From Yoga to Everyone
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 400,000 years
of the War Age behind us, and I believe the world’s yoga
communities can be the catalyst.
War is always a violent means of conflict resolution. After wars,
really just one issue is resolved: Who were the better fighters.
wars don’t resolve conflicts, the amplify them.But whether the solution imposed on the
vanquished is the best for eitheror both combatants has had no light focused on it.
Rather, death, dismemberment, collapsed economy, destroyed medical services,
and famine develop 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 us yogis model an urgently needed wake-up call?
20 | Yoga Therapy Today 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.
www.iayt.orgTherefore, 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 nonattachment (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
Spring 2025
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 nonharming, 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
Yoga Therapy Today | 21PERSPECTIVE
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.
22 | Yoga Therapy Today “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 impre