Going Heavy

By Ed Staskus

   In the year 1120 after the First Crusade captured Jerusalem for Christendom, massacring the Jewish and Muslim population, a new monastic order was created to assist and protect caravans making pilgrimage to the Holy Places. But, unlike earlier monastic orders, the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, or Knights Templar, was different. They weren’t interested in withdrawing from the world.

   Christian monasticism had always been a devotional practice. The basic idea of the practice, even today, is withdrawal from the world. It is similar to Pratyahara, one of the forgotten limbs of yoga. Pratyahara literally means, “gaining mastery over external influences.” It is firmly grounded in the same tradition. Christian monks lived ascetic, often cloistered lives, dedicated to worship.

   The Knights Templar, however, was a military monastic order, among the most skilled fighting men of the Crusades. In 1177, at the Battle of Montgisard, 500 mounted and armor-plated Knights Templar, backed by only a few thousand ground troops, defeated the Muslim Sultan Saladin’s army of more than 26,000.

   Although arms and monks may seem like strange bedfellows, they are not. In the 13th century St. Thomas Aquinas, the influential Roman Catholic scholastic philosopher, wrote, “A religious order can be fittingly established for the military life, for the defense of divine worship.” In the 16th century the monks of the Shaolin Temple battled Japanese pirates, who had been raiding their Chinese coastline for decades. In the 17th century Christian monks acted as shock troops during Europe’s Wars of Religion.

   Buddhist monks have not hesitated to join the likes of fundamentalist Christians, Hindu nationalists, Muslim radicals, and ultra-Orthodox Jews in advancing their religious views at the point of a gun. Since they have all the answers, it is questionable whether they have any faith, the kind of faith that implies there might be a mystery at the heart of things.

   Yoga has long been perceived as being built on several core principles, among them non-violence. “The first yama, ahimsa or non-harming, which asks us to embrace non-violence at the level of speech, thought, and action, is truly the cornerstone of yoga as a way of life,” Rolf Gates wrote in his book “Meditation From the Mat.”

   Both cornerstone and culture, it is a behavior essential to the yogic lifestyle. “Practicing ahimsa is a way of cultivating an attitude of kindness, gentleness, and forgiveness in all situations,” said Heather Church, an Adjunct Teaching Professional at Ohio University, where she teaches yogic philosophy.

   But, in a country that possesses 50% percent of all the guns on the planet, even though it accounts for only 5% of the world’s population, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and where more than 20 million people practice yoga of some kind or other, according to Yoga Journal, it was inevitable that guns and yoga would one day become bedfellows.

   In the brave new world of today’s yoga, some are taking a different tack at tackling the issue of violence, eschewing self-restraint. Rather than, for example, trying to live what Jesus or the Buddha taught, they are taking an Old Testament approach. The Pentagon has hired ‘Yoga Defense Contractors’ to deal with changes in basic training, combat readiness, and issues such as PTSD. On a personal level, others are meeting the problem head-on by arming themselves. 

   “I’ll be damned if some religious extremist decides in his twisted head that he thinks he’ll clean the world by popping off some godless hippies and decides to walk in and spray some bullets into my studio with my students,” Cheryl Vincent wrote in an op-ed piece for Elephant Journal.

   “You better believe I’ll be packing,” she said.

   When yogis pack pistols their accuracy is generally better than most, making them daunting adversaries. Writing in Women’s Self Defense Weekly, which offers advice such as “Less-Than-Lethal Defense Options” and “The Neck Grab and Throat Punch,” Laura Simonian pointed out that the best-kept secret about yoga is that “it helps your shooting.”

   She added it was “great” for mental strength, core strength, balance strength, and breathing control strength, all leading to an aim that is true. “I bet you didn’t know all those core conditioning boat, crow, and warrior poses were benefitting you in more ways than flexibility and mental well-being,” she said. “Yoga can actually aid your shooting.”

   Shooting guns takes focus and concentration. “Yoga’s Zen-like quality can be applied to shooting guns in a lot of ways,” said Deirdre Gailey, a yoga teacher and vegan chef in New York City. “I like to shoot guns.”

   Female participation in shooting in the United States has grown rapidly in this century, according to the National Sporting Goods Association, leading to pink pistols and purses with holster slots. It was once said Samuel Colt made all men equal. Now women are catching up.

   Brandon Webb, who trained Laura Simonian on bolt-action rifles, described her as a “natural born killer” and explained that he has “definitely witnessed firsthand the positive effects yoga has had on my own shooting.” Laura Simonian trained with a Glock 34 handgun, as well. Although its longer barrel results in a slightly slower draw time out of the holster, it is still used by some as a concealed weapon. No one should try messing with yoga girl Laura once she’s got her handgun in her hand.

   Gallup Polls consistently reveal that protection is the top reason Americans own guns, followed by hunting, sport and target shooting, and 2nd Amendment rights. Gun owners say that having a gun makes them feel safer. The NRA argues that if more law-abiding citizens had guns everyone would be safer from gun violence.

   “You see peace and tranquility in the country and I see the ‘Blair Witch Project,’” Texas novelist Ruth Pennebacker writes in “Yoga and Guns.” Danger can be real or it can be in the eye of the beholder  “You see cows and horses and I see lethal rattlesnakes ready to strike. You see friendly, down-to-earth farmers and homespun families and I see the two murderers from ‘In Cold Blood.’ A gun. Shooting lessons. Sign up now. Before it’s too late.”

   But, a study in the Southern Medical Journal found that owning a gun is 12 times more likely to result in the death of a family member or guest than in the death of an intruder. The more guns there are the more shootings there are. That is why in countries with few guns there are few shootings. It is the protection paradox: the risks of gun ownership often overshadow the benefits.

 “Every shotgun and rifle in my family’s gun safe is brimming with stories,” writes Babe Winkleman in “The Sportsman’s Guide.” For many people the joy of owning guns is entwined with the joy of hunting. “I wonder where those walnut tress grew for my rifle stock. Was there ever a deer shot from the very tree that grew the wood for my deer rifle?”

   Although more and more people in the United States live in cities, hunting has expanded in the new millennium.  Some tramp through fields and woods because “doing things outdoors is healthy,” says Dan Ashe, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service. 

   Some hunt because it is a rite of passage, growing up in families that have always hunted, and passing their knowledge down. Writing in “Buddhists With Guns,” Justin Whitaker, a Buddhist scholar, noted that he and his sister, a yoga instructor, grew up in rural Montana and were introduced to guns early in life. “I think I skipped the ‘you’ll shoot your eye out!’ bb-gun that many friends were getting and moved on to a pump-action single shot pellet-gun around the age of 8.”

   Others hunt to harvest their own food. Millions of Americans go hunting, shooting squirrels, pheasants, turkey, and deer, among other wildlife.  Eating animals is an instinct, although old-school yoga eschews eating meat. Sri Pattabhi Jois, progenitor of Ashtanga Yoga, recommended not eating it because, “It will make you stiff.” 

   Most people who practice yoga today eat animals, but are sometimes sensitive about the issue. “When the rare occasion does arise for me to indulge in animal food, I do so with great respect and meditation on the sacrifice of the animal,” said Jerry Anathan of Yoga East in Cape Cod.

   More than 150 billion animals are killed every year for food, both in slaughterhouses and forests. That is a great deal of butchery, no matter how you slice it or how much anybody meditates about it. It may be that’s the way things are, but whether that much bloodshed aligns with yogic values is an open question.

   Shooting guns is enjoying a renaissance in the United States. 35 million-and-more Americans participate in formal and informal sport and target shooting, surpassing all earlier estimates of the sport. “Firearms sales are way up, so it’s really no surprise that more people are enjoying the shooting sports than ever before,” said Steve Sanetti, president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, based in Newtown, Connecticut. “AR-style rifles are rugged, accurate, fun to shoot, and they’re here to stay.”

   Fun on the mat and fun at the range sometimes vibrate on the same plane. “Shooting guns and doing yoga on the same day was the biggest ‘You got chocolate in my peanut butter!’ moment I’ve had so far in my life,” wrote Patton Oswalt in The New York Times. “I was one with my target, and my target was bliss. Namaste. Lock and load.”

   Guns are the “new yoga” CBS News reported. However, instead of rubber mats and foam props, parts of the new yoga include high-velocity metal projectiles. “Although it is usually hard to hear over the racket of gunfire, shooting a gun can be “just like yoga �" meditative,” Caitlin Talbot recounted in an article in Elephant Journal. 

   In the same way that consciously relaxing your body, focusing your thoughts and your gaze, and breathing evenly are the basic tools of meditation, so are they the basic tools of shooting, too. When shooting a gun, the fewer muscles in use the steadier the shooter’s position will be. Focusing on the task at hand puts the shooter in the zone, making their efforts effortless. Lastly, shooters use breathing cues, relaxing on each expired breath as they squeeze the trigger.

   It’s just like yoga, except you don’t want to be on the wrong end of a gun. It’s not like being on a yoga mat, where any end of the mat is the right end. At least, until recently, when Mattthew Remski observed in “Should Yogis Want Their Guns Back”, that his yoga mat “sometimes smells like gunpowder” and that “authentic peace seems to thrive on the juice of authentic violence.” 

   Many gun enthusiasts, industry spokesmen, and the NRA cite the 2nd Amendment as justification for the right everyone has to keep and bear arms. Owning guns is framed as a fundamental right, although they seemingly never defend the merits of gun ownership without referring to the amendment, as though guns in and of themselves are only signifiers, not actual things.

   The hue and cry is made despite the wording of the amendment itself, which is, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” What Thomas Jefferson seems to have meant was that the right to possess firearms exists in relation to the militia, not in relation to teenagers possessing Sig-Sauer 9mm handguns, Bushmaster semi-automatic rifles, and Izhmash 12-gauge shotguns, and then using them to shoot and kill grade school children in Newtown, Connecticut.

   Until this century all federal courts, liberal and conservative alike, agreed that the 2nd Amendment did not confer gun rights on individuals. However, in 2010 the Supreme Court ruled otherwise in a 5 �" 4 decision, affirming a fundamental right to bear arms. Now that many of the arguments about who can have a gun �" there are no federal laws requiring licensing to own a gun �" have been settled, the Supreme Court might in the next few years try resolving the question of whether or not the Supreme Court should be held to a Code of Ethics.

   Gun aficionados from Rush Limbaugh to Arnold Schwarzenegger applauded the decision. “I have a love interest in every one of my films �" a gun,” said the Terminator. Guns can be testy lovers, however. “The recoil from a .357 Magnum can really do a number on your chakras,” said one of the shooting yogis in “Higher Caliber, Higher Mindedness: The Story of YoGun”, an award-winning short film from SofaCouch MovieFilms.

   As yoga has matured in the United States, it has begun to embrace the notion of gun ownership. “Yoga is starting to become more associated with the cultural right wing and promoting Ayn Rand,” writes Carol Horton, a former political science professor and certified Forrest Yoga teacher.

   “Until all governments disarm, the people have a right to bear arms,” argues Avananda, a self-styled philosopher yogi and registered Yoga Alliance teacher. The argument is the same as the abridged 2nd Amendment photo-shopped on the front of NRA headquarters: ”The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Like the NRA, many prefer the amended version of the amendment.

   Michelle Comeaux Howard, a yoga teacher and mother of two in Mission Viejo, California, has argued that only by being armed can we successfully defend ourselves from being victimized. “I believe strongly in our Second Amendment rights because there will always be crime and I want to exercise the right to protect myself and my children in the event we were to become victims of a home invasion or if someone ever attacked us in public.” She believes all “law-abiding” citizens, including her, should be allowed to legally carry a concealed weapon.

   Non-violence is one of yoga’s self-restraints, but it is being pushed out the door at the same time as gun control is coming to mean being able to hit your target. But, maybe old-school yogis today have it wrong about ahimsa, and what is really old-school are yogis toting the monkey. Back in the day many believed you could get more with a kind thought and a gun than with just a kind thought.

   “From the fifteenth century until the early decades of the nineteenth century, highly organized bands of militarized yogins controlled trade routes across Northern India,” writes Mark Singleton in “Yoga Body.” Yoga exercise, or hatha yoga, was a kind of boot camp or military training, keeping them in trim for the wear and tear of guerilla warfare. As Birgette Gorm Hansen writes in “Wild Yogis,”an article in Rebelle Society, yoga back then “was a bad a*s practice.”

   After putting down the Mutiny of 1857, the British colonial government of India began to systematically disarm the sub-continent’s population, and in 1878 introduced the Indian Arms Act, forbidding almost all Indians from possessing firearms of any kind. Although not specifically targeting yogis, it effectively ended the marauding of the armed yogi gangs, who threatened both princely states and British economic interests.

   They were forced to lay down their guns and turn to showmanship as a livelihood. In the meantime, they kept yoga exercise alive into the 20th century, when in the 1920s Krishnamacharya, the father of modern yoga, took up the mantle and revived the practice of hatha, crafting it to become the booming posture practice it is today

   Nowadays, modern yoga studios preach breath and exercise to keep us fit and healthy, sprinkling in concepts like Dharana and Dhyana to keep a few of the other limbs of yoga alive. But, back in the day, yogis were keeping the peace by going heavy. Maybe yogis armed to the teeth in the here and now are just getting back to the real roots of yoga. 

   After all, even the Dalai Lama, arguably one of the most peaceable men on the planet, when asked by a schoolchild at the Educating Heart Summit in Oregon what he would do if someone came to his school with a gun, replied, ”If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

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