PERSPECTIVE
Yoga as a Peace Practice: Yoga as a Peace Practice:
Strength in Numbers and Radical Ahimsa
By Loren Fishman
Humankind has survived the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. Now is the time to put the 10,000 years
of the War Age behind us, and I believe the world’s yoga communities can be a catalyst.
War is always a violent means of conflict resolution. After wars, really just one issue is resolved: Who were the better fighters. But
whether the solution imposed on the vanquished is the best for either or both combatants has had no light focused on it. Rather, death,
dismemberment, collapsed economy, destroyed medical services, and famine follow in the wake of a conquering army, and a parade
of disabilities, mental scars, and resentments follows the victorious soldiers home. All of these fuel preparations for the next war, from
which the same consequences will emerge.
Wars have the same birth and rebirth cycle from which yoga offers individuals escape. Can we apply the yogic path to peace to us all? And can we yogis model an urgently
needed wake-up call? It takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in protests to ensure serious political change.
In the past, nations and groups have taken up arms to defend themselves from their neighbors and increase their chances
of survival. Today, with many countries possessing missiles that travel more than halfway around the world, we all have
dangerous neighbors. The chances of total annihilation have risen proportionately. No war, however valuable its purported objective, is
worth this existential risk. The risk of total annihilation is infinitely
greater than any war’s goal.
Therefore, now, to ensure our survival, we must behave ourselves. It’s
similar to the environmental situation: In the past we had to control nature to survive; now we must control ourselves so that nature may
survive. Erika Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, in their 2012 book. Why Civil Resistance Works, reviewed 323 violent and nonviolent
campaigns between 1900 and 2006 and found that nonviolent ones succeeded roughly twice as often as the violent ones. Mahatma
Gandhi’s satyagraha (determined nonviolent resistance to evil) is one formidable example, echoing the Rig Veda scripture in hymn
10.117.5: “Let the stronger man give to the man whose need is greater.” And the Greek poet Euripides is said to have written, circa
400 BCE, that “the tongue is mightier than the blade,” a sentiment made more widely known in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1838 play
Richelieu: “The pen is mightier than the sword. . . . Take away the sword; States can be saved without it.” The Stone Age did not end because people ran out of stones; we just
found better ways to do things. Isn’t it time to replace war as a means of conflict resolution?
The Yogic Path to Peace
E. O. Wilson, in his bigthink.com video “What Is Human Nature?” described humankind as having “paleolithic emotions, medieval
institutions, and god-like technology.” Regarding the paleolithic emotions, neuroscience finds that our lower brains, the source
of our emotions, are just like those of reptiles, fish, birds, and our fellow mammals. Penguins mourn; many fish “build” and maintain
home nests; snakes strike back when they perceive a threat. In correspondence originally published in 1933 but preserved in
the book Einstein on Peace, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud concluded that war was an inevitable consequence of humankind’s
aggressive nature. Human politics, governments, banks, religions, and even families are often based on autocratic models stressing power
and control, not thoughtfulness and equality.
As verse 6 of the Isha Upanishad reminds us, “Who sees all beings in his own self and his own self in all beings, loses all fear.” Our paranoic human cultures are replete with
narrow-windowed military architecture and songs and dramas of war. In early classics like the Iliad and Odyssey, Njál’s Saga, Gilgamesh, and even the
Mahabharata, war is always the main event. In the part of the Mahabharata known as the Bhagavad Gita,
Krishna describes the struggle of elevated consciousness to win out over baser impulses and desires. He tells Arjuna that self-restraint
and non-attachment (not detachment!) from the world are the essence of spiritual self-mastery. Being even-minded in pleasure and pain,
applied personally and communally, is the gateway to lasting inner peace. Even talking to a warrior, Krishna makes it clear that mastery
over our base urges is one stop on the royal road to peace. Outhouses and traffic laws demonstrate our ability to overcome
primal urges to do what comes naturally. Our laws and mores contain many other examples of self-control.
Governments have evolved past medieval models of servitude, and yes, technology can serve a divine purpose. Our conventional and nuclear weapons alike are—or
should be—sufficiently horrible to motivate us to stop their use. Our technology can surveil the round Earth’s imagined corners and detect
any massing of troops or movement of missiles out of silos. We can nip uprisings and transgressions in the bud. I believe that many of us
possess the will to stop war, and the means of detecting its beginnings are universally applicable on our small, exceptional planet.
The grimmest realities of war are not well-publicized. For instance, according to costsofwar.org’s online publication How Death Outlives
War: The Reverberating Impact of the Post-9/11 Wars on Human Health After 9/11, more than 3.6–3.8 million indirect deaths
occurred in Iraq, Afghanistan, and neighboring countries—although precise figures are unknown and likely much higher. Civic life is
wrecked: The buildings, the economy, transportation, medical care, and educational systems do not function. A 2023 editorial in Nature
Sustainability documented the colossal damage wars inflict on the land and the atmosphere.
I have come to look at war as a millennia-long natural disaster, like a protracted hurricane, earthquake, or flood. The innocent victims include not just the civilians and children,
but also the combatants who are lured or compelled to fight—to kill and be killed, maim and be maimed. We devote eye-watering
amounts of money, talent, and cultural focus to destroying one another’s houses and killing one another’s children.
Nonviolent campaigns succeed roughly twice as often as violent ones.
Here, again, the small and large pictures share a pattern. How much of one’s own life, time, talent, and fortune are spent in competition
with fellow humans rather than cooperation toward a common goal? To me the yoga principle of non-harming, ahimsa, applies also to
not spoiling other people’s plans and even their reputations. We have laws governing our behavior within any nation on Earth, but
internationally the United Nations and other regulating bodies are kept intentionally weak by our fear of one another, our lack of trust, and our
blindness to the outrageousness of war. Here at home, in our personal and political lives, we may avoid the conflict born of polarization
by compartmentalizing our views, failing to humbly listen to and understand individuals or nations that seem to fundamentally disagree
with us. But what evidence says we are not all fundamentally the same, with stunningly similar (and simple) needs?
Ahimsa in Action
September 21 or 22, the autumnal equinox, is International Day of Peace, when hundreds of demonstrations dot the globe. But on
September 23, everything remains just about the same. Almost everyone is in favor of peace, but it’s just not a high enough priority. Feeding
one’s family, providing shelter, keeping one’s job, even avoiding social embarrassment may rank higher. Once upon a time we armed ourselves
to protect ourselves from our neighbors. Now we are all neighbors, each having an obligation to arm more and more “for safety.” But the game
has switched, and the more we arm, the less safe we are. Although we do not stop the arms race, even for our own safety, we have evolved
sufficiently to face and confront this likely source of mutual destruction.
What can we do?
The outrage we should feel that a rational species should spend such a proportion of its time, its focus, its talent, and its fortune on
destroying itself and protecting itself from that very destruction may motivate efforts to damp down and someday stop this homicidal-
turned-suicidal obsession. First, we can analyze the actual mechanism of war: Someone has
enough political power to get others to fight. What is that political power? Essentially, it lies in the fact that people will obey him or her
and do what he or she tells them to do. Once this fragile hold on power is threatened, leaders tend to listen more closely.
What is behind this phenomenon? Political power is due to obedience or, at best, cooperation. We owe this liability, this susceptibility to being
ordered around, to the fact that we can learn: We are therefore trainable. Part of that training is obedience to the law and the mandates of our
leaders, be they presidents, kings, warlords, or cartel bosses. Although obedience may be rote, it is still voluntary. The open secret is that we do
not have to obey anyone. Resistance to war is an option for every one of us. Disobedience to authority is often illegal and dangerous, but it can
always remain—on the part of the demonstrators—peaceful, thoughtful, and pursued with respect and empathy.
Over the centuries yogis have differed about many things, but just
about every yogi holds peace—within and between ourselves—as a top priority.
“Educate and develop our resources together. Let’s not hate anymore,” is the counsel given in the Atharva Veda (3.30.6), a text
focused on prolonging life, healing illness, and getting a lover or partner. “And when something does come along to disturb your
peace,” said Swami Satchidananda, “that is the most important time to practice being peaceful.”
There is Peace Day and there is an International Day of Yoga, but can we yogis make a difference for peace? To do so we must be just as
intent—and intentional—about tactics and strategy as generals are in war. In prosecuting a war, lives are at stake; in promoting peace all
those lives are at stake, along with the lives of the unborn. It may take centuries to definitively disarm; but we are wise to start now.
Chenoweth and Stephan also state that it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in protests to ensure serious political
change.
With the most recent National Health Interview Surveys suggesting that well over 15% of the U.S. population engages in yoga
practice, that’s a lot of potentially clear-sighted individuals. Of 8 billion people, 3.6% is 288 million. We, as part of the hundreds
of millions of yoga practitioners worldwide, must reach those who would make war, and those who actually fight it. We might start with
an attention-grabbing symbol in which active supporters wear a thin gauze bandage across their foreheads on August 14, 2025, Global
Yoga Therapy Day. Even a band-aid on the forehead will make the point, stimulate questions, and impress with our numbers. But it is just the start. • •
Loren Fishman (sciatica.org), MD, C-IAYT, earned an advanced degree in philosophy
at Christ Church, Oxford, before spending 3 years in India, 1 of those with B. K. S. Iyengar.He uses yoga and philosophy in his medical
practice and in 100+ papers and 14 books.
www.iayt.org
We have lived through:
the Stone Age
the Bronze Age
the Iron Age.
It is time to get beyond the War Age.
How is war doing as a method of conflict resolution? It is difficult to think of what else for which it might be useful. But does it actually resolve conflicts, or does it just serve to enliven and thereby perpetuate them? A look at the history of armed cities and states reveals that a better solution is now available.
In the past, nations and groups have armed themselves to defend themselves from their neighbors and increase their chances of survival. Today, with many countries possessing missiles that travel more than half-way around the world, we all have dangerous neighbors. The number and destructiveness of these weapons can handily wipe out most life on this planet, and keep it uninhabitable for milennia. The chances of total annihilation have thus risen on both counts. No war, however valuable its objective, is worth this existential risk.
WAR
BENEFIT/ RISK = 0
The risk of total annihilation is infinitely bigger than any war’s goal.
Therefore now, to assure our survival, we must find peace. It’s similar to the environmental situation:
In the past we had to control nature to survive, now we must control ourselves so that nature may survive. If nature fails to survive, we do too.
In the past we have prepared for war to protect ourselves from existential threats; now, we must prepare for peace
to protect ourselves from an existential threat.
1.Most wars are about land and their resources. Yet the wars destroy that very land, waste or lay waste its resources, and its people.
2. A few wars are theoretical: based on religion or precepts such as “All people are created equal.” Although we may agree
with the tenets and at times even praise the outcome of such wars, there must be another way to adjudicate such
claims.
3. Some wars are the result of sheer human misery. Since all the world’s in danger whenever there is armed conflict,
one easy solution here is for the world’s more fortunate to help the people out of their misery.
What Circumstances Underlie War?
Unemployment and loss-of-property through environmental change amongst other causes are the chief sources of
war’s personnel. This is a mammoth problem, yet the funds saved by avoiding military build-up would probably
go a long way toward employing people or providing a “basic wage.”
The motivation of the leaders is often pride, greed, maintenance of position, or they may be subdued by pressure
groups in their nation or external to it.
The motivation of the soldiers and armed people may be pride, wanting a job, either domestically or as mercenaries,
anger, hatred or another emotional motive such as revenge. That is why they fight. If they have no such motivation,
the leaders may use laws or brute force to compel them to kill people and and destroy property.
E.O. Wilson once described humankind as having “paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and
god-like technology.” Neuroscience finds that our lower brains, the source of our emotions, are stunningly like
those of reptiles, fish, birds and the other mammals, and so are the emotions that originate there: penguins mourn, many fish
nest, eagles are monogamous, snakes strike back.
Many wars, if not all, are either due to these primitive emotions, or they are caused by the aftermath of previous wars.
Bob Dylan sings of “guns and sharp swords in the hands of small children.” We adults must take them away,
for their own good and for ours.
ON THE ONE HAND, OUR ABILITY TO TRANSPORT ANNIHILATION-STRENGTH WEAPONS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD THREATEN US AS NEVER BEFORE.
ON THE OTHER HAND, OUR COMMUNICATIONS ENABLING TRACKING OF EVERY EARTHLY AND HEAVENLY OBJECT, AND OUR ABILITY TO COMMUNICATE WITH ONE ANOTHER SO INSTANTANEOUSLY AND UNIVERSALLY ENABLE US TO STOP OURSELVES FROM WAR AS NEVER BEFORE.
THESE HIDEOUSLY BRUTAL AND OUTRAGEOUSLY EXPENSIVE WARS PERPETUATE THE CYCLE:
ENMITY – WAR – DEATH AND DESTRUCTION-MORE ENMITY – ANOTHER WAR – MORE DEATH AND DESTRUCTION – MORE ENMITY-…
THIS HAS BEEN THE CYCLE SINCE HISTORY WAS RECORDED, AND PROBABLY LONG BEFORE THAT. APES HAVE WARS.
WORST FEATURES OF WAR:
Death of many people – protagonists and mainly civilians
Destruction of a great deal of property housing people and institutions
Cost of rebuilding after the war
Resentment, vengeful hatred of the bereaved
Cost of preparation for the next war
Diversion of focus from humanitarian enterprises (science, medicine, history, psychology, art, space exploration, etc. ) to non-humanitarian enterprises (armaments, etc.)
Loren Fishman, MD
Columbia University Medical School
WAR
9/3/24
The US gave Ukraine some coveted fighter planes.
Last Friday one was shot down by friendly fire.
In a sense, isn’t it all “friendly fire?”
The enemy today is not whom we are fighting. the enemy is war itself.
For every legitimate and corageous war hero, there are probably 100 dead civilians. Can we not find a better use for bravery?
My Plan:
Note: No early disarmament. It may take 100’s of years for disarmament.