The inner and outer landscape
It’s the arrogance of humanity that gets to me the most. Our egotistical need to be recognised as ‘someone’, to define ourselves by our busyness and our obsession with acquiring stuff, and our delusion that this is the way, that we can buy ourselves happiness regardless of the greater implication.
There is a distinct lack of responsibility for the planet and the way that we use its resources, just as there is a distinct lack of responsibility for our own wellness. We are constantly looking outside ourselves for something bigger, better, brighter, only seeing what we want to see, and ignoring the mess in the shadows, pretending that it’s not there.
Most would have felt a little uncomfortable, even slightly depressed, watching David Attenborough’s ‘Extinction’ as the programme sought to convey an important message – that each one of us is individually responsible for the continued exploitation of this beautiful planet, which is indeed being exploited by us humans.
It was a bold documentary which shone a light onto some of the many shadows, potentially making us - the British public at least - more aware of the ways in which wildlife is being killed and the land destroyed in our pursuit of money, which underpins our consumer culture and motivates ‘progression’.
People are out to make a buck and they don’t care how they do it. Never is the ego more manifest than in its sole pursuit of money and wealth; we continuously sell out in the chase of this, and often find ways to justify our behaviour around money, deluding ourselves as we try to delude others and simply feeding our egos.
I was humoured to see the furore around Lululemon’s promotion of a yoga workshop advertised as an opportunity to “resist capitalism”. This being a company which encourages us to buy into the illusion that we need to buy $180 yoga leggings to practice yoga!
As Amy Swearer of Heritage Foundation was quoted as saying: “Lululemon IS capitalism. It is literally a privately-owned corporation that raked in half a billion dollars in pure profits last year, merely by selling overpriced yoga pants to women willing and able to pay for this luxury. All this begs the question … WUT?”
Sadly the yoga world has sold out to our capitalist consumer culture as much as the rest. This is now an ‘industry’ where you are sold the idea that you need to wear particular clothes, use a certain mat, drink from a specific type of water bottle and practice in a dedicated all singing-all dancing yoga studio if you hope to practice yoga properly. I’m yet to find any reference to any of this in the ancient texts btw!
But this is so typical of our culture, in that we have to commodify things, make money from it, even those things that by their very nature are not about money but about something very different, such as yoga. It seems to me more obvious than ever before, the way in which we fall into the illusionary trap that it is about the external and about what how other people perceive us and our place in this world.
The reality is that we are really very insignificant in the grand scheme of things and life will continue anon without us in it. It’s a hard lesson for us to learn, but a necessary one if we are serious about trying to make the world a better place to live upon. The trouble is, people buy into their need to be someone and take themselves far too seriously, to the detriment of the bigger picture.
Look at social media and the manner in which this is used to promote ourselves in our attempt to ‘be someone’. Look at the politicians who put their own egotistical need to be elected for the sake of being elected beyond the greater interests of the society and the planet as a whole. We are all of us in some way feeding into our need for recognition at the expense of something – be that our values or our children or our health.
The more important we think we are, the busier we have to be, as if to justify the labelling we have given ourselves around our own self-importance. Our lives become a mere creation of the mind – we imagine ourselves important and live it out, impacting on the way we treat others, and the way we expected to be treated by others too.
The ego is often so subtle and our conditioning so deep, that we don’t even notice that we are doing it. We turn a blind eye to the way we are living our lives and justify the choices we make based on it being OK because it is me…just me. Yet a whole heap of ‘me’ makes up this planet, which makes for a whole heap of people living in a way that isn’t necessarily responsible, let alone harmonious, and definitely not conscious.
I keep thinking that clearly our way forward cannot be one based on our past, as it is our past that got us into this sorry mess in the first place. We have, many of us, learned a lot, but there are still some that are reticent to take responsibility – look at President Trump and his inability to accept that climate change is real, because then he might have to make some hard decisions and this might lose him his electorate ratings. See what I mean about the ego!
My Ayurvedic doctor will always say that ‘ever action has a consequence’ and she is right. Even the most well intended actions, such as people switching to veganism in an attempt to save the planet, will have consequences - all of a sudden there is greater demand for nut milks, for example, which means more nuts need to be grown, which means more monoculture and greater demand on water and land, to the expense, often, of another crop and biodiversity of land.
Try as we might, us being here and living on planet earth places a demand on the earth’s resources. We cannot escape it. But one thing we can do is try to become more conscious of our impact on the earth, taking our head out of the sand and looking more honestly at how we are living and the choices we are making about that.
We do not have to do what everyone else is doing, blindly following like a sheep. It is healthy to ask questions, especially if what is being asked of us does not make sense. There is lots about the way we are currently living that does not make sense to me, from education to our health and wellbeing.
Often there’s this resignation that because things have been done like this in the past, it’s OK to continue doing them like that now. Our approach to life needs to change and fortunately many people are making a shift and doing some really positive things that are beyond their own ego, and for the greater good. The more that follow suit, the more we stand a chance of making this a healthier planet for our children to live on.
I can’t help thinking that the more we come to know ourselves, explore more of our inner landscape and recognise the way that we are treating our physical bodies and managing our mental health, the more this will be reflected back out into the world. The more conscious our relationship with our self, the more conscious our relationship with the outer world, and the more we might begin to recognise what is important in life (and I don’t believe it is the life that is being fed to us by marketing companies, social media and private enterprise).
We can all do more to help, but it is actually in the doing less that we might achieve this – there is always the paradox! In letting go of trying to be someone, of having to label and separate ourselves from everyone, of thinking that we and life needs to look a certain way, well perhaps we might just become a little more conscious of what really matters and find a new way; usher in the paradigm shift that is needed now for our wellbeing as much as for Planet Earth.
