When Less IS More

Have you ever found yourself wishing you had more —more time for yoga, more money, more info (internet), more friends (electronic or real live ones), more experiences, more postures, more travel, more time?? We live in a world whose mantra is MORE. More is better!  If we only had more of this or more of that, life would be grand!

But the wisdom of the yoga teachings tell us something quite different!

More implies that what we have right now is not enough.  That what we have and are is somehow inadequate —a condition which our bodies are hardwired to view as a threat to life itself.  The problem of scarcity – not having enough time, possessions, experiences,  self-confidence, etc.,  creates a toxic burden on our system known as stress.   Things aren’t okay. This sets off the limbic system and ignites the fight, flight or freeze response.  Cortisol levels go up.   Belly fat forms.  Anxiety and worry increases.  The quality of our sleep and digestion suffers.   We get cranky.  We are in such a hurry to get MORE that we miss the beauty of the moment, here and now.  We forget to stop and smell the roses.

What’s worse, is that the constant pushing ahead for MORE–whatever that more is—– clutters up our energy body. Think of your mind. Your thoughts.  Your emotions & beliefs.  In yoga, the subtle energy body is believed to be the underlying substratum upon which our physical body grows,  made up of more than 70,000 pathways thru which energy flows.  When we have a  belief that MORE is better, the belief repetitively drives our thoughts in a compulsive way.  We don’t have time to spend with the kids.  We don’t have time to meditate.  We speed on the way to yoga class just to get there in the nick of time—holding our breath the whole way!  We wish we could clone ourselves, but in lieu of it, we show up physically for one thing, while our minds are oft somewhere else.  We split ourselves up inside.  When we are always hurrying on to the next thing, we miss the fullness of what’s happening here and now.  Which leads us to feeling empty, and searching for MORE of something!

As much as we’d like to believe that all of the internal machinations of our MORE! madness are invisible to the physical world, they are not.  Internally, when we get cluttered up with obsessive or repetitive thoughts, we effectively clog the pathways that energy travels with junk.  We subsist on a mental diet of junk — thoughts that are addictive, repetitive and not good for us.  What’s more, according to Rabbi Wayne Muller when we neglect rest — whether mental or physical—he says that “With few notable exceptions, the way problems are solved is frantically, desperately, reactivly, and badly.” (Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest)

One way we can rest physically, mentally and spiritually is through Cleansing the mind-body-spirit.  Cleansing reduces our thought production, slows down our activity, and gives the body a chance to rest, recharge and rejuvenate.  If you’ve every done a cleanse before, you’ve had a first hand experience of this.  If you haven’t, you don’t know what you are missing out on.  There is nothing quite like it.

“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence…[and that is] activism and overwork.  The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.  ….The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace.  It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.” —Thomas Merton