Yoga's ethical precepts teach us to tell the truth and do no harm, but few realize that these teachings can also help us to manage our money.
By Alan Reder
When, in the wake of 9/11, President George W. Bush urged all Americans to buy more to fight terrorism, he was not just handing punch lines to David Letterman. Tortured logic aside, he was asking Americans to do something that few of us normally consider: Let values drive our financial behavior.
Unfortunately the shop-til-Osama-drops plan echoed the usual messages from our national leaders in other ways—its pitch for orgiastic consumerism and its blindness to environmental consequences, for starters. We're pushed from almost every corner of society to "get ahead"—in the careers we choose, the lifestyle we maintain, and the money we spend and invest. If we do those things within the bounds of the law and cut the occasional check to the United Way, we're assumed to have covered the values part, September 11 notwithstanding.
This notion leads to some unwitting discrepancies between our actions and intentions. Few Americans celebrate the devastation of individual lives, families, and local communities that occurs every time a corporation orders a mass layoff to bump up its stock price. But that didn't stop us from cheering as our 401Ks swelled fabulously in the late 1990s—helped in part, yes, by layoffs. Given a simple choice on a ballot, most people would vote against polluted water, sweatshop labor, and global warming. But all three problems enjoy landslide victories every day at the checkout stand in the form of non-organic food, cheap clothing, leaf blowers, and other ethically questionable but popular products.
What does all this have to do with yoga? More than you might think. Patanjali's Yoga Sutra, composed around 200 ce and still considered the most succinct statement of yoga philosophy ever written, describes yoga as a path with eight limbs, of which asana is only one. The first two limbs, the
yamas (moral restraints) and
niyamas (observances), together lay out a set of 10 valued principles that Patanjali and virtually every yoga master after him say are crucial to one's progress along the yogic path. Yes, money and possessions are only explicitly referred to in a few. But it doesn't take much of a stretch to imagine that Patanjali meant for the whole program to cover a yogi's fiscal dealings. He clearly intended his text to apply to a yogi's entire life—and what touches more parts of our life than the way we handle our finances?
