vastu-samye-chitta-bhedat tayor vibhaktah pantah (YS IV.15)
Each individual person perceives the same object in a different way, according to their own state of mind and projections. Everything is empty from its own side and appears according to how you see it. You know what? I like yoga. In fact, I love yoga. I love practicing it, I love teaching it, overall I love the complete package. I don’t ever take it for granted that I have this privilege to do what I love. I’m going to be upfront and say not everyone can teach yoga full-time. The big part of it is because for many people, it’s not financially feasible. I’m never going to earn what a CEO or a law firm partner earns by being a yoga teacher. Not only that, it takes certain conditions for someone being a full-time yoga teacher to be possible. If I had to send 3 kids to school, for example, it won’t be feasible. There are things possible and almost impossible for many people based on the conditions of their lives, and often, these are the conditions we didn’t exactly earn— at least not in this lifetime— but conditions we are born into. These conditions also shape the way we view the world. The fact that you’re practicing yoga at yoga+ means certain assumptions about your life right now can be made: You have financial security, you don’t have to worry about being hungry, you have spare time you can use in any number of ways you wish. When you walk into the practice room, your conditions give you a certain “bias” in which to view this scenario. You see the perfectly laid out mats, you decide if you want to be up front or at the back when you practice, you see the blocks as yoga props to help you, you see the padded floor as a way to protect your knees, as a means to make your fall in inversions softer. That’s what we see with the conditions we are in. Now, if someone who’s lived in Smokey Mountain (an area where trash is thrown and the people there live as scavengers) all their lives walks into this room, yoga is likely not the first thing they would think about it. They will see clean floors, not infested with flies. They will see spaciousness, where they’re not cramped with 8 other people, when sleeping. They will the lights with switches, electricity, air conditioning, that you can turn on and off according to your comfort level. We see different things based on our life circumstances. As the wisdom of the yoga sutra suggests, we see things not as objects are, but we see things as we are. And while seeing the yoga room differently may not cause a lot of anguish, it tends to create a lot of conflict when we see things differently with personal opinions, choice of religion, views in politics etc, and we insist that our way is the only way. Practice today with the intention of offering it up to one person you’ve had a major disagreement with. Think of this person, their circumstances, and see the world through their eyes. So it may be the opinions remain different, but we can always choose to come from a place of understanding and empathy and compassion. So it may be that our views are still at odds with each other, but we can validate our truth without invalidating the truth of others. So it may be that we hold on to our views as the views that are reasonable to us, but we express these always with respect and with an understanding that we are projecting our own personal truth.
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Have you ever been bullied, in person or online, as a child or in the recent past, over your appearance, your race, your gender, your sexual orientation, your religion, your ethics, your politics, etc?
Have you ever bullied someone, in person or online, as a child or in the recent past, over their appearance, their race, their gender, their sexual orientation, their religion, their ethics, their politics, etc? Life is not easy for any of us. We have all been hurt and we have all hurt others. Every single person has their share of pain and suffering. Every single person has their struggle. Every single person has some burden they carry. Not only that, there are systems and structures that make some of this unfairness normalized, like hierarchies in society. In all cultures, there are second, third, and fourth class citizens. They are bullied by the mere system in which they exist. When I was in college, we played this game where everyone is handed an envelope with pieces of paper. Each piece of paper has an object listed down with a corresponding numerical value. Each person tallies their number, and there’s a ranking from top to bottom. The top 5 then gathers around to reassign values of the objects, and they do so as they wish, with no restrictions. After each round, the new ranking is listed. When the game started, the differences in numbers were small and incremental, but by the end of the game, the top 5 held numbers that are exponentially higher than the ones at the bottom. The top stayed on top and bottom stayed at the bottom. It was then revealed that this game shows us power structures at play. When the powerful few make decisions based only on their self-interest, others tend to be oppressed. When the powerful few is interested only in winning, others are left behind. When the powerful few are not connected to the rest of the others, it is as though the others are invisible. We didn’t know this while we were playing the game. We each just thought we wanted to win. What is interesting in yoga philosophy is that there is no such thing as good or bad, or even right or wrong. There is only the true Self and the illusions that prevent us from seeing it. Our true Self knows that we are all in this together, that we are all connected to each other, that my interest is your interest, and that none of us are really separate. The true Self understands that we are already perfect, and we do not need to put others down to lift ourselves up. When we hurt others, it’s not because we are bad people, it is only because we do not know our true Self. We have mistakenly identified with our egos and our fears and our insecurities. We have confused self-love with external indulgences like buying expensive things, accumulating wealth, etc. When in reality, authentic self-love has little to do with external validation and everything to do with complete unconditional acceptance. In your practice, observe not only how the physical body moves but also the tendencies of the mind— the self-talk, the internal dialogue, the deep-seated reactions. Use the practice to bring the unconscious to the level of the conscious. Are you holding on to the illusion of “I’m not good enough”, or at the other end of the spectrum, “I’m too good for this”? Observe these tendencies, not to judge, but merely to understand the layers of defenses you are working with. You invite them up so you can gently lay them down. Now think of one person who bullied you, hurt you, made you feel small. Reframe your perspective by no longer seeing this person as bad. Simply see this person as someone who was hurt, someone who didn’t know what to do with the pain they were passed on, and so they passed it on to you. Perhaps they mistakenly thought that by hurting you, they would benefit in some way, but that is short-lived and does not resolve the hurt they still carry. Forgive them. See them as someone who struggled, that is all. When you free them, you also stop seeing yourself as a victim, and you free yourself. Pause and think of them. May they be free. May they be happy. And then think of someone you have bullied, you have hurt, you have made to feel small. See that at this given time, you also just thought you would get some kind of benefit from hurting them. You were passed on hurt, and you didn’t know what to do with it, and you passed it on. You did so because in some way, you thought you were protecting yourself, because your idea of your self is the illusion, the ego that you were attached to. Forgive yourself, and ask forgiveness from this person too, even if it’s just in your mind. Pause and think of the person you hurt. May they be free. May they be happy. Every single person we know, our parents, our guardians, our caretakers, our siblings, our relatives, our past partners, our current partner, our children, our friends, our acquaintances, our critics, our adversaries, everyone we love, everyone we resist, everyone who challenged us— all of us were hurt and all of of have hurt others. We are all in some way stuck in this matrix of illusion. But we are all also capable of unraveling these layers to reveal our true Self. May we all be free. May we all be happy. May we all be liberated. May none of us suffer. Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu. Life is not easy for any of us. And the work is cut out for us to peel away our layers of illusions, to put down our armors, one by one by one, and it may take an entire lifetime or more to do so, but we can start right here. External changes in the world we live in are important, but without our internal evolution, we will be back to where we started. Look within and search within. Do the work of letting go of those layers of defenses. We can be free. We deserve to be free. Purnam adah, purnam idam purnat purnam udachyate; purnasya purnam adaya purnam
I love this mantra because it is very validating. Even if we set aside the whole pursuit of enlightenment and oneness of all being, the starting ground is self-acceptance and knowing one’s self-worth. Purnam means whole, complete, perfect. This reminds us that as we are now, we are already enough. This is our starting point, not a result of some condition we need to fulfill. Our everyday lives are filled with invalidation, starting from our appearance, often with things we have no control over, such as the color of the skin we are born in, our race, our gender, our sexual orientation, etc. The focus of the month is called “It’s not easy being green” based on Kermit the Frog’s song, and as the song opens he talks about self-doubt and insecurity, but by the end of the song comes to the conclusion that he accepts and likes himself. It’s not easy being ____ and today we’ll reframe that. It’s not easy being ____ but I am whole just the same, I am complete just the same, I am perfect just the same. So it may be that in the past we are told by others we are not good enough, and perhaps we believed it, and perhaps we beat ourselves up for it. But today, we see that the only validation we need is from ourselves. Having that acceptance, we become our own person, our own savior, our own hero. Purnam, wholeness, is the state of who we are. Have you ever been without water? Felt the kind of unbearable thirst because water wasn’t available to you? Most of us don’t have that experience. We are very fortunate.
I joined a Save Vigil and gave water to some of those who are experiencing that intense thirst. Some of them gobbled up the water immediately, wanting more. While others didn’t even bother anymore, because there are other discomforts they are feeling. It doesn’t make a difference that these beings I’m talking about are pigs. When it comes to our primal needs, we are the same with these land animals. To have water to drink, to have food to eat, to be physically comfortable. For the pigs whom I gave water, it is but a small relief. I gave them that water just a few hours before their scheduled slaughter. I wish it were different. I wish they won’t be slaughtered. I wish they weren’t brought into this world just to be killed. I wish their lives weren’t such miserable existence. I wish they would be happy. I wish they would be free. We practice yoga to find some physical comfort. Some of us find relief in our lower back pain or shoulder pain etc through yoga exercises. Some of us enjoy the stretches and strengthening involved in the poses, first thing in the morning, or after a long day, or both. We can not deny that the quality of our lives are affected by our physical comfort. The practice of yoga expands, and I don’t just mean that we become better at the physical exercises, that we do for sure. I mean, that we become, in a sense, better people. Even if we’ve learned to hold headstand for 10 minutes, but if we care about ourselves only, and sometimes even at the expense of others, it’s not a very comfortable place to be. Even if we intellectually justify it, our souls will feel it. But if we practice yoga and what comes out of this practice is that we want for others what we would not deny in ourselves, we start to have this humility and grace, our practice becomes beautiful because we start to make peace with ourselves. Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu. Consider all beings who may have that primal need to drink water, and whose needs are unmet, and offer your practice to them. Being vegan is one of the most important ways we can practice compassion towards all other beings. Please consider it. A series of experiments on water was conducted by a Japanese doctor named Dr. Masaru Emoto.
First, he took water from different sources, he froze them, and he looked at the water samples under the microscope. He found that water from lakes and oceans and mountain streams that are far flung, where there’s very little human population, produced images that were like beautiful symmetrical crystals, like snowflakes. Water from tap, or sources where there’s a lot of pollution on the other hand, showed images that were disfigured. Then, he used distilled water samples, and then put words on the glass bottles. Same process of freezing and looking under the microscope. The water sample from the words “love and gratitude” came out with beautiful hexagon shapes while the water sample from words like “you fool” or “war” came out disfigured. He then got polluted water, and then he asked people to set good intentions for the water, like a mantra or a prayer, and then the shape of the crystals changed. He concluded then that thoughts, intentions, and words affect water. So when we chant “Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu”, our thoughts, according Dr. Emoto actually have an effect on the very molecular structures of the 70% water that we are made up. Love and gratitude— the water samples that created the most beautiful shapes. Think of these words and let these words shape your reality. |
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