Lessons in Simplicity
After spending our first two nights in Pune at a luxury hotel and spa, Kate and I moved into the shared apartment where we are spending the month while studying at the Iyengar Yoga Institute. Our situation could not be more convenient: our apartment is in the building right next to the Institute; we have a cook who makes us delicious home-cooked meals daily; and we have a cleaning lady who comes three times a week and also does our laundry.
While we want for nothing, our apartment is simple to the point of being Spartan. The furniture is spare, and there are few decorations on the walls. There are no Ziploc bags or Tupperware (reused food containers take their place). There are no napkins, paper towels, or spray cleaner (we wash our hands in the sink and wipe the table with towels; when the going gets tough we wipe a little harder), and if it weren’t for us, there would be no toilet paper either (this is one comfort we are not eager to learn to live without). Eating without a napkin is still somewhat uncomfortable, but we have aspirations to learn to eat with our fingers like the locals do.
In one of Kate’s first classes at the institute, her teacher gave a direct and personal lesson in simplicity. He said that he had examined his own life and decided to radically simplify. He realized that his life was too cluttered with things, that the compulsion to consume was too strong, and that his impact on the environment was too great. He decided that for the next two years he would buy only groceries and other supplies, no new clothes, no new things. He asked the class to examine their own lives, to consider their own consumption.
The lesson in simplicity also extended to food. He pointed out that many in the class were overweight. India’s rapid development and the changes in diet and lifestyle that come with it have brought on a growing epidemic of obesity and other lifestyle diseases. A couple of days later outside of a popular lunch spot, we met folks promoting an interesting and insightful campaign about healthy eating called “Eating Right Is My Birthright.” The campaign was striking for its sophisticated rendering of the psychology of eating: the role of habit, cycles of guilt and indulgence, and external pressures. Ultimately it asked us to commit to aware eating at all times.
I thought of my place in the culture of consumption. I thought of the piles of things I recycled, donated, or threw away when packing my apartment. I thought of all the time I spent shopping online to find just the right things. I thought of my relationship to time: the clutter of my calendar, the way I always tried to pack too much into the wisps of time outside of work and yoga classes. I thought of the effect of devices, the steady stream of notifications, the way screen time can expand to fill the empty spaces.
One of the big reasons I decided to go on this trip was that I could feel how our consumer culture, my work schedule, the invasiveness of technology, and particularly my relationship with time were affecting the workings of my own mind. I am reminded of an interview with John O’Donohue where he called stress “the modern word we use to describe a perverse relationship with time.”
Later on the same day that we encountered the “Eating Right Is My Birthright” campaign, Kate and I found a little park and took a stroll through it. The park offered respite from the traffic and busyness of the shopping thoroughfare we had been walking along. We enjoyed the shade of tall trees, admired Diwali forts built by local children, and walked down to a small playground overlooking the river. A high fence separated us from the lush, grassy flood plain through which the river meandered. A tiny, idyllic footbridge crossed the plain a little ways downriver.
The river itself was not nearly so appealing: its water was polluted; its muddy banks were piled high and embedded throughout with trash. Seeing this, I was grateful for our apartment’s lack of paper towels, spray cleaner, and Ziploc bags. I was grateful for the cloth shopping bags we took with us when we went shopping for vegetables or groceries. The river offered its own lesson: with the effects of the trappings of modern life on the environment so readily visible, living more simply seemed easier, and more urgent.
The concept in yoga philosophy that this calls up for me is aparigraha, renunciation of unnecessary possessions. It is one of the five yamas, moral injunctions that constitute the first of the eight limbs of yoga. The yamas are the foundation on which all the other practices of yoga are to be built upon if one wishes to achieve the true, spiritual aim of yoga, which is unity and freedom.
We see similar moral injunctions in other spiritual traditions. The Ten Commandments are foundational in the Abrahamic religions, and also include injunctions against covetousness: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor's.” Jesus takes it a step further, telling the rich young man that if he wants to enter the kingdom of heaven he should sell all his possessions and give the money away to the poor. He goes on to say that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”
It seems to me that the function of these moral injunctions that we see across different spiritual traditions is purification. If a saint or a sage was going to be stopping by our house for a cup of tea, we would make sure that the place was spotless. If we are to come to know the divinity that is already there within ourselves, we similarly need to clean the interior house of our heart, our mind, and our will.
Aparigraha asks us to clean our house in a more literal sense, and also to clean other aspects of our lives: to find and remove that which is unnecessary. The oversubscription of our time and the toll our overconsumption is taking on the environment are both are the result of us wanting more than we need. Too often the riverbanks of garbage have been hidden from my view. Being in India is helping to make them visible, helping me to see thethings that are unnecessary, and I hope will help me to find the way to a life of greater simplicity.
This is one of a series of posts written during our travels. You can find the first post here, and you can find the next post here. You can sign up for email alerts about future posts here.
