Personal Responsibility. This is one of those cultural mantras we are subjected to from birth throughout our lives. Republicans tout it as means to pull ourselves up from our bootstraps. Teachers in school pile hours of homework on unsuspecting children as a strategy to impart it. Parents guide and direct their offspring to take it on as a lifelong value. And yet how odd that even the simplest and most base of personal responsibilities - one's own personal health and state of physical being - is so wantonly disregarded as something not only out of our control, but something to be battled, struggled with, and ultimately subjugated through drugs, medical labels, genetic reasoning, second opinions, and an attitude of victimization that flies directly in the face of the personal responsibility mantra. Yoga provides guidance to take back control of our health and the means to re-claim responsibility for our selves in a true sense of the word that has been lost in the modern world.

Look at the drug advertisements rampant on television these days. Every possible physical condition now has a name attached to it. A clinical label is given to relieve you of any kind of personal responsibility or ownership, and a pill that will mask the symptoms to prove it. The message repeated is that we are somehow separate from the appointed label and condition, a victim only a pill away from the relief we deserve. Sad? No, clinically depressed. Overweight and overindulged? No, malfunctioning thyroid syndrome. Shy-social anxiety disorder. Hyper-ADD. Heartburn and indigestion-acid reflux. Impotence-erectile dysfunction. And pills, lots of expensive little pills to address all of them. This disassociation between ourselves and our health is the height of irresponsibility. How is it that we can divide ourselves like this? We are not separate from these so-called conditions and diseases. They are descriptions of who we are, who we made ourselves to be. They are part of the whole person, a cocktail of genetics, actions, inactions, beliefs, behaviors, habits, willingness, stubbornness, knowledge, ignorance, nature and nurture all rolled into one unit we used to call a person.

For years, I suffered from a so-called mental disorder. At times described as bi-polar, borderline schizophrenia, existential crisis, nervous breakdown, paranoia, chronic depression, etc., it was suggested that I pump myself full of drugs to bring relief. But even as a young person, with no context or language to understand the madness in my head, it struck me as absurd to cover up the crisis with labels and drugs to bring relief. Relief from what? I was not suffering from anything outside of myself. I was struggling with who I was as a person in this world, how I processed information, how I chose to relate to thoughts and emotions, how my senses interacted with my mind, which parts went into my subconscious, my unconscious, my conscious self, how those three had started to leak into each other, causing great confusion, hallucinations, voices, surges of thought and visions and layers of awareness looping on top of awareness that were steadily driving me mad.

But this was me. This was not something I was suffering from. It did not have a name, nor a requisite drug needed to make it go away. It was Billy, and I was it. Period. No separation. I had chosen and learned to collapse the world in my head in a particular way. And this way was causing great suffering. But it was mine. And the process of relieving the suffering could never have begun had I relinquished my ownership of the knots I had myself tied inside. It was up to me, and only me, to unspool the thread. After all, the world presses in on all of us with equal force. How we react and stand amidst those forces, including genetics and chance, is what creates the reality of our lives.

Maintaining our health, and the ownership of our health, is obviously a difficult challenge. Especially in this day and age where doctors and drug companies have made up these names to label us, to relieve us of our own responsibility, giving them a wedge and leverage in to sell their wares and goods. (Not all doctors, of course. And certainly not specialists dealing with immediate, life-threatening circumstances. That is not the subject of this paper.) And we happily agree. We give up our power, instead of standing up tall and strong to face ourselves with bravery and maturity. It is much easier, of course, to spread blame outside ourselves-to cite genetics, environment, class, etc. But if we are interested in healing, then we must stop seeing these things as somehow separate from ourselves. We happily tell others to take responsibility for themselves and their communities, to grab hold of their own bootstraps to pull themselves up and out of their conditions. Yet few of us will even take responsibility for the quality of our digestion, or the shape of our body, or its capacity to oxygenate blood, process sugars, etc. If we demand from others that which we don't even demand from ourselves, happiness will always elude us.

Yoga is a great practice and meditation on taking responsibility. In class the other day, I suggested that one of the great benefits of the practice was its ability to train students to more gracefully face and adapt to unforeseen changes that inevitably bombard us in life. In a controlled, watchful environment, we take our bodies through a wide range of actions and motions, all carrying different pressure requirements, circulation loads, pain thresholds, breath capacities, oxygen needs, etc. And in the midst of that storm, we learn to stay poised, balanced, undisturbed, and adaptable to the changes thrown at us.

As a specific example, I told the students to observe the transition between hand-stand and uttanasana (standing forward bend). When you come down from hand-stand, it is likely that the breath is quickened, maybe there is pain in the wrists, fatigue in the arm muscles, a bruise in the ego and emotions for not having presented the pose in a way you expected or hoped. But if you let all that reaction from hand-stand saturate the system, it is not possible to be in uttanasana.

Uttanasana has its own specific requirements, and focus needs to be directed there. It is not that you don't notice the effects of hand-stand. To learn and grow, we must observe and receive the effect of the postures. But we mustn't get stuck in the pose that has been completed. We, as students of yoga, have to learn to make a smooth, complete transition from one posture to the next without having to react and analyze and waste time floating in the in between state which is neither here, nor there. We have to learn to allow and guide the body and mind to make the necessary changes required from moment to moment. In this way, we train the entire nervous system to adapt and calibrate itself with great dexterity and precision in spite of the barrage of circumstance and genetics thrown at us.

As soon as I finished this explanation, a woman blurted out from the back of the class that I had obviously never had arthritis. Somewhat confused regarding the connection between what I had just spoken of and arthritis, I looked at her for a moment. And as I replied that no, I had never had arthritis, I saw the unmistakable glare of a mind convinced of its victimization looking back at me. This woman had obviously struggled for years with a nasty pain in the joints, and had now come to the conclusion that she was the victim of 'arthitis'. And, presumably, because of this condition, she was excused from not indulging the pain, or not holding onto the debilitation I was suggesting we learn to release.

This is exactly the loop of suffering the mind creates when it gives up responsibility, when it separates the self from chance, genetics, and circumstance. But it is not chance and genetics and circumstance that shape who we are. It is our reaction to these forces that shape our character. Of course arthritis can be debilitating, and a student suffering from these symptoms deserves only my compassion and full attention. Modifications might need to be made. Special attention might be required. But it is not an excuse to use as leverage to avoid the self, to avoid the deeper, fundamental challenges the practice presents. Arthritis (or any condition for that matter) is not a disease that is somehow separate from the self. It is a fundamental part of the self. And how we face it and respond to its challenge, not the fact of its existence, is what defines the quality of who we are.

The week immediately before this episode, I was in Colorado for a week-long yoga intensive with B.K.S. Iyengar. In the crowd of more than 800 people was a woman with one leg. She was a dedicated student who had had the top of her leg sheared off in an automobile accident some years earlier. And at this conference, on this woman's face, I saw only bravery, optimism, and willingness. Mr. Iyengar gathered the entire conference around her one day to watch as he helped her into ardha chandrasana and virabadrasana III (both standing one-legged balancing poses). On her stump! Surely the challenge of living with one leg is more acute than living with arthritis in the wrist, and yet this woman with one leg listened, persevered, and struck the pose with every ounce of her being in whatever capacity she could.

That she has one leg is not significant to the practice. That this student in my class has arthritis is not significant to the practice. That I have some mental disorder some doctor somewhere tried to label years ago is not significant. Human beings don't have things. Human beings are things. Our life, our genetics, our actions, our circumstances are there as gifts to reveal without modification or nuance who we actually are. The practice of yoga has been passed down through the generations as a means to accelerate and amplify this process. And only when we as individuals finally stand up and take responsibility for who we are, entirely and without modification or excuse, can the long night of ignorance wane and happiness dawn in our lives.