"Don't allow anyone to walk through your mind with their dirty feet." Ghandhi

Last week when I got into my car after teaching a yoga class, I was unlucky enough to discover shards of broken glass covering my passenger seat. 

After a brief moment of confusion, I realized that someone had taken a screwdriver to the frame of the window and shattered the glass in an attempt to steal whatever they could find in my car.

After my mind caught up and I realized what happened, I reported the theft to the police and the health club CEO. Both of them said to me, "how is it that you are so calm?"


Mahatma Ghandhi said, "I will not allow anyone to walk through my mind with their dirty feet."

I don't claim to be anything at all like Ghandhi but, I was also unwilling to allow anyone to walk through my mind and leave their muddy footprints. Taking a step back and pausing allowed me to put it all into perspective, and be happy that no one was hurt and the damage that was done could be fixed. 

Had I reacted by taking it personally, indignantly cursing the unfairness of what had been "done to me", I would be allowing another person to determine my state of mind. Remembering that another person's actions have nothing to do with me, helps me to stay rooted in my own center as opposed to being yanked this way and that because of someone else's choices.


While I can't even imagine destructing someone else's property or stealing money from someone, I have been fortunate enough in my life to never be in a situation that required desperate measures such as those. Having compassion for the person who violated my property was another way that I could respond instead of reacting.

Baron Baptiste says, "We don't really have experiences in life, we have reactions to experiences." In other words, "things don't happen to us, they happen in and of themselves, and what we do is react to them." 

If it had been someone else's car that was broken into, the experience of a broken window would be the same, but my reaction would be very different. So according to Baptiste, what we experience in our day to day lives are just a bunch of reactions. With this knowledge, we can choose our responses instead of reacting out of habit. When we choose to live this way, our lives will be much more peaceful. 

Ghandhi made a choice not to be reactive even when he was thrown in jail and beaten. Instead with equanimity, he chose to respond with acceptance and non violence no matter what the circumstances were. 

For most of us, this ability to remain calm in the face of injustice or any stress for that matter can be very difficult. We are hard wired with an instinct that served us well when we were cavemen. If we were being attacked by a saber tooth tiger, our "fight or flight" mechanism would take over and we would instinctively stay and fight or get the heck out of there.

Fortunately, we are no longer living under the threat of attack of a nine hundred pound razor toothed cat, but we do find ourselves in stressful situations that will activate our fight or flight response whether we need it or not.

According to Baron Baptiste, we have a third option when we aren't in a life threatening situation, but since it  may go against everything we have learned up until that point, it can be difficult to choose. The third and most often best option is to just stay and breathe.

If you start to feel your reactivity creeping in, stay put and breathe. The recognition of the reactivity arising may be enough to stop it in its tracks, and make a choice to respond in a better, more productive, and healthier way.

For me, had I allowed my fight reaction to lead me, I would have been angry and vengeful and might have carried that into my next interaction with family, friends, or strangers. 

Had I allowed the flight reaction to lead me, I may have become fearful and lost my ability to feel safe leaving my car unattended.

Choosing to stay and breathe and be non reactive doesn't mean that I live without feelings or emotions, but it means that I am responsible and able to make a choice of how to respond to the experiences in my life in a healthy and life affirming way.

The next time life hands you something that you wouldn't choose for yourself, remember the quote by Charles Swindoll that says,  "life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it" . Choosing to respond in a non reactive way makes your inner and outer world more peaceful.

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