Monday December 22nd, 2025

For almost 20 years, I’ve been working for an environmental education organization here in New York City. During that time, I’ve seen how many people, whether they are schoolchildren or new colleagues or program participants, are concerned about the future of the planet. Every day, there seem to be reports from around the world about tsunamis, floods, droughts, famines and many weather-related disasters, but at the same time, there are so many conflicting opinions about how and why these things are happening and what’s the best way to address them. And every year for the past 30 years, the nations of the world gather to try to agree on how to proceed but do not seem to be able to make much progress. It’s hard not to become frustrated at the slow pace of action on these issues—something I feel at times within myself. As one individual person, there may not be so much I can do about these large global issues, but I am also trying to learn Yoga under Shri Mahayogi, and Shri Mahayogi teaches about the power that Yoga has to improve our daily life situations. Much of my daily work life involves helping people understand and address environmental issues at the local level. Yet up until about a year ago, I hadn’t really been looking for a connection between the work at my job, the actions I was taking in daily life and the work toward Yoga.

What could I try concretely based on my understanding of the teachings to connect these things? What might be relevant when it comes to the state of the environment? After reading some of Shri Mahayogi’s words about Yoga and the environment, I thought that I should try to make some changes in my everyday habits based on my understanding of the teaching of santosha,* “contentment,” because I thought that it meant trying to determine what I really need to support my life and to restrain myself from obtaining more than that. Accumulating less would have an environmental impact, I thought, because eventually these things will need to end up somewhere, most likely in the trash. So I felt that trying to restrain myself from buying and consuming more than I really needed could be a way of trying to change some of my behaviors that I may not have thought too deeply about before, and might help me begin to connect these three—Yoga, environmental work and lifestyle.

For example, for most of my life, when it came to the matter of buying new clothes, my mind would get pulled towards something and then obsess over it until I convinced myself that I just had to possess it, without giving much consideration to whether I really needed it or how long it would last. It may seem odd, but even though I am working for an organization that focuses on environmental issues, including how we dispose of waste in our society, my mind could always come up with rationalizations and excuses for my own behavior.

So earlier this year, I started practicing to question myself before making a purchase, asking myself whether there was a real need or not, and whether I was tempted to buy something new that was really just a slight variation on something I already had. Eventually, over the summer, I made a determination to not buy any new clothes for one year as an experiment, and so far I’ve kept it up.

But do these kinds of changes in habits really indicate that I’m practicing santosha? Thanks to the feedback from senior gurubai, I began to recognize that this idea of santosha is very superficial. I don’t think santosha can merely be at the level of how we consume or spend; there must be something deeper that I need to discover about this teaching. And this led me to think that probably the way I’m thinking about the environment also really needs to expand—something which has been pointed out to me before but that I haven’t quite been able to clarify or grasp. What is the bigger picture that my mind hasn’t been able to recognize? This is something that I hope to explore going forward.

* Santosha is one of the five niyamas (observances) of raja yoga, and it means to be satisfied with what we have.

Prajna