Sustainability in business is treated as if our wellbeing isn’t
linked to the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the world
we create. In ayurveda’s holistic worldview, there’s no such thing as ‘it
doesn’t concern me’ when it comes to sustainability.
First, a confession: Before I learned anything about
ayurveda, I had already decided it was
silly. While I acknowledge the presumption in dismissing thousand-year-old
traditions out of hand, a quick Google turns up DIY ayurveda quizzes to
“find your dosha” that read like a BuzzFeed quiz crossed with a horoscope,
with more interest in my digestive tract than I was prepared for. To this
outsider, despite working for Yogi Tea — a company
driven by ayurvedic principles — I was ready to dismiss it.
After some patient instruction by one of our in-house experts, what I found
instead was an illuminating way of looking at the world that was perfectly
analogous to my work as a sustainability practitioner. While I am certainly not
an expert, and fully admit that aspects of ayurveda stretch credulity, it’s
still worth investigating for the intriguingly different way in which it sees
the world. In fact, I believe we need ayurvedic insights to advance
sustainability today.
There’s a whole universe to ayurveda, but the basics are something like this:
Ayurveda is a holistic wellbeing practice that deploys diet, exercise (notably,
yoga), routine and medicinal plants to treat illness and keep people healthy. It
holds that there are five main elements – ether/space, air, fire,
water and earth – that combine to form three doshas called vata,
pitta and kapha. Vata is all about movement, pitta concerns heat and
metabolism, and kapha embodies structure and solidity. Doshas combine to
characterize “Dosha Prakriti,” or basic constitution. Those online quizzes
are assessing which combination of doshas form a person’s constitution.
Ayurveda uses the dosha idea to articulate the following: The more aligned basic
constitution is with current state, the better one feels. In ayurveda’s
terminology, the idea is to bring prakriti (basic constitution) into
balance with vikriti (current condition). It’s a sensible idea with
profound resonances.
The challenge is that vikriti is constantly changing. It varies depending on the
time of day, the time of year, what one eats, emotional states — plus, any
number of other considerations. We know this, intuitively, to be true: Tension
in the news, for example, translates to stress in the body; unhealthy
environmental conditions create personal health challenges. The work of ayurveda
is to find balance during perpetual change.
By articulating the interaction between prakriti and vikriti, ayurveda makes
sustainability tangible by showing that personal wellbeing is always connected
to the world around us. The sensitivity of current condition means that whatever
happens to the world changes individual experience. Impact anywhere, in short,
matters everywhere. One need not witness the environmental damage wrought by
industrial corn farming, for example, to still be impacted by it: Cheap
industrial corn ensures cheap high fructose corn syrup, which begets cheap and
irresistible junk food, which creates troubling
news
coverage about health
crises
and compromises the health of friends or family. Anxiety increases with stories
about
desertification
or suicide rates of
farmers
or diminishing fertile topsoil.
Even if you don’t live in the corn belt, what happens there will find its way to
you sooner or later.
Ayurveda’s holistic worldview, linking the individual with the world, shows that
there’s no such thing as “it doesn’t concern me” when it comes to
sustainability. The corporate sustainability discourse treats sustainability as
if it were an optional choice whose implementation ought to hinge on corporate
strategy. Endless articles try to prove what the
ROI might be, whether
sustainability resonates with target
demographics,
or what value might be created if sustainable changes get made. In effect,
sustainability is discussed as if it didn’t matter — directly, urgently and
powerfully — to us. Sustainability in business is treated as if health –
everyone’s health, physical and mental – isn’t linked to the air we breathe, the
water we drink, the food we eat, and the world we create. As if businesses and
humans operate in entirely separate spheres, as if healthy balance sheets can
somehow compensate for the failing health of the living beings who create them.
How else could we contextualize decisions made for business
reasons
that will inevitably compromise the very health of the people making them?
Taking an ayurvedic perspective reminds us that we are in the world and the
world is in us. Treating either with respect matters for both, and there is no
way to disentangle one from the other.
Where does this leave us? At Yogi, our ayurvedic sustainability practice informs
our mission statement: to make the world better off because we’re in it. Not to
have a neutral impact on the world — which in our present state of imbalance,
would be destructive — but to heal, fostering balance in a damaged world. We
work with our competitors, supporting collaborative interventions from
Guatemala to Nepal — understanding that our sustainability success means
nothing in isolation. Realizing that a damaged biosphere requires more than
conservation to find balance, we push for regenerative-agricultural
practices
— trying to find equilibrium between our work and the world that enables it. Our
ayurvedic tea blends are designed to create balance for our community, but they
can only do that if the teas themselves are bringing balance to the world we all
share.
The conclusion is inescapable: Sustainability only happens in collective
balance. Compostable packaging doesn’t count for much with no composting
programs to send it
to. Collecting recyclables doesn’t matter if there are too few recycling
programs
that
reuse
the collected material. Individual success will not compensate for overall
failure. Sustainability, like ayurveda, takes balance between inputs and
outputs, resources and consumption, means and materials. Sustainability efforts
do not, and will not, succeed in isolation from their broader context. We are
truly in this together.
Through the ayurvedic lens, sustainability becomes a state of balance between
dynamic forces in which we are inextricably entangled. Just as ayurveda finds
balance between doshas, sustainability finds equilibrium between giving and
taking. We, as humans in the 21st century, have inherited a particular prakriti;
yet our vikriti remains dangerously out of balance. This imbalance — which
creates pervasive dread and
anxiety,
sickness and devastation of all kinds — constitutes a kind of collective illness
that requires balance to alleviate. It will take all of us, understanding our
fate as a shared fate and our work as a collective effort, to align our current
condition with what the natural world makes possible.
Published Feb 23, 2024 8am EST / 5am PST / 1pm GMT / 2pm CET
Sustainability Marketing Specialist
Yogi
John Broadway is a Sustainability Marketing Specialist at East West Tea Company, which owns and operates Yogi Tea.