Why are we always at war?

Maybe it’s already been discussed on social media, but is it any coincidence that as we declare war on a virus, ‘our enemy’, the fashion industry is awash with camo print this season?! Why do we always have to be at war with something?

I saw on the news today that people are going to be asked to “step forward for your country” in terms of getting the vaccine. I mean seriously, if ever we think we’re at war then it’s comments like that. I’m not anti the vaccine by the way, or pro it for that matter, everyone should have the right to choose according to their perspective, situation and families. But I do wish we’d stop this war talk and look deeper, at the reason we’re getting these super killing viruses in the first place.

Furthermore, I really wish, for the sake of my children and their children, that we’d stop focusing on the quick fix and look at the bigger picture, how we’re living, and how we’re living in relationship with our own nature and nature generally. It seems so blindingly obvious to me. Yet here we have 70 million Americans voting for a man who doesn’t even believe in climate change, let alone equality for all regardless of race or gender.

We could easily get really depressed about the state of the world at the moment, all the actual wars as people kill one another in the name of religion, or some sort of power base, whatever it is, crazy. Krishnamurti was right when he said:

“We human beings are what we have been for millions of years - colossally greedy, envious, aggressive, jealous, anxious and despairing, with occasional flashes of joy and affection. We are a strange mixture of hate and gentleness; we are both violence and peace. There has been outward progress from the bullock cart to the jet plane, but psychologically, the individual has not changed at all, and the structure of society throughout the world has been created by individuals. The outward social structure is the result of inward psychological structure of our human relationships, for the individual is the result of the total experience, knowledge and conduct of man. Each one of us is a storehouse of all the past. The individual is the human who is all mankind. The whole history of man is written in ourselves”.

It can only ever change with each of us, but we’re often at war within ourselves, not at peace with who we are and/or our purpose on planet earth. We fight with those we love, take our crap out on those we don’t, and wonder why we suffer the way we do. The only way we’ll change the world is by changing ourselves, taking responsibility for our health and wellbeing, our state of mind, our level of consciousness then, and our resulting experience of life, determined as it by the state of our mind.

But of course, so many don’t make any effort to know more of themselves, to understand the nature of their mind and the manner in which their mind impacts on the collective consciousness of life lived here on planet earth, how the lack of delving in the shadows, the lack of fundamental change, of increasing consciousness by waking up to our true selves (beyond the illusion of this material world), means that we just keep getting more of the same, albeit packaged differently, because we are continuously reinventing the wheel.

As Krishnamurti said: “…in order to understand ourselves we need a great deal of humility… But how can we be free to look and learn when our minds, from the moment we are born to the moment we die, are shaped by a particular culture in the narrow pattern of the ‘me’? For centuries, we have been conditioned by nationality, caste, class, tradition, religion, language, education, literature, art, custom, convention, propaganda of all kinds, economic pressure, the food we eat, the climate we live in, our family, our friends, our experiences - every influence you can think of - and therefore our responses to every problem are conditioned.”

So it is that when we feel threatened as a society by something, be that another religion or a virus, we declare war on it! This is the conditioned response. If only we could get out of our minds and find a different way to live, that doesn’t respond to conditioning, to what has happened previously, to always having to find a way to harm and limit the possibility for peace.

The way we live is harmful! This is really at the crux of it. Life is being lived too quickly, frenetically, and we are expected to keep up, even though it is not in our nature, not fundamentally, to live at this pace. Increasing numbers of people are suffering mentally with depression and anxiety rates on the rise, let alone stress and the resulting loss of life through heart conditions and cancers, as our hearts give up under the weight of all the tension, and our cells are the battleground for all the inner tension.

This from trying to live in a way that isn’t harmonious with the very core of our being, and within us all this dis-resonance, being one person at work, another person at home, another person with friends and another with our children, never truly knowing who we are deep on the inside beyond the titles, labels and names we give ourselves, beyond all the outward stuff to try to prove who we are - that we are someone - in this world.

So we roll out our mat and we practice, and we look inside, beyond the superficial, to deeper parts of us that we ignore, to those muscles that we never use, or need to connect into, because some of the larger muscles take over the path of least resistance, repeating more of what has been, depending grooves that now need to change, awakening to unhelpful movement patterns in the body and the underlying emotional and mental imprinting, the stuff that doesn’t need to be there anymore, that weighs us down, keeps us stuck, keeps us limited, keeps us being at war within ourselves.

The wonderful thing about yoga is that it doesn’t ask much of you, just to turn up and keep turning up, that’s all. Yoga weaves magic into our lives, we breathe, we move with awareness, we rest, we sit in silence and observe, it doesn’t need expensive clothes, an all-singing, all dancing mat, it doesn’t need our titles and our labels and our stories and narratives, it just needs our attention, our awareness, and it is this that will help to wake up, help us make peace with ourselves and be at peace within ourselves.

The world needs us to wake up. Not more war. We’re done with war. There has to be another way and I’m hopeful the next generation will be more awake than us and usher in the change we need on planet earth. But we need to lay the pathways for them, do the work on ourselves, encourage greater inner resolution and peace, greater responsibility for our experience of life lived so that we positively influence them.

This because when we resolve dis-resonance in ourselves, then it is resolved in them too energetically and so we clear it from the line, shift the consciousness filtering through, positively affect intergenerational patterns, so that we literally change the course of our family line…we stop passing our crap (inherited from our parents and their parents, all the conditioning from eons ago) through to the next generation…It’s our duty then.

But more on that another time!

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