Last year in August, I was in Woodstock for the entire month to study with my teachers Sharon-ji and David-ji. The classes would start at 10am and end at 1pm, after which we would have a satsang to discuss certain topics, like an open forum for Q&As. One day there was someone famous in our class-- well, famous in the yoga world. It was MC Yogi, a musician who raps about yogic teachings like the yamas, the limbs of yoga, nonviolence, seeking the truth, being the change you want to see in the world etc. It was his birthday that day and he took Sharon-ji's class with us. And because it was his birthday, we sang him the maha mrtyunjaya mantra. He then put his hands together in front of his heart center, as we often do in yoga classes, and he made eye contact with each person in the room and said "I love you". It was a nice feeling, and it also confirmed my suspicions: yogis are weird. What "normal" person would tell strangers they have just met that they love them? In the safe and sacred space where we connect to each other as souls, love becomes normal. Loves becomes the default. I wanted to share this story because in a clip I watched of Radhanath Swami, he said that the purpose of life is to love and to be loved. How beautiful. How simple. How divine. When we take in that the purpose of this life is to love and be loved, all our worries and anxieties and restlessness seem to fade into the background. Our petty disagreements seem not to matter in the big picture. Our relentless pursuit of material things seems to become irrelevant from this perspective. To love and to be loved-- an intention, a code for living with joy, the meaning of life itself. In the book The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm, it is mentioned that if love were to include some but not all, then that is merely attachment. I think for many of us, it may start out with a feeling or a desire to protect someone and make them happy, and it could be a starting point to practice having this same affection towards more and more beings, including not only those within our immediate circle of family and friends, but also those who we may feel neutral towards, and eventually including even those whom we may perceive as being different from us or those whom we have conflicts with in some way. Love also includes the self. Whenever we say the words Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu (May all beings everywhere be happy and free), we should not forget about ourselves, that we too deserve that happiness and freedom, that we too must love ourselves. The kind of self-love we talk about is not narcissism or selfishness, for those are the complete opposite of love, those are defense mechanisms brought about by a lack of love. Self-love is acceptance. It is to love ourselves today for who we are, to love ourselves for who we once were, and to love ourselves for who we will become. What is the meaning of life? It is a question that is big and daunting-- until we realize that the meaning of life is quite simply to love. The meaning of life is to love without condition and without exception and without discrimination. It is to love without the need to possess or control. It is to love not because we are receiving something in return but because we can, because it is our nature, because it is who we are, and so we will choose love every time.
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PYS I.2 yogaś citta-vritti-nirodhah When you stop identifying with your thoughts, fluctuations of mind, then there is Yoga, identity with Self, which is samadhi, happiness, bliss and ecstasy. Yoga is the state of samadhi, the state of bliss, the state of enlightenment. Citta vritti is mindstuff or fluctuations of the mind. It is the endless chattering of the mind. Nirodhah means to stop. In this yoga sutra, it is said that enlightenment happens when the chattering of the mind stops. The mind does that constantly-- the endless chitchat, on and on and on. What am I going to do after class? It's so hot here. What time is it going to be over? I wonder if anyone texted me. When's the next holiday break? Some citta vrittis are stubborn recurring themes that take over our vision of reality: I am not good enough, strong enough, thin enough, smart enough, pretty enough, popular enough, smart enough, rich enough, so on and so forth. The danger in these citta vrittis is that we may sometimes mistake them for our reality. We may get so absorbed in them that we start to believe these citta vrittis as our truth. And to overcompensate, we let the ego take over. And then we think that in order to be good enough, we must do this and that, become this and that, and when these things don't happen, we feel that life has no meaning, because our sense of self was hinging on the chattering of the mind-- an illusion-- in the first place. So we'll turn it backwards. To find the meaning of life, we want to cut through the unnecessary things, cut through our ego tendencies, cut through our citta vrittis, and realize and accept that the only meaning in life is to live. It's not to be perfect, it's not to be someone we are not, it's not to chase what is outside of us. It is simply to live. Citta vrittis are constantly there, haunting us and taunting us. The practices of yoga allow us to create space between the witness consciousness and the thoughts. As a sakshi observing the mind and its citta vrittis, we then start to have an experience of the self not as the thoughts but as separate from the thoughts. We are not our citta vrittis. We are not our mind. We are not our body. We are the consciousness that drives this body and mind. In those brief moments that the fluctuations of the mind stop and we find that inner stillness, the present moment becomes so vibrant it needs no external influences for it to be meaningful. It just is. Life just is. One day when I was in preschool, we were handed out this coloring page with an outline of a shoe. I remember coloring it all black, even the insole was colored black. I remember coloring with a lot of gusto and how much I enjoyed it, but when I showed it to my teacher it seemed to me that she didn't like it. And I doubted myself. I thought I had so much fun, but apparently I missed the point. I could've colored it differently, made the sole different. I could've done this or I could've done that. When my self-doubt crept in, I forgot that I had so much fun while I was doing it. I forgot that I was playing. I forgot that there was no right and wrong. The focus of the month is: What is the meaning of life? Do you find that you come up with this question when you're having the time of your life? When you're having fun, traveling, meeting amazing people, making peace with yourself, trying to bind in your asana, so on and so forth that give you some kind of pleasure in life, does this question become dominant in your life? My guess is not. It is when we are having an existential crisis, when we are filled with regret of the past or doubt about the present or fear of the future that we ask: What is the meaning of life? I am not saying that this question is not important, or that only depressed people ask this question. What I am saying is that perhaps this question is not answered by the intellect but rather answered by experience. We can overthink it, or we can just dive into life, play in it, color this life however way feels free and expressive and truthful and authentic, enjoy it and submerge in it,even if the answers cannot be found in words. Like David Life said, the way to heaven is heaven itself. The meaning of life is living. If we live that way, then when someone asks us what the meaning of life is, we can pick any incident, any slice, any aspect, any moment of our lives and say: This. Over the long weekend, I joined an event called Mayday Mt. Pulag Charity Climb. As the name suggests, it is a climb to the summit of Mt. Pulag. It also has a volunteerism aspect of reaching out to a local community to hand out donations to a school. Now, I am not much of a mountaineer. I am really more the lie-down-by-the-beach-while-having-a-fruit-shake-with-a-tiny-umbrella kind of person, but I thought it would be fun since this is an event that brought my vegan and animal rights friends together. So I went. The itinerary was that we'd go to the school first to give the donations, head to the camping grounds, rest in the afternoon, and wake up at 1am to begin the climb to the mountain so we could reach it by sunrise. As far as we all knew, we would leave our things by the camping ground so there was no worry of carrying our bags and tents and sleeping bags. The ride to the school was quite an adventure for us. We rode at the back of a big truck. Some of us were standing, and others were seated, just like what it is like in the movies with people hitchhiking. The road was bumpy and the inclines were often very steep, so it is not rare that we would fall into each other. At one point, we heard a tire burst, but the truck did not even stop. It just kept going as if nothing happened. We reached the school, gave the donations, talked to the kids and the teachers, and while we gave them vegan burgers, they cooked fresh vegetables for us. On the truck ride on our way back, it suddenly poured, and while there was a waterproof sheet we could cower under, a few of us decided to just embrace the rain and shower in it. We laughed a lot and had quite a good time. However, because of the delay and consequently the rain, the ride to the camping ground had an unexpected turn. It was so muddy the tires kept getting stuck. That meant we had to do an unexpected hike in sharply inclined roads with all of our bags. I changed into warmer clothes and layered my leggings. I was wearing shoes that I have not worn in years. We know how that story goes. As I stepped into the mud and out of it, the rubber soles of my running shoes started to fall apart before my eyes. And so, out of breath and tired, literally carrying a heavy weight over my shoulders and wearing shoes that were giving out, I decided I was not joining the 1am wakeup call and I am going to sleep in instead. Someone asked me, "You're not going to the summit? But isn't that the point of coming here?" Of course, what she said was sensible and rational and what most of us would take for granted as some kind of universal law for joining events called Mt. Pulag Climb. We may also think of the yoga practice in a similar way, in that we have an objective to nail a pose, hold that handstand, balance on our arms etc. We may also approach this life with the same attitude, that we are here to become this good person, accomplish that goal, achieve this milestone, accumulate that wealth etc. But those are intellectual concepts-- the should-be's and the must be's. They are the concept of what a climb or a practice or a life has to be like. We are, however, spiritual beings too. And as spiritual beings, we can choose to think less and feel more. The focus of the month in Jivamukti is this big question: What is the meaning of life? Is it our intellectual understanding of "doing something", or could it simply be "being"? What if the meaning of a climb, of a hike, of a practice, of a life etc is not limited to reaching the peak, the summit, or the accomplishment? What if the meaning of it exists within itself? How will that change our perspective? Can we then start to accept that whoever we already are is beautifully enough, and that the significance of this life does not hinge on some external condition waiting to be fulfilled? Can we see this moment as something completely whole on its own, and not just a prelude to something else? What if the meaning of life is not something to be thought of but something to be experienced? It is not to say that we will not climb mountains or work on our handstands or try to live ethically. It means that however smoothly those plans pan out are independent of the intrinsic meaning of merely being alive. If we are insistent that the meaning of life depends on an "accomplishment", then we miss out on all of the beauty that exists in what we may consider ordinary. Feel your heart beat. Hear your own breathing. This is you, being alive, holding the gift of existence. Trying to intellectualize the meaning of life is like explaining the concept of water to a fish. We struggle to see it not because it cannot be found but because it is everywhere. It is in the very fiber of our existence. It is the significance of simply being here, right now, as we are. In this life that is a metaphorical hike, we will get rained on sometimes, and it is up to us to choose whether to see it as a disturbance or to hold our hands up in the air and receive this little miracle with joy. Our metaphorical shoes will fall apart, we will have to carry heavy things, we will have to shudder in the cold. Our intellect can categorize this as a failure of sorts, or we can let our spirits allow us to experience the meaning of every moment set forth as a gift to us. We may reach the peak, or we may not. Just the same, our journeys are significant, our lives are filled with meaning. With a grateful heart, may we choose in each moment to love more and worry less. With a grateful heart, may we choose to embrace all of life rather than picking out only parts that we feel are easy or look good in some way. With a grateful heart, may we choose to see that the meaning of this life need not be sought but merely remembered. |
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