Yoga of Sustainability (Individual Sustainability Framework)

I never thought I’d start my journey defining Yoga of Sustainability from a study done in an engineering class.

In the article Developing and Validating an Individual Sustainability Instrument with Engineering Students to Motivate Intentional Change written by Elise Barrella, Elisabeth Pyburn Spratto, Eric Pappas and Robert Nagel, the authors developed a survey to evaluate the individual sustainability of engineering students. They believed that by measuring an individual’s value systems they could begin to understand the motivations behind their work. They theorized that by gathering more information about an individual, that individual would achieve greater insight into their work, and would become more effective in confronting issues of sustainability. “As a construct, Individual Sustainability (also referred to as Sustainable Personality) serves to define and support a process model for intentional self-development based on self-directed behavior and systems thinking.” The authors believed this was important for their engineering students because, “Developing an individual’s values may provide motivation to behave in a manner more congruent with sustainability principles.” 

The article defines individual sustainability as harmony, awareness, and intentionality in a person’s thoughts and behaviors. By enhancing thoughts and behaviors with these values the author’s believed individuals are more likely to engage in “responsible actions and continued growth in one’s physical, emotional, social, philosophical, and cognitive life.” The researchers go on to say that Individual Sustainability creates, “relatively high levels of awareness in one’s values, thoughts, and behaviors as well as maintaining or increasing control over one’s physical, emotional, social, philosophical/spiritual, and intellectual life.”

As I continue to brainstorm what Yoga of Sustainability: The Healing Power of Synchronicity would look like, I can’t help but be inspired by this line of thinking. How could this definition of individual sustainability support the development of Yoga of Sustainability? Could it help create a survey for future students to begin evaluating where they are, so they have a road map to where they’re going?

Every human’s experience is multifaceted. According to the authors, Individual sustainability can be analyzed through 4 perspectives: social sustainability, economic sustainability, emotional sustainability, and intellectual sustainability.

Since there are varying factors influencing each of us all of the time, attempting to develop one Yoga of Sustainability feels insane, but important. In Yoga, we agree that despite everyone’s varying context, we are all intrinsically the same. We understand that each human requires love, nourishment, purpose, and community to both survive and thrive. And while the type of love, nourishment, purpose, and communities vary from individual to individual, the values that determine individual sustainability never change - those values being the harmony, awareness, and intentionality in thought and behavior. Setting a framework for individual sustainability takes into consideration the multiple factors that impact our behaviors, experiences, and elevates the importance of how these behaviors and experiences impact our unique lives. Rather than compartmentalizing ourselves, and ultimately diluting certain aspects of our lives in the process, we can start holistically viewing our behaviors and use an individual sustainability survey to evaluate what sustainability in our behaviors really looks like (or could look like). And that could hypothetically bring us all to a place of harmony, awareness, and intentionality, despite our differences, right?

Does our culture of emphasizing hyper individuality take away from our ability to feel a part of a human collective? What if we can continue to live our unique experiences but collectively evaluate our personal success through one framework? What would the world look like? Would there be more confidence and commitment to our own visions on life? A stronger understanding for how our visions and actions influence the collective human population? Would we start to interact with ourselves better, bringing more compassion and surrender into our lives, and would that positive interaction influence how we treat the environment?

Using the 4 perspectives, and influences from other scholars in the field, the team created a 34-question survey, each question tailored to extract specific motivations behind an individual’s behaviors. My favorite aspect of this study was that the researchers asked their students to provide a “real” and “ideal” answer to each question to determine an “effective way to identify dissonance between one’s Real and Ideal conceptualizations of self.” Insert head explosion emoji here Yoga allows us to embody a life of love, which ultimately has us confronting the aspects of ourselves that are not lovely. But instead of tensing up to the aspects we want to change, Yoga teaches us to move through them. Rather than continue to put up boundaries, yoga helps remove those boundaries, and acknowledges that true transformation cannot be achieved without dealing with the hard stuff. The “Real” vs. “Ideal.” We can’t just take a pill and fix all our problems. And It’s no surprise that, “Individual Sustainability resulted in statistically different ratings in Real vs. Ideal.” We’re all ready to become the ideal versions of ourselves, it’s just a matter of gathering the right information and giving ourselves permission to do it.

The work of confronting what’s unsustainable in our lives starts with a willingness to listen. A willingness to hear what our bodies and hearts are trying to say. Then comes consciously embracing facts about our unique experience. We cannot act to change unless we want to. And we cannot begin to act unless we know how. Once we accept that it’s time to shift gears, it doesn’t matter what brought this precipice for change, what matters is that we start taking this information and use it as guidance to move in the right direction. “Understanding the complexities and interconnectedness of one’s own sustainability factors is pre-requisite for transferring this systems knowledge into understanding.”

I don’t know what you think about on a Saturday afternoon, but this is where I’m at today. When I first read this article, I was inspired to create a survey, like the authors, that I could use with future students of mine. I’ll still do that, but right now I want to simply get these thoughts out and see what others think. How could we develop Yoga’s Individual Sustainability survey and what would that look like?

Reference:

 Article: Developing and Validating an Individual Sustainability Instrument with Engineering Students to Motivate Intentional Change

 Elise Barrella, Elisabeth Pyburn Spratto, Eric Pappas and Robert Nagel

 1 Department of Engineering, Wake Forest University, Winston Salem, NC 27101, USA

2 College of Integrated Science and Engineering, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA 22807, USA; pyburnem@jmu.edu (E.P.S.); pappasec@jmu.edu (E.P.); nagelrl@jmu.edu (R.N.) * Correspondence: barrelem@wfu.edu; Tel.: +1-336-702-1967

Received: 15 May 2018; Accepted: 6 August 2018; Published: 14 August 2018