A Spiritual Return to School

Tags

autumn, curiosity, delight, discovery, school

The first day of return to school is often a shock to the system. No matter how much you prepare for it, the fact is that you are jolted out of the long sleep of ten or so weeks of summer. The signal of change is unmistakable as all the lights that had been flashing yellow over the past week or so suddenly change to green… it’s time to move forward and meet the early waking hour again.

There is a certain stillness about the world in the new waking hour that I am glad to welcome back. There is a return to a routine, a structure, a familiar purpose that I am glad to return to. And it isn’t just me. The entire household, including the puppies, seem to have been jolted into the ‘return to school’ mode.

Like many mornings this summer, it’s humid, warm, gray and overcast today. It doesn’t quite feel like autumn yet, but our bodies and the trees outside seem to be ready for it. We are ready to welcome the change in color and the chill in the air that makes you clasp your hands around the mug of tea a bit tighter as you first walk out onto the deck to check what kind of weather is approaching from the west.

She is more than ready, though. The excitement of a new grade, new teachers, new subjects, new friends and much more has her bubbling over with enthusiasm. We take our “first day” photos at the top of the steps overlooking the lake — her puppy joins in and they both enjoy some special moments. And then, just like that we’re off for the ride to school.

It’s one of those days where I wish the car ride was a bit longer. She is talking a hundred miles an hour about the subjects and her new teachers – Math, History, Chemistry and more. It’s all pouring out and I’m happy to watch the resumption of flow that had been seemingly at a standstill for the past few weeks.

As I drop her off with a quick goodbye, she has a quickness in her step that I haven’t seen in a while. As much as she looks forward to the beginning of summer every June, she looks forward to her return to school in August even more. It is a sign that the village is raising her well, and that return to school is much more than just the academics, the sports, the extra-curricular and such.

How does all this connect to our inner spiritual life?

Return to school can be a reminder of an embrace of possibilities, adventures, and detours that await us when we are dunked into the alphabet soup of human beings and their variant personalities. It is an invitation to remain young at heart, to embrace every new day with freshness, curiosity and preparedness for the possibilities that will unfold.

We are ready for our return to school. We’ve been ready for a while. A new inner awakening is just a sunrise or moonrise away for us. Let’s simply choose to return to it with childlike joy and delight!

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly chat on Twitter – Sunday Aug 22 at 9amET / 630pm India in #SpiritChat. Bring your open mind and heart. I will bring the tea and cookies and school syllabus 🙂 – @AjmaniK

A walk around the school campus on the first day back..

Spiritual Return to School

Tags

backtoschool, change, school, spiritual practice

The entire notion of ‘return to school’ this fall has taken on a new meaning in the context of the pandemic. For my daughter’s school, the conversation between administration, teachers, support staff, parents and local, state and health agencies has spanned most of the summer. Finally, this past Friday, school did reopen to students. The entire first day was spent in orientation sessions about new rules and guidelines.

And yet, about 15% of the students have chosen not to return ‘in-person’. They have chosen the ‘online’ option. In many ways, the ‘return to school’ has become a bit of a fragmented experience for the student community. Just like the world that they live in, school has become a brand new world for students. Wearing of masks and six-foot distances, taking turns while visiting their lockers, no large assemblies, no theater in the auditorium, no inter-school sports. It’s quite a bit to take in for the parents, let alone the school community.

However, inspite of all the changes and adjustments needed to make ‘in-person’ school possible, the ‘first-day survey’ says that the students are happy to back. The social bonding that happens in school cannot be duplicated online and is thus an important part of the educational experience. One may argue that some level of social bonding does happen in online (social media) interactions, but we can all agree that the ‘real life’ meeting is orders of magnitude more impactful. So, what does all this have to do with spirituality?

Well, that’s a good question. I guess one connection that comes to mind is the question – how have our spiritual practices served us in times of great change? Most students seem to have taken all these big changes in their ‘return to school’ process in stride, and with a good attitude. How do we adults handle great changes in our (learning) environments? Assuming that there are no setbacks, and that ‘in person school’ continues through the academic year, these fairly large changes will be in effect for a fairly long time. If we were in a similar situation, how would our spiritual practices be affected or undergo change(s)?

Let me share one personal example of change affecting spiritual practice. Ever since we brought a new puppy home six weeks ago, my morning meditation routine has had a ‘return to school’ experience. I had no idea how difficult it would be to try and sit quietly in the same space with a ten-week-old puppy. You see, the puppy wants to do the exact opposite of sitting still at 7am in the morning after a good night’s sleep! So, I had to change, adjust, and even school the puppy a bit. I would let her play for half an hour, let her burn off her energy, and then sit for my morning practice. And guess what?

After a few days, she caught on to the fact that this was my quiet time. I often found her curled up at my feet at the end of my morning sitting. I won’t go so far as to say that my original daily practice has been fully restored, but I am on my way back. It is a ‘return to school’ in a different environment for me and my practice. The timing and space where I practice varies depending on how the morning develops, and I have developed a new sense of gratitude for what I can accomplish on the days when I am able to practice.

That’s my short story. How about you? Have there been occasions where you’ve had to make small or big changes to your practices? Have you experienced a ‘spiritual return to school’ at any time and learnt new things about yourself and your environment? What did you learn in the process?

Kumud

P.S. I invite you to ‘return to school’ with the #SpiritChat community on Sunday, August 23 at 9amET on twitter. We will ask some old questions in new ways, and share some new answers. Maybe we will even get a bit of an education on taking change in stride and staying in school. Namaste – @AjmaniK

Engaging our Youthful Spirit

Tags

engagement, leadership, new direction, spirituality, transformation, youth

The breeze blows swift this morning under overcast skies and the grasses rimming the lake seem a tad taller from having been replenished by the light rain that fell all night long. It’s the kind of morning on the deck where a light T-shirt isn’t warm enough and a sweat-shirt wouldn’t be cool enough… and so I put on a yellow soccer jersey with Brazil colors on top of the blue.

In the small Zoom chat on Friday, a lot of us were wearing blue again. I commented that blue was becoming a theme for the chats and Lucille (@sageandsavvy) reminded us that blue activates the “throat chakra” and empowers us to speak the truth. From hosting my niece’s wedding events on Zoom for three straight days this week, I know that yellow is the color of purity. Bride and groom wear yellow while the family applies orange turmeric paste on them, before they take a ritual bath the day before the wedding is a ritual of the ages in our community.

Blue, yellow, orange – add red and green trimmed with gold – the traditional colors worn by Indian brides, a lot of music, dance, and laughter, and you get a soul-filling vibrance that energized me and all those present. The energy of love and joy of the young bride and groom was unmistakable – even from seven thousand miles away. It was a wedding like me and many others had never experienced – an immersion and engagement of a different , unique kind where you could be fully present to the flow of youth-led celebration, without all the distractions and stresses of attending a real-life wedding.

As I write this, the wind has calmed a bit, and out of the corner of my eye, I see that the Mama rabbit who has set up family camp in the thick shrub beyond the fence, has arrived at the base of the deck’s steps. At a six foot distance, we have been doing this stillness dance for a few days. We are aware of each other, but we only look at each other through sideways glances, and we both sit in stillness — a bit like how the bride and groom sat during the fire ceremony part of the wedding. Once she has decided that she is safe, she moves to the base of the bird-feeder where the spillover created by the blackbirds is her repast. My phone flashes a notification — “Flight from GOI to BOM at 9am” — this was to be my return flight from the wedding in Goa. Rescheduled for next June.

Now, where was I? Yes. The contagious, vibrant, energetic refueling of the spirit provided by immersion in the colors and sounds of youthful energy. Last week was confirmation of a direction that I had been called to the week before – to focus my energy towards greater engagement with folks who are young in heart and spirit.

This new direction is not merely about engaging those who are young in age, although they are the inspiration for it. It is about offering the energetic experience, the wisdom, the talents of those who have been on life’s roads less traveled, to those emerging youth who will lead our world into its new future.

Some of this reminds me of my good friend Jon Mertz of @ThinDifference, whom I met on Twitter, and is the first Twitter friend I met IRL on a visit to Dallas. He has supported #SpiritChat for many years, particularly in its youthful years, and has been a long term proponent of “engaging generations and empowering future leaders.” It also reminds me of Simon Harvey (@Simon_GB), a day one #spiritchat participant, whose passion for leadership flowed through #LeadfromWithin for many a year.

I believe it is time for me to follow their lead, the lead of my calling, and the lead of many others like @GrandmaOnDeck, @GaryRGruber, @VegyPower and more. I believe it is time to focus on engaging the energy of youth across the world, and dive headlong into this new experiment and calling to a return to the heart.

I hope you will join me in this new walk. I was going to wait to start walking towards this in a few weeks, but Elisa (@WomenandBiz) in yesterday’s Zoom chat taught me through a Maya Angelou quote — why wait to do the next good thing? Sharon (@AwakeningYourTrueSelf) encouraged me to follow the new direction with the same passion that I have had for the weekly #SpiritChat and Quaratulain (@iquarattariq), the youth representative in the Zoom chat, lent her warm, heartful endorsement.

So, here I am. I am hoping that some of you who have been with the #SpiritChat community for a while will provide inputs, ideas and guidance to this not-so-new heart direction for many of us. I will need all of your help and more, to take the current energy of “we’re all in this together” and transform it into action, so as to effect a transfer of power that will create a new core of leadership at the heart of this world.

I know that we can do this by engaging a new generation that leads and acts with the heart — for that is the key to sustainability.

My three week retreat is over. I’m back. Refueled. Ready for a new launch. Join me. Let all of us young in heart and spirit, you and Me, turn this world upside down, and become We.

Let us arise, awake, and stop not!

Kumud

P.S. Join us in our weekly chat, Sunday June 28 at 9amET / 630pm India as we gather to celebrate the energy of youth. Maybe I will switch from tea to juice, and from cookies to fresh fruit. Namaste – @AjmaniK

The contagious joy and energy of young hearts and spirits…

On Spirituality and Privilege

Tags

equality, freedom, oneness, privilege, spirituality, vedanta

The tears came suddenly and as large droplets from my firmly shut and already moist eyes at the end of the morning meditation session; about midway through I had ceded any semblance of trying to get my mind’s thought pattern to calm down as the thoughts had somehow drifted to thinking about privilege by birth, and how much of it I enjoyed growing up in a middle class family in India.

The tears came as I thought of the one who probably saved my life when I was ten, as I lay bleeding and unconscious on a concrete floor, having fallen from about 20 feet high onto my left side from the first floor window. I had broken the raised bone in my left arm where it meets the wrist and bridge of my plastic glasses had embedded into my nose on impact, which was miraculously not broken, but was bleeding like the river Yamuna. She was the only adult in the house with all of us kids — the very dark-skinned South-Indian lady named Chalma who would wash dishes twice a day for three families of at least eight to ten people each who lives in a three-story home in a wealthy New Delhi neighborhood.

Her tools were used lemon rinds, and wood ashes that she brought from the remnants of the cooking fires from her home, and the husks of used coconuts that she used as a cleaning ‘sponge’. The family sized pots and pans of cast iron and copper were heavy; plates, spoons, glasses, knives were all stainless steel. One eight foot section of the granite kitchen counter top would be filled with the washed dishes after she was done. She wasn’t allowed to stand and wash in the marble sink next to the counter because the ashes would cause damage to the fine surface.

So, on the floor she sat cross legged on a small flat stool, with her frail frame bent over her kingdom of dirty dishes, coconut fiber in one hand, dipping it ever so often in the ashes sitting in an earthen bowl by her. In the morning, she did the dishes from last nights dinner. In the afternoon, she did the dishes from breakfast and lunch. Once or twice every day, she was chided by the lady of the home, not to let the tap of fresh water run so freely. Her job was particularly difficult in the summer when running water only came for an hour, twice a day — during the early hours of the morning and the late afternoon. If she missed that running water window because she was ‘late to work’, she would have to use water that we would have filled in heavy aluminum buckets the night before, and lined her workspace with in a quarter circle — water that she would treat like molten gold as she used it sparingly, and wash out thoroughly for the next day, after she had washed all the dishes…

And then there was the lady who would come and sweep all the finely crafted and smoothed concrete floors of our family’s 1500 sq ft home on the middle floor of the three story home. The ‘dry sweeping’ with the traditional broom was the relatively easy part. What was much tougher was the mopping that followed. It was done with a heavy cotton-roped cloth about two feet square, sitting on her haunches as she dipped the cloth with her bare hands in the water doused with phenylaline as a disinfectant, moving slowly, a few square feet at a time.

Her task was to remove the dust that is endemic in the oppressive summer heat of Delhi when the hot breeze called loo from neighboring Rajasthan brings hot sand with it and coats everything in its path — whether it be a shining, three story home in a wealthy neighborhood or the ramshackle tenement of the dish-washing lady who tries to feed her family every night with just enough money earned by washing dishes all day so that she can buy just enough wheat or rice filled with stones and dirt from the ration shop every week or so.

I have to admit that while all this was happening around me in middle-school, high-school and under-grad, I didn’t think about it much because it was considered “normal” for most middle-class families to employ multiple, task-specific maids. The maids and their families needed to work to live, and we were supposedly providing work, wages, an occasional cup of tea when they were done working — even a saree or some clothes for the kids on major holidays. It was a sort of unwritten societal labor contract — it was also a social network of ladies of the homes and the maids who worked through multiple homes every day.

For some reason, lately, I’ve been made aware of the privilege enjoyed by me in that contract, in painstaking detail. For me, the way out of that contract happened to be in coming to the USA for graduate studies. For them, the only way out of that contract, was perhaps death. For death does finally destroy all privilege accorded by birth, or does it?

I do remember talking to a teenage son of one particular lady who used to do the daily trash pickup and clean the bathrooms — the dish washing lady, the floor cleaning lady, laundry washing and clothes ironing lady, and bathroom washing lady were all separate — if he had ever considered going to school. I don’t know that he ever answered me directly except by saying with his brilliant smile and impish grin with slightly downcast eyes — bhaiya (brother), this is my life, and I am happy doing the work given me.

So, that is why all the tears came. His statement, which I never forgot, was such a simple reminder that “it isn’t the task that makes the person high or low — it is the manner in which it is done, that makes the person so.” The tears also served as a reminder of what I have read so often in two of my favorite essays delivered in London in 1896 — “Vedanta and Privilege”, and “Privilege” — both by Swami Vivekananda.

A quick recap may be useful. The Advaita (Oneness) philosophy of Vedanta says that for Oneness to be our truth, one needs to believe in Universal equality, in the fact that we are all manifestation of the One divine. Without that central belief and practice, our inner world is fragmented and we dwell in anger, hate, jealousy and all that which divides us. If we hold that central belief that we all have the same One light of higher embodiment, our inner world is united through an ever-flowing current of higher love.

So, what is it that destroys Oneness, ethics and equality?

“Everyone is the embodiment of Knowledge, of eternal Bliss, and eternal Existence.

The ethical effect is just the same, with regard to equality.

And yet, there is privilege – the bane of human existence. The privilege of the strong over the weak, of the wealthy over the poor, the subtle privilege of those who claim higher intellect, and the worst of all, because it is the most tyrannical, is the privilege of (birth and) spirituality – those who think of themselves as more (due to birth), or those who think they know more of spirituality (than others).” – Vivekananda

And so arise the questions in my heart-mind complex. What privilege(s) do I assert? Which privilege(s) have I inherited? What privilege(s) am I passing on in my legacy? How does privilege manifest in my actions and practices, my goals, my dreams and my aspirations? And perhaps most importantly, how do I break down the bondage of all these privileges that entangle me in the web woven by all my desires?

I don’t know. Perhaps I can begin by washing my own dishes, keeping my personal (office) space clean, and maybe doing (or at least folding) my own laundry. Or all of the above…

Kumud

P.S. Join our weekly chat, Sunday June 14 at 9amET/ 630pm India in #SpiritChat on Twitter. All are welcome. No privilege necessary to attend, to share some love with all. I will bring some questions, some tea and cookies to share, for that is the small loving privilege granted me by the community for that hour. Namaste – @AjmaniK

Spirituality by Numbers

Tags

mathematics, numbers, oneness, spirituality

The Big Numbers

If some of you are like me, then the month of April probably felt like it had much more than the normal thirty days. Some days  seemed like to run into another, and we would sometimes forget what day of the week it was. Some days even seemed to last longer or shorter than the usual twenty four hours depending on our frame of mind. 

So, it was a bit of welcome relief to actually see the calendar roll over from April to May. There was a sense of freshness about seeing the single digit, 1, in the calendar icon on my phone’s home screen. It felt like the universe was nudging me to begin anew and re-establish some sort of a normal schedule — whatever ‘normal’ even means or will mean any more. As I looked back at April, I couldn’t help but think about some numbers.

We dealt with a lot of really big numbers in April. Trillions, billions, millions, hundred thousands, tens of thousands. In various different contexts, these numbers with lots of zeroes attached to them, came into our awareness. Some of these large numbers  will perhaps remain in our awareness for a while, if not permanently. We may rarely ever again treat them as mere numbers, because they attempt to quantify the impact of Covid19 on our collective consciousness. 

However, numbers big or small, did not always a role, or any role in human life of the past. Humans only invented numbers a few thousand years ago. Before that, humanity led a life on Earth for a fairly long time without numbers. This doesn’t mean that the ancient humans did not know how to count – they probably didn’t use numbers in the way that we use them. Some of us humans like me, even get obsessed with numbers occasionally. 

Learning Small Numbers

One of the very first things we want to teach toddlers is the skill of counting. As parents, it is often a great moment of accomplishment and pride when our child can learn how to count from one to ten. It’s a milestone of sorts. If they didn’t learn  how to count, children would be greatly impaired to function in this world. The parents and teachers would be deemed downright failures. And yet, I would posit that counting, numbers and the ability to eventually learn mathematics is mostly a mental skill. 

So, I reflected on the question – how do we remove ourselves from our dependence on numbers, if only for a moment? Nature provides the immediate answer. Walking the forest trail, I have never counted the number or trees. I have never even thought about counting as I walk across a bridge, marvel at the river’s flow, watch the woodpeckers tap on the trees, get blinded by the sunlight streaking through the trees or watch new flowers springing before my very eyes. When the storm starts to build up over the lake and the clouds do their dance, numbers are erased from my consciousness. You get the idea.

To quote Shakespeare — “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. I would take some liberty and replace ‘philosophy’ with ‘numbers’ — particularly the really large numbers. The ones with all those zeroes, particularly those which quantify pain, suffering and death, tend to overwhelm the heart and mind. It isn’t that every single person’s grief and healing isn’t important. It’s that when we look at suffering in mass aggregates, we run the risk of losing empathy for the individual.

Spirituality and Significant Numbers

And yet, there are some numbers which are very important from the heart’s perspective, from the spiritual perspective. In the vein of ‘paint by numbers’, let us be creative and look at them as ‘spirituality by numbers’. I was going to list a countdown from twelve, but for the sake of brevity, I will limit it to five. So, let us begin. 

Five. The number five represents the elements, and our senses. Our body is considered to have ten (a multiple of five) doorways, through which we receive sensory input. It is the tenth, the invisible space between the eyes, the third eye, which is the most significant from a spiritual perspective. It is used by many as the doorway to travel within, and as also the seat of awakening. 

Four. The four quadrants of the heart space and the cardinal points come to mind with the number four. In spirituality, there are the familiar three — the heart, the mind and the body — and also an additional fourth, unexplored, unearthed dimension. Can you think of any more spiritual interpretations of the number four?

The number three immediately evokes the Trinity of Christianity. In Sanatana Dharma (hinduism), three represents the powers of creation, sustenance and destruction that govern the cycle of life. The notion of word, thought and action, all interconnected, represent the number three. There is no thought without word, and thoughtless action notwithstanding, there is no action without first being impelled by thought. 

What about the number two? The philosophy of duality follows from the notion of two. Man is created in the image of the divine. Man eventually merges into the divine. These flow from the ideas of duality, which are often the creators of the ego, which can be the cause of great pain and suffering. One proposed solution is to discard the notion of duality. 

Finally, we arrive at the number One. The idea of Oneness is very appealing to many, because it represents our Universal nature. If we can remember to constantly embrace our fundamental nature of Oneness, then the world would be one of infinite love. And yet, the practice of Oneness is a work in progress. It is a seemingly huge task and yet it can be accomplished if we begin by recognizing and experiencing our own Oneness with the divine. The heart is our instrument, our flute to the experience of Oneness — if we let the divine breathe the breath of love through it. 

The lesson for me from April has been that it is easier to focus on the small tractable numbers. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Learning to count, all over again. Not to be outdone or ignored, zero is possibly the most powerful number of all. Zero can take any number, no matter how big or small, and by multiplication. reduce it to itself. Zero can also take any number, big or small, and by division by itself, create infinity.

From zero to infinity. That is all the spirituality by numbers we will ever need in our new present, won’t we?

Kumud

P.S. Longest blog post ever, isn’t this? I get carried away by numbers. Thanks for reading. And join us for our weekly gathering of folks in #SpiritChat on Sunday, May 3 at 9am ET / 1pm UTC / 630pm India. We will talk about some small numbers over tea, coffee, fruit, cookies, and a few questions. Namaste – @AjmaniK

Sunset – Spirituality, beyond the Numbers

Our Spiritual Reserves

Tags

covid19, preparedness, reserves, resilience, resolve

The sound of distant rolling thunder woke me up from my deep sleep. It felt like a freight train was headed in our direction, and I tried to go back to sleep but to no avail. The storm grew louder and louder until it was close enough to pelt the windows with a driving downpour. It was determined to be heard, demanding an awakening. And then, just like that (or so it seemed), there was silence as it must have quickly moved east. Even though the eye of the storm had passed, I could hear the distant rumblings, but from a different direction.

And yet, using my relaxation technique, I managed to go back to sleep again.But this felt like a different kind of sleep. Thunderstorms are known to charge the atmosphere with ions as they pass through. The severity of this one in the pre-dawn hour must have done the same. This new sleep felt like I had one eye open in uncertainty, in a kind of raised awareness. An awareness of a low intensity electric current running through the heart. A current that was asking questions like — what is truly essential in my life, what am I certain of amid this uncertainty, what is my readiness level for the next storm?

My Isshin-ryū sensei often used to say, a large part of preparedness is about knowing your strengths. He was also a proponent of practicing the basics, over and over and over again — even for, and particularly for, the black belts. “If you forget the basics, your foundation will weaken, and your mental reserves will eventually dwindle to the point where even a weak storm (opponent) will knock you over.” Good self-defense is a combination of awareness of our strengths, of the potential and intensity of the threat(s), and of our reserves.

Some storms come our way without warning or grow quickly upon us. They are like the hit that we don’t expect and they  hurts the most. There are other storms which can be seen coming our way from a distance. The early warning systems are flashing yellow, and the ones who have had their sleep broken before, know that it’s time to awaken. They know that this isn’t time to choose to ignore the warnings or to believe that they are somehow immune. They take action to check on their preparedness, to build up their physical, mental and spiritual reserves. 

What may our spiritual reserves look, sound and feel like? They may look like select passages of our faith’s texts or the essays and writings of spiritual luminaries who inspire and enlighten us. They may sound like the saying of our childhood prayers, the singing of our favorite soothing songs, the poetry recitations of hope, or the re-reading of stories read to us by our parents and teachers. They may feel like the remembrance of moments that gave us courage when we felt that we were deeply loved.

How do we build up our spiritual reserves? We build our reserves every time that we read a little bit more of the inspirational, sing a little bit more of the devotional, share a little bit more of the emotional. We can also build our reserves when we do regular check-ins with how we’re feeling, become more aware about how we let others’ actions influence our feelings, and clean our receptivity filters. Engaging the mundane can help us build our reserves too.

As I was walking the dog yesterday evening with my daughter, we got into a conversation about who expends more energy per body weight in a walk around the block – dogs or humans? Does it make a difference that humans have to only use two legs and dogs have to use four? This led to other mundane questions. How is it that the dog, in the middle of a deep sleep on a couch in the back of the house, can spring awake and bolt to the front of the house because he has sensed another dog walking by?  

Yes. Sometimes, asking the mundane questions of life is a good distraction because it shifts our awareness from the impending storm to the present moment. It gives us time to pause, to breathe, to let our guard down and let the nervous system resume its normal flow.

So, what are we to do with all this preparedness? What is the best use our spiritual reserves? We can use them to support those who are leading community preparedness, to spread awareness about the need to prepare, to perform small acts of kindness, to dissipate our fear and to boost our spiritual immunity. We can use are reserves to create more empathy for the suffering, deepen our friendships and even form new ones, and learn anew to find joy in the small things.

We are all in this together. Now, more than ever, our connectedness is essential. Of that, I am certain.

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly conversation on twitter in #SpiritChat – Sunday, March 29 at 9am ET / 1pm GMT / 630pm India. We will try and boost each other spiritual reserves through (mundane) questions over tea and cookies. It isn’t the end of the world, and yet it may be the beginning of the creation of a new, more empathetic one. Namaste – @AjmaniK

Sunrise on the beach in Riveria Maya (March 2016) 

Raising Community Spirit

Tags

community, connection, healing, health

As I sat at my writing window observing the community dynamics of the variety of birds in the backyard on a chilly spring Saturday morning, there was much to learn. The blackbirds take their positions on the fence and the cattails. The robins take position in the thrush and the grass. The hawks have their nest at the highest point in a nook among the trees. The chickadees sing in the pine trees along the fence line. So much diversity, and yet they have figured out how to mostly live in harmony as a community. They seem to live in a manner where all of them can make nests, grow families, and thrive for the season. On more than one occasion, I have even seen blackbirds sounding the alarm and escorting the hawks back into their nests when they get too close for comfort.

The community in my backyard reminds me of one of my grandmother’s favorite expression, with which she would end every prayer session… sarve bhavantU sukhinAH – it simply means, may we act in a way so as to spread peace and prosperity to all. On the face of it, this seems like a fairly easy way for us to live our lives. However, when faced with tough choices which negatively impact our lifestyle, our livelihood or the health of our immediate family, we may tend towards making decisions which may negatively impact our communities. 

She was so looking forward to this weekend, to playing back to back volleyball tournaments on Saturday and  Sunday. She loves the sport, her team, her coaches and everything about the community that surrounds it. On Wednesday, her coach texted that the tournaments may be cancelled because the venue (a local community college) was being shut down. The initial disappointment was quickly reversed as a following text said that they would be allowed to play (as they are not a college team). Confusion led to uncertainty and some anxiety. However, on Thursday, the state’s Governor gave clarity by banning all gatherings of a hundred of all more people. Game over. 

Schools closed for three weeks. Science centers, museums, nature centers, local libraries. All closed till further notice. At first glance, it all  seemed a bit ‘over the top’. And yet, once we talked as a family about how ‘flatten the curve’ works, we understood. By  limiting person to person contact, we slow the exponential spread. In turn, this gives the health system and its workers a fighting chance to treat those who are most at risk. In my three decades of living in the USA, other than the ‘coming together’ after 9/11, this is perhaps the widest action of community solidarity that I have seen.

So, as we adjust to our new ‘home boundedness’, what we can do to mitigate the sense of isolation we may eventually feel? I thought back to grandma’s invocation of sarve bhavantU sukhinAH. In times of crisis, she often would choose to do less, rather than more. This was her way of creating space for others, for community. She would have advised:

Eat less, drink more (water). 

Stream less. Read more.

Frown less. Smile more. 

Hoard less. Share more.

Talk less. Listen more.

Sit less. Walk more.

Less is more. 

It is the wisdom of our elders, our mentors and those whom we trust to speak truth to us that can raise our spirit. When our spirit is that of calm, instead of that of anxiety, we become conduits of spreading calm instead of anxiety. So, how do we bring calm to our heart, mind, body and spirit? The answer depends on the individual. What brings you calm? Regardless of the answer, the health of the community depends on the health of each one of us. As long as we radiate higher purpose, our actions will be  infused with the power to virtually hold on to each other, and keep our spirits soaring through any crisis.

Our true power is in the current that flows through us, and our community. Our power directs our actions towards a greater purpose. Our selfless actions inspire our spirits, and the result is the health and well-being of all.

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly twitter chat, Sunday March 15 at 9amET / 1pm GMT / 630pm India in #SpiritChat – we will raise each other spirits over tea, coffee, fruit and cookies as we gather online and engage in some Q & A – just like we’ve been doing for so many years 🙂 – @AjmaniK

 

Flowers – holding on to each other – raising each other up!

The Heart’s Unknowns

Tags

collaboration, heartmonth, mathematics, uncertainty, unknown

To say that I have a particular affinity, if not an outright life-long love-affair with Mathematics, would not be too far from the truth. And yet it didn’t always used to be that way. I think it was my fourth or fifth grade Math teacher, a fire-cracker of a lady named Mrs. Das, who lit the spark within me. She had such a passion and energy for the subject that I still remember the spark in her eyes all these decades later. 

Once a week, my daughter brings home a “problem of the week” (POW)  as part of her ‘honors geometry’ homework. Their teacher encourages them to work the POW with a parent ‘at the dinner table’. I think it’s a brilliant idea as it encourages parent-teenager conversation and collaboration. It also gives me an opportunity to find out how much of my middle-school math I actually remember! More often than not, we sink our teeth into the POW by transforming it into equations consisting of unknowns like x’s, y’s, and if absolutely necessary, even z’s.

Once the transformation is complete, it’s time to solve for the unknowns. Yay. Algebra. The first question we ask is if we have at least as many equations as there are unknowns. Why do we ask this question? If we have more unknowns than equations, we are stuck. No exact solution is possible unless we reformulate the equations and unknowns. This is akin to where our heart is looking for a solution to a life challenge, and yet the unknowns far exceed our own knowledge of the problem. Now what? 

In life, one step towards a solution would be to make some assumptions about the relationship between one or more of the unknowns. Say that we need to buy a new car or a house, choose a spot for our next vacation, help our kids decide which sport to play or which college to attend, and so on. From a financial perspective, one could assume that the choice of the  car would directly impact the choice of college. By creating this relationship between our choices, we eliminate an unknown. We can also reduce unknowns in decision-making by evaluating our tolerance for risk-taking.

In some cases, our perceived risk of the unknowns is so great, that it binds our heart to insurmountable fear. What if we sign a mortgage on the house and our financial situation changes? What if we don’t like the new neighborhood or our neighbors? When fear takes over, it ensures that no amount of guidance or reframing of the challenge will get us closer to a solution. Fear can also make our decision for us by magnifying the risk of the hearts unknowns. 

In other cases, the risk may be low enough, and we may even have more than enough information to make a decision. And yet, there is a nagging unknown in our heart which is informed by our intuition, our past experience, or some higher guidance. Unlike the x’s and y’s of algebra and geometry, we are now engaged in the POW of life’s mathematics. We have two job offers in hand. They are both financially great for us, but the heart’s knowing leads us to the lower paying one with the low-stress lifestyle.

The heart’s knowing may thus lead to seemingly inexact or even irrational solutions. And that’s okay, because joy isn’t always found in finding the exact solution to the problem. Joy is in the simple sitting down at the kitchen counter and playing with the unknowns. Joy is in the knowing that there will soon be another opportunity to collaborate on life’s new POW with an open heart. 

Maybe it’s time to open our heart and re-kindle our love-affair with more unknowns — what does your heart think? 

Kumud

P.S. Join our weekly twitter chat, Sunday Feb 23 at 9amET in #SpiritChat – we will explore some new unknowns, and learn a bit more about life’s mathematics and may even attempt to solve a POW together. Of course, no group activity would be complete without tea and cookies…. Namaste – @AjmaniK

Bridges – old and new – can serve as invitations to explore the unknown – meditation is one such bridge…

It was a brilliant walk beyond that bridge…

Last autumn’s leaves, waiting for a new spring’s unknowns

The Spirit of the Game

Tags

chess, coaches, equality, play, sports

Growing up in India, I was never much of a sports-playing kid in school. The emphasis was purely on academics, and any activity that distracted from “studies” was considered superfluous. It was even suggested that those who excelled in sports only did so because they were “poor” students and were probably not much interested in studying anyway!

This isn’t to say that I did not enjoy playing football (i.e. soccer), basketball, volleyball or even softball (without the gloves)  at every opportunity that I got during the daily P.T. (“physical training”) class. I even signed up to play “goalkeeper” during an inter-school tournament one year. However, my stint was short-lived because the after-school practices interfered with my “studies”. So, I decided to bide my time to play “real sports” until I got to college. 

However, all was not lost on the high-school “sports” front for me. In the ninth grade, my new brother-in-law started to teach me how to play chess. A combination of “plus points” about chess made it “acceptable” to my parents to allow me to spend untold number of hours playing the game. Firstly, I was viewed as being a good host to my brother-in-law, every time that we played when he visited us. In Indian culture, family members of the sister’s or daughter’s in-laws were always  treated with great respect and accommodation. So, this was strike one in my favor. Secondly, chess is a cerebral game, and this aligned well with the focus on “academic” activities. Thirdly, unlike football, there was no chance of getting physically hurt playing ‘chess’!

After playing diligently for a few years, studying books about chess openings, spending hours trying to solve the chess puzzles that appeared in the Sunday sports section of the newspaper, I actually started winning once in a while when I played with my “teacher”. I even started playing with my brother-in-law’s father, which was always a special occasion for me. This did land me in a bit of a dilemma as I was now finding myself in a position of asking a question. Should I be showing “disrespect” to the “in-laws” by playing “all out” and to the best of my abilities? Or should I be playing with integrity, in the “spirit of the game”, and let the pawns and rooks and knights and bishops sort it out on the board? (The dilemma sorted itself out once I graduated high-school and the opportunities to play became very rare).

Just when I thought I was getting really good at the game, an “International Master (IM)” from the USSR visited our high-school for a demonstration. He agreed to play “simultaneous chess” with thirty-two students and teachers. We all sat, sixteen apiece, in two long rows, and he moved from one board to the next, making one move at a time against each player. One by one we were defeated, and I was totally awed by the surgical precision with which he dismantled all but one student’s carefully crafted defenses. At the end of it that day, I wasn’t sure if I was awed by the IM’s thirty-one wins or the student who escaped with a draw! In those three short hours, I learnt a lot from the IM about the “spirit of the game”, and how much more I still had to learn about playing chess itself.

During my college and graduate school years, there was an unexpected hiatus of about ten years in active chess-playing for me. Fortunately, the love of the game did not die. In the mid-nineties, the advent of the internet and “international chess servers” opened up a lot more opportunities to play with players of different “ratings” (levels) from across the world. I even made a few friends with whom I would play fairly regularly – “friends” who I never even talked with, let alone meet in real life. Perhaps this experience was a precursor to what was to come a few years later on twitter in the form of #SpiritChat!

But what does chess, or sports at large, teach me about life and spirituality?

Chess taught me that the “spirit of the game” goes beyond winning and losing. It allows for the possibility of a well-contested, thoroughly enjoyable draw! I learnt that regardless of how “powerful” they were at the start of the game, every single piece was subject to being “humbled”. Any of the “lowly” pawns could not only humble the “mighty” king but also  become “all powerful” by being “queened”. All a pawn had to do was take one small step at a time until it reached the other end of the board! The bishops taught me about the discipline of “staying in our lane”, for they were only allowed to move diagonally on squares of assigned colors. The knights taught the power of flexibility in movement – the only pieces that can attack without being in line-of-sight of the pieces that they are attacking. The rooks taught me that long-range thinking, even if it is only limited to straight lines, conveys power only second to that of the all-powerful Queen.

One great lesson of playing chess perhaps came from learning that “the center” is all-important. A strong grasp of the center of the board, just like a powerful awareness of our heart, is essential to success in chess and life. Who is it that  controls the center? More often than not, the center is established by the “lowly” pawns, with their one or two small steps at the very start of the game. Similarly, it is with our small, pawn-like moves in our daily spiritual practice, that awakens awareness of our center. Our daily spiritual steps may seem small, even insignificant. Yet, with every heart-based move we make, we are setting up space for our center to prevail.

Looking back on all those years of chess-playing and all the games I must have played, one common conclusion stands out. At the end of every game, all of the pieces – whether they were black or white, winners or losers or participants in a draw,  pawns or queens or kings – all were put back in the box from which they were brought out, to await yet again for  their opportunity to take center-stage again.

The game taught me that winning and losing are often forgotten, but the spirit of those who taught us how to play with purity, fairness and dignity leaves an imprint on our heart. Remembrance of the game’s spirit is perhaps the best way to honor our coaches, and to be grateful for those who choose to be on life’s playgrounds with us! 

Kumud 

P.S. What is your favorite sport to watch or to play? What has your favorite ‘game’ taught you about life and living? If you were to play a position in your favorite game, what would it be? I invite you to share the spirit of the game with the #SpiritChat community on Sunday, Feb 2nd at 9amET on twitter. Maybe we can even play chess one of these days…  Namaste – @AjmaniK

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Alan Light – Own work by the original uploader, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20299

On Loving Discipline

Tags

awareness, freedom, spiritual practice, spirituality

Have you ever thought that “discipline” was invented to put you in a “box”, restrict your freedom(s), prevent you from living the life that you were meant to live? Have you ever met someone who is allergic to, inherently resists the idea of “discipline”?

In my younger (read ‘teenage’) years, discipline was perhaps the last thing that I wanted to be subject to. The very notion that I was expected to make my bed before I went to school seemed like an injustice. And the bus came at 6:30am! In high school, there was no ‘sleeping in’ on weekends. Saturday morning discipline included going shopping for milk, vegetables and groceries. Then there was the choice of dusting the furniture and bookcases, folding the laundry, putting away the washed dishes, setting the table for lunch or dinner, clearing the table after the meals, and much more. There was no escape from the seeming prison of chores and discipline. And I haven’t even talked about the take- no-prisoners attitude of discipline of some of the teachers at school!

But little was I to know that it was all preparation for what was to come my way a few years later. On my arrival as a graduate student in the USA, I realized that the ‘prison of discipline’ in my aunt’s home in India had taught me self-awareness. I was pleasantly surprised that I knew exactly what it would take to thrive on my own in a foreign land. I was able to work out chore-sharing with my roommates, just like I chore-shared with my cousins growing up. I quickly became aware that grocery shopping, laundry, dishes, cleaning, and even cooking, were all things that I was already good at. I actually began to fall in love with the idea of discipline!

After the self-awareness, I began to realize that freedom from the ‘prison of discipline’ had led me to the practice of self-discipline. The more I practiced it, the more my self-respect and self-image grew. With this growth, I found that I was comfortable in reaching out and making friends with all sorts of nationalities, and particularly the Americans. The land that I considered foreign, adopted me over time.

I believe that this two-way adoption happened because self-respect grew into self-love. It took self-love to keep an open mind to learning about western customs and culture, and harmonizing them with my eastern foundations.

As a parent and teacher, I began to consider that most of our parents’ (and teachers’) discipline is perhaps borne out of love for us. By by ‘drawing lines’ for us, they are teaching us self-awareness, self-respect, and self-love. Theirs, and now mine, is evolving into a loving discipline indeed.

Loving discipline manifests because true love takes some discipline, and true discipline takes a lot of love. What’s your take on ‘loving discipline’?

Kumud @AjmaniK

P.S. join us for our weekly #SpiritChat gathering – Sunday, Aug 11 at 9amET – I will bring some questions on discipline – with love 🙂 – Namaste. Kumud.

Nature’s discipline takes many forms – mostly of a loving nature!