Fourth Form of Madness

Part of the criteria for my yoga teacher training course is assisting. Attending classes to offer assistance to participants. This has prompted a lot of questions asking within myself, not only for the situations that arise within the class but on a more holistic level, the ethics of assistance. Mainly, when do you know someone needs assistance and what ultimately, within yourself, do you use to make a decision whether to offer assistance or not.

Firstly, the yoga class situation, when should one assist and from what place within should you come from? This divided me for some time as I feel with yoga the aesthetic creeps in where it has no place. For me, if you are assisting to make the body look better, to match some perfect picture in some book, you probably shouldn’t offer the assistance. Mostly asanas unfold like, life, they come out of nothing, into something, whatever that something is for that person, and then should go back to nothing. Just like the flow of life. For me, if anything looks like it might take out a knee, a neck a shoulder, that is if it is going to cause harm, if there is a need, I assist.

Shifting to a more holistic view of the world, this is pretty much how I feel about the ethics of assistance on a global scale. If there is a need, assist. But what inside you actually gets you to the door of assisting and actually doing it? Peter Singer has some very interesting theory on this topic my favourite being his example of at what point do you decide not to assist in terms of distance between you and the person requiring assistance. In the example, there is a young girl that can not swim and she has fallen into a deep pond. You walk past but 10 metres away – would you render assistance? I hope I can safely say that you would. Now you walk past and you are 300 metres away and you have to cross some obstacles to get to her and give up catching a train that would take you on holiday. Think about your answer. Now you are in a cafe a few streets away, you hear about the girl in the pond through Facebook, she still needs assistance, but you have just started an important business meeting and you are fairly certain that someone closer will help if you don’t – would you still render assistance?

Singer was referring to geographical distance and factors in your code of ethics that determine for you in what situation you would assist. I think another interesting distance to be explored, if we are to examine this area, is the distance between what you consider “you” and the “other”. If we think of people as not us, or even not like us, then the distance between “yourself” and other people’s needs, naturally widens and allows you comfortably to disregard the suffering of others as not your problem. If we can harbour feelings of sameness, the fact that we all face this world with so many unanswered questions, we are all going to share in the same heart aches and joys, birth, sickness, death, this kind of binds us and manifests a ground level compassion and empathy for all. We can walk across this bridge that compassion provides and towards a place where everyone is an extension of each other. When one sees someone else as merely an extension of their own arm, their own heart, their own thoughts, then there will be no need for the talk of the ethics of assisting. Until then talk and theory is all we have, oh yes and the actual doing 🙂