On the way home, it being twilight because I’d stayed talking about the state of our country and what William Penn House can do to support action and resistance, I was fortunate to see bats swooping for mosquitoes. In practice, we contemplated dharma and integrity.
Uh oh. Must be time for a puja to Kali in her aspect as the goddess of sequencing.
Advancing
The practice.
Community.
I spied this sign yesterday in the exhibitor hall on the lower level of the Marriott in Woodley Park. I was attending a portion of the 38th Annual Conference of Enrolled Actuaries. (Go ahead: I dare you to put that into your favorite search engine).
Although this sign was to invite enrollment in one of the actuarial professional organizations, it seems most similar to the stated aspirations of various yoga groups and schools.
I’m not surprised by this symmetry. I think that anyone who seeks to live so that employment and dharma (aligned life) are in harmony and who supports, participates, and works in community, is living like a yogin, though perhaps never knowing about or having any interest in yoga per se.
There are many life paths and humanistic and spiritual practices that guide life towards a contented path of service, the true reason, to my thinking, for a steady, long-term yoga practice (including asana, pranayama, and meditation).
I personally find the yoga practices to be among the most helpful ways to engage my body and mind for my health and well-being. Among other things, the practices have helped me listen with open enough awareness to be able to comprehend with my law-trained mind some small portion of the language of actuaries.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
In Paths to God, Ram Dass speaks of satgurus and upagurus. A satguru is the true teacher. The upaguru is anyone who teaches us something, which, when we are truly open to recognizing the good in all, is literally every one.
The satguru may refer to that within us that is the power, or the essential pulsation, or the light, or the illuminative wisdom, or the heart unbound by space and time that leads us to know the true Self. As such, the satguru unfolds the means to experience the love that the satguru is/experiences. The very rarest of individuals do not have to make any effort either through the various yoga practices (yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara, etc.) or practices in another spiritual tradition to experience the fullness of consciousness unbound by self, or time, or space. The rest of us must engage in shifting our lives to align better with nature to experience the highest bliss of being. For this, we need teachers and we receive, if we are paying attention, teachings.
Sometimes a person will will recognize the satguru embodied in a particular human form, as Ram Dass has with Neem Karoli Baba. Sometimes, the teachers illuminating our journey are acharyas, great spiritual teachers who illuminate pathways and practices for finding the satguru within ourselves and in others. They are important teachers for many and a profound influence, but except to the extent that we are all the satguru, they are not “gurus,” nor do they hold themselves out as such. I think of my primary teachers–those I have studied with personally and a couple, like Ram Dass and J. Krishnamurti, whose writings have deeply shifted me–as acharyas. That they may have human foibles does not diminish the power of what I have learned from them and the joy I have experienced and shared from studying with them.
Other people we meet — all of them — are upagurus; we can learn from everyone and anyone. That is what Quakers are taught and seek to practice; that is what Ram Dass is offering for us to consider in both Paths to God and in more detail in Be Love Now. Sometimes we meet a stranger just for a moment, but the stranger in that moment exhibits such grace, that the stranger is one of our teachers for life. It is by being open and spacious that we get the opportunity to recognize those who have just one perfect teaching for us. When we are closed off, we can miss both teachers and teachings.
If we are open enough to seeing the light in everyone, we will also find that even those that trouble us can help us better respond in the highest. Those are the ones Ram Dass calls “teachings” instead of “teachers.” And those who will trouble us will come. We will meet someone and that person will push our buttons. Perhaps the person demonstrates too strongly some behavior or trait we don’t like in ourselves. What a great teaching that can be. When I see such a reflection of myself, I know that when I respond or act in similar ways, I am out of alignment, and it is a great motivator to release the behavior or trait.
Perhaps someone shows up to help us reenact an old emotional pattern that has not served. That someone is the laboratory upaguru who has arrived to give us the opportunity to discover whether this time around we are able better able to embody the principles that we are studying. In being faced with our old stuff, we are given an opportunity, by changing how we respond, to dissolve the old patterns (samskaras) that, if not dissolved by practice, commit us to perpetuate the suffering resulting from our past actions (karma).
Sometimes the upagurus come from the past. They are seeing you through the filter of their own past and have reappeared for something on their own journey. In such people, we perhaps get a teaching that reminds us why we are seeking to better align, why we have sought to shift and change old patterns. We might also meet in an upaguru who has been part of our past someone who has shifted and grown and inspires us to go further on the path, sharing it for a while. Those who are parts of our life for a long time, I think generally serve as both teachers and teachings, and we are the same for them.
With regard to everyone we meet, from an embodied satguru to the most troublesome, the more we are open, the more we hold all that we encounter in what John Friend calls “luminous spaciousness,” the more able we will be both to recognize the true teachers and to learn from the teachings.
I have spent most of my life practicing one thing or the other. What attracts me about practicing in the sense of complete absorption that it brings. For a time, the absorption can be enough. Ultimately, though, the absorption should bring joy. I do not really think that it matters what it is that one is practicing as long as steady engagement brings a sense of inner peace and bliss that enables one to be kinder and to offer service in some way. I have quit some things along the way either because the practice did not bring enough joy or fulfillment or the practice was detrimental to my nature.
I know yoga and meditation are the right for me at this point in my life because sadhana (practice) continues to brings me ever increasing delight. I do not think of practice as work (though sometimes I need to use some self-discipline to remind myself to practice), but as an invitation to greater depth and understanding of not only the practice, but myself.
I have friends for whom the right practice is not yoga, but something else — a visual art, music, law. It is not what one does, but how one does it, and whether it brings a sense of fullness to life, a satisfaction with the engagement in the doing, rather than in what the doing achieves.
Check out what comes up with an internet search for “slug spirit animal.” #persist
