selfishly making decisions to simply keep yourself happy (albeit probably only superficially), without any real thought for the consequences your choices may have for others.
The term idealist tends to suggest that you are aware of the problems (or at least the fact that there are problems) but that you also have a belief in the potential for solutions. This equilibrium is can draw parallels with many yoga parallels, including the quintessential notion of balance and union. Like stilling one’s mind for meditiation or contemplation, idealism is essentially about recognising a problem, understanding it’s presence and taking the steps to contribute towards a solution.
The most important factor, no matter what category you fall into, is the idea of being constructive. Are you helping to solve a problem, or are you possibly making it worse? Are you minimising the negative impact your life can have on others? On your community? On the planet? Maybe even just on yourself. Every single day we push the planet, it's resources and it's inhabitants closer and closer to breaking point - and it may well be too late for us to reverse the majority of the damage we have done to the earth and to humanity. But we simply have to try.