The Path of the Peaceful Warrior

What the principles of yoga teach us about dealing with fear and uncertainty in an age of global terrorism.

By Anne Cushman

On a cold, rainy night last December, after tucking my 16-month-old son into his crib, I built a fire in the wood stove in my living room. As I crumpled newspapers to kindle the flames, the last month's headlines danced before me: Terrorists had threatened to blow up the Golden Gate Bridge. Mistaking a mountainside farming village in Afghanistan for a terrorist training camp, American warplanes had bombed its mud huts to dust, killing 50 people. The United States was unprepared to handle a bioterrorist smallpox epidemic. A postal worker had died from anthrax. Go about your ordinary life, the government admonished, but be on "high alert."

With the war news blazing away in front of me, I spread out my yoga mat and folded into the silence and surrender of a deep forward bend. Since hijacked airplanes crashed into the heart of America last September--smashing our collective illusions of safety and separation to smoking rubble--we're all doing our yoga practice against a whole new backdrop. On one level, things go on as usual, especially for those of us whose lives weren't personally torn by loss: We pick up the kids at preschool, order spiritual books from Amazon.com, fret about our backbends, charge too much on our credit cards. But all we have to do is turn on our television, and we're plunged into the ongoing drama of America's "war on terror," unfolding in epic images of suffering and horror that also, somehow, exert hypnotic fascination.

In the weeks immediately following September 11th, as Americans flocked to churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples in record numbers, attendance also soared at meditation and yoga centers around the country. As prescriptions for antidepressants and sedatives skyrocketed, people turned to yoga and meditation as a kind of spiritual bomb shelter, a refuge of peace and safety solid enough to withstand the daily bombardment of bad news.

Since then, many yoga students continue to turn to their practice with a new set of questions. What tools can yoga and meditation offer as we struggle with our anxiety about suicide bombers on our transcontinental flight, our tears for the orphaned children of a firefighter crushed at Ground Zero or for an Afghan shepherd blown up by a stray American missile, our fury at an "evil one" in a cave in Afghanistan or at our own government for bombing one of the poorest countries on Earth? What practice should we do when we wake up at three in the morning planning where we would flee with our child in the event of a smallpox epidemic, or find ourselves suspiciously eying the turbanned driver of a truck in the next lane on the George Washington Bridge?

And the ongoing war has brought up other, even more compelling questions. For thousands of years, one of the bedrock principles of all forms of yoga has been ahimsa, a Sanskrit word that literally means "nonharming" or nonviolence. "Hatred never ceases with hatred, but with love alone is healed. That is the ancient and eternal law," taught the Buddha. But what does that mean, on a practical level, for a nation at war? How should we live our practice in a country whose citizens have been attacked and whose government is hurling bombs at another country in retaliation? Is nonviolence compatible with self-defense? Is the use of force acceptable in a just cause? And who and what determine when a cause is just?

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