When we were asked to think about which yama or niyama we wanted to work with for our first experiment, I was immediately drawn to the concept of ahimsa. Non-harming. This concept is one I have thought about and applied to my life before in some ways, but there is still a significant situation in my life that frequently arouses un-yogic thoughts: my job. I make my living waiting tables. I’ve been doing it for over two years and it has certainly been a learning experience. But I have to admit that it is very taxing work sometimes. Dealing with difficult customers is a regular occurrence. I also work in an environment where my coworkers and I often vent to each other, so we all carry the burden of each other’s negativity. Collectively, unintentionally, we help create a toxic working environment that saps energy from everyone involved. I frequently leave work feeling exhausted, drained, squeezed-out.

I wondered if this concept of ahimsa could help me break out of that. I wondered if, instead of getting angry at rude customers or taking up other people’s negativity, I could choose to do something else instead. I didn’t know what that something else might be at first. One day at work, it came to me. I was feeling upset and, suddenly, out of nowhere, I heard the Gayatri Mantra in my head. We had used the Gayatri Mantra a couple of times in class, and something about that mantra in particular resonated with me. I loved its message about meditating on the creator, letting our minds be inspired and filled with divine qualities. I felt that these were exactly the qualities I wanted to cultivate in order to stop doing harm through my thoughts. So I decided that every time I felt upset at work—or every time a situation arose that might possibly cause me to think toxic thoughts—I would chant the Gayatri Mantra internally. I wrote the mantra (along with its English translation) on a scrap of notebook paper and took it to work with me every day.

The most profound moment in my experiment happened on a night when a couple of coworkers in my vicinity were being incredibly negative. They were saying nasty things about their customers and they were both getting each other more worked up. They started to get louder and louder, and I started doing my mantra in my head. I repeated it a couple of times, feeling annoyed at how hard it was to hear my thoughts over their noise. I started to get frustrated with these people for the way they were acting. But all the while I kept chanting in my head, partly now to drown out my own reaction to their negativity, and at one point, spontaneously, I realized I didn’t just want to chant for myself anymore—I wanted to chant for them, too. So I silently dedicated a couple of chants to my coworkers, wishing for them to find more happiness and peace within themselves, because happy people don’t talk like that. I wished for their minds to be inspired and filled with divine qualities. And then I felt at peace.

This was a beautiful moment because, suddenly, it wasn’t just about me anymore. I wasn’t just concerned about my own peace. I almost feel guilty admitting that, for most of the rest of the experiment, I was too busy trying to find my own inner peace to worry too much about what other people were doing. There was just this one spontaneous moment when it dawned on me that I wasn’t the one who needed the most help here.