A few days ago a group of people, including me, were discussing a case in the media which the readers had reacted adversely to. It does not matter what the case was, what matters is the root cause of the anger or frustration which people, organisations and even countries can arouse with their wrongdoings every day: the lack of integrity.
Why is integrity such a hard nut crack for the grown-up world? Look at children. “Mom, why do you look so angry and wrinkle your eyebrows – is it because of me?” asks my 8-year old son when I have had a tough day at work and have not yet been able to let go of it. Or he states in a loud and clear voice while staring at a person with green hair and pierced face on his way school: “Mom, promise me that you never do this to yourself”.
Where does this honesty disappear when we grow older? We see someone who has a problem which shows all over the place and face and we choose to ignore it. We solve the situation by pretending that the problem does not exist and cause the person to sink even deeper. We may see someone crying or lying on a street and walk by without trying to help.
One of the most important principle in yoga is ahimsa – non-harming. We can harm both by saying ant NOT saying, by doing and NOT doing. In yoga it is possible to lose integrity as a teacher by believing that by NOT doing or saying, we do less harm. As a student, the lack of integrity causes us to try too hard during yoga practice.
When my son asked me not to look like the green-haired person, he meant more than that. He meant also the invisible to the eye – that this person was not in balance. My son was being brutally honest. Like children often are.
This brutal honesty is there until at some point the grown-up world overtakes it and replaces with compromises, an accepted code of conduct and rules of conformity. The tricky thing with being brutally honest is that it can cause confrontation. Confrontation can trigger action. And it is never easy to act because it exerts more energy – both mental and physical. One’s values can be put into question. But the interesting thing is that we oftentimes stop learning when we stop asking confrontational (requiring action and change) questions. “Why was Hitler such a bad man, Mom?” my son once asked. It took me a long time to explain it.
In a balanced world confrontation and being brutally honest are good things. In a balanced world being honest is not being violent. But in this imbalanced world that we live in, honesty is often misinterpreted and treated as the trigger of violence and harm. There is nothing wrong with honesty but a lot of things are wrong with our reaction to it.
When we move away from integrity, we move away from balance. When we do not want to admit things to ourselves or stop seeing the obvious, we are lying. Yoga for me is a way to practice integrity. Because I can only change myself and if I know better my root causes, I can be more honest towards myself and others. Is hard work, a struggle where the 5 senses often want to mislead and even the brain wants to trick into believing an illusion rather than the reality. But I keep trying because the world with integrity is a much better place than the world without.