An Attitude of Friendliness

Tags

friendliness, friendship, maitri, relationship, spirituality

Some would have been first seeded forty years ago next July. Others would have been planted thirty five years ago this fall. They have become strong, healthy, long-term trees that have endured the winds of time and stood the droughts of distance across continents. And then, there was the ‘online world’ of twitter, where a totally different garden of friendships was seeded over the past ten years.

Some years, it seemed like I would talk with my twitter friends much more regularly – at least weekly during our hourly Sunday morning chats – than I would with my ‘real-life’ friends. Somewhere along the way, I dropped the distinction between ‘online’ and ‘real-life’, because all the friendships had a human quality about them. If the heart is engaged, then the medium is simply a conduit. If there is no heart-engagement, then no medium is going to help develop a friendship, is it?

So, where does it all begin?

It is when we exclaim ‘you too!’ that the friendship seed can find common ground. You lived in that part of Delhi? You’ve been to Kashmir too? You are also a middle child? You had a tough time with thermodynamics in engineering school too? Oh, you’re looking for a roommate too in this small college town, seven thousand miles away from home?

That’s the ‘birds of a feather’ metaphor of the beginnings of friendships.

There is also the ‘opposites attract’ metaphor.

This happens when two people are brought together in time and space, and they are so totally different that their natural curiosity leads them to take baby steps towards each other. A half-dozen or so American friendships in graduate school began this way for me. They taught me about baseball, white-water rafting, late-night pizza, football, thanksgiving, living and thriving in small-town America.

More importantly, the gentle inquiries of my American friends about Indian society, religion and customs also encouraged me to delve deeper into my own culture. In trying to answer their questions, I begin to realize how little I knew about my own country and myself. Their questions got me started on the path to asking questions – my journey into inquiry was prompted by them. 

What makes for a life-impacting friendship? Does the impact depend on the stage in our life that the friendship begins? Is it the ‘birds of a feather’ or the ‘opposites attract’ type that is more impactful?  How many friendships can we meaningfully sustain? What makes a friendship sustainable in the long run? Let me try and answer that last question on sustainability. 

Some shared experiences, some commonality of life experience, some diversity of cultural background, some openness of heart  towards forgiveness. These are some basic ingredients for sustaining healthy, long-term friendships. Is there an indispensable  ingredient for sustainability? To quote the Yoga sage Patanjali, an attitude of friendliness towards those who are friendly towards us, also called maitri, is vital. In other words, our attitude of Maitri is the essential sun, the seed, the soil, the wind and the water of all friendship.

As we grow our attitude of friendliness, we grow our heart through joyous experiences of deep friendships. Eventually, we see no stranger because we become aware of our sustainable friendship with the One who is the friend to all. 

Kumud

P.S. Join us in our weekly conversation with the #SpiritChat community this Sunday, July 18 at 9amET / 630pm India on twitter. We will kickoff an informal “Friendship week” and invite you to (re)connect with a friend or few, either online or offline, or within. Help us spread the attitude of friendliness. In maitri, Namaste – @AjmaniK

An attitude of friendliness makes space in the heart for the friendly…

 

On Spiritual Enrichment

Tags

enrichment, obstacles, prosperity, spiritual goals, wealth

It felt like an early autumn morning as I walked out on to the deck after a night of storms. The remnants of the coastal storm had brought some welcome relief from the heat along with overcast skies. However, one glance at the thicket of trees filled with green leaves was enough to bring me back to summer.  It was going to be a great outside day. Perhaps I would work in the garden and  pull weeds in the flower beds, I mused. 

My musing turned to three hours of first removing the overgrown grasses on both sides of the fence, and then working around the rose bushes on the weeds. Why do these weeds keep showing up, particularly in a six-foot portion of the flower beds? I know that I have put down landscaping fabric (weed barrier) and covered it with layers of river rock over the years. What’s missing?

As I dug into the six-foot portion with my special tool that helps me extract the weeds from the roots, I noticed that I wasn’t hitting any fabric beneath the rocks. Aha. Mystery solved, or so I thought. I now remembered that I had run out of landscape fabric when in that six-foot portion when I did the flower bed project a few years ago. No wonder the two rose bushes in that portion would always be out-shone by the ones that bloomed in the adjacent twelve-foot portion that does have the weed barrier, and a lot less weeds. 

A single shortcut taken by me three years ago, and I have spent an inordinate number of hours paying for it in maintenance and  lack of enrichment in that part of the garden. I essentially left the door open for the weeds to create ‘poverty’, right next door to the ‘wealthiest’ part of the flower bed. I felt like the farmer who keeps watering his fields while the back-stops on his sluice gates are left open. Do you ever feel that way in life, in your spiritual practice?

I felt like that for years. My progress, my heart’s growth would happen in fits and starts. I did a lot of reading, which I still do, because I love to read.  I spent a lot of time and learnt a lot in years of my visits to the local temple. I still do. I rarely missed an opportunity to attend day(s)-long retreats with spiritual Gurus visiting town. That didn’t happen over the past year, but I look forward to them again. And yet, something was missing. The aspect of long-term enrichment of the heart and soul remained elusive. I didn’t feel like I could call-up deep inner peace, silence, stillness, and such, at a moment’s notice. And then something changed.

I decided to try a new meditation practice. My ‘trainer’ asked me for a favor. “Make a commitment to practice for ninety days.” Ninety days? I had been practicing on and off by myself for years. Ninety days was going to be a walk in the garden, weeds and all! And so it began. Morning practice. Evening cleaning (weeding!). Night-time remembrance. Repeat next day. Weekly ‘deep cleaning’ (weeding!). Slowly, days turned to weeks, which turned to months. It has been over four years. Why am I still practicing?

My practice makes me feel enriched. Every morning – okay, more mornings than not – I feel like a kid in a candy store as I sit for the morning meditation. What new treasures am I going to discover today? In the evening, as I do the inner weeding, I prepare for the dreamless sleep that is going to come after bedtime remembrance. More enrichment follows. Some days I feel like I am immersed in all this wealth at random moments during the day. I can carry my peace with me because I feel like I have access to a secret treasury. 

Except that it wasn’t a secret. All it took was wondering, asking the right questions, waiting for the answers, and when offered the help of a new practice, accepting the invitation to make a small commitment. It was like deciding to fix that six-foot piece of missing fabric, and see if the weeds would stop taking the roses’ bloom away next season. It was learning that enrichment isn’t about accumulating a wealth of practices, but more about doing that One practice which consistently gives us great joy, peace, harmony and whatever makes our hearts glow with purpose. 

What is that enrichment practice going to be for you? If you are already practicing, you are already on the path to enrichment unlimited. If you aren’t, then pause and consider. Ask some questions. Be open to the answers. And keep sight of the knowing that you, just like anyone else, deserve to be enriched beyond your wildest dreams.

This is your time. Don’t shy away. Be still. Listen. 

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly conversation with the #SpiritChat community on twitter, Sunday July 11 at 9am ET / 2pm UTC / 630pm India. I know that you have the ability to enrich someone with your experience and insights. Come share with us. Namaste – @AjmaniK

 

Let’s make no mistake – weeds and thorns contribute to enrichment too!

On Belonging and Detachment

Tags

attachment, belonging, detachment, purity, truth

In conversations about spirituality, the ideas of attachment and detachment come up regularly. The motivation for practicing ‘letting go’ is that it can potentially help us with our progress on the spiritual path. The question is: how does  detachment really help us grow spiritually?

According to the Indian sage Adi Sankaracharya, doing our work with an attitude of detachment to the rewards helps us purify our inner being or heart. It is when we purify our heart that we develop the burning desire to know the truth. It is when we want to know the truth that we develop the desire to work towards liberation. If we string together the pearls of purity, truth and an inner attitude of detachment, we can travel the path to liberation. 

The path sounds so simple, doesn’t it? And yet, it is often so difficult to walk in daily life. We are constantly getting more and more entangled in the web of attachment woven by our actions. We share something on social media or write a blog post, and we immediately await the ‘reward’ of likes, shares, reactions and comments from others. We are incessantly subjected to a stream of advertising, marketing, and messaging that tries to deepen our fear of missing out on the latest activity or product that will make our life ‘better’.

We want to embrace simplicity and minimalism by reducing our impact on the environment, and yet our desires and possessions seem to keep on increasing. So, what can we do to reclaim our attitude of detachment in our daily living and actions? The Yoga practice of aparigraha – not grasping in any way – can help us reverse course. Aparigraha is a simple, two part practice. The first part is to work towards identifying and then freeing ourselves of our existing attachments. The second part is to turn our focus towards our internal world, which will automatically reduce our focus and attraction to the ‘shiny objects’ of the external world.

Our two-part Yoga practice of Aparigraha or developing detachment can be viewed as an invitation to live our lives in a non-clinging, non-acquisitive, non-transactional and non-possessive manner. When we reduce the transactional nature of our actions, we begin to notice more lightness, purity, and caring emerge in our heart. If and when we truly care about our fellow beings, then giving and sharing can follow. Sharing can create space for us to belong to each other and replace the desire to constantly transact with one another. 

The sense of belonging can create a beautiful heart space. Loving detachment can bring us closer to that space. Working together, belonging and detachment can bring us closer to our divine potential. Let’s work towards that, shall we? 

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly chat, Sunday June 27 at 9amET / 630pm India on twitter. We will talk about detachment and its practice. We hope that you can join us for our #SpiritChat gathering, and grow our circle of belonging. Namaste – @AjmaniK

 

Detached from each other, they bloom best in a shared sense of belonging – hydrangeas

On the Raising of Fathers

Tags

children, fatherhood, Fathers Day, imperfection, spiritual fathers

Let’s get this out of the way at the very beginning. There are no perfect fathers, just like there are no perfect children. That could be the end of the blog post right here. In fact for some of you, “father’s day” doesn’t exactly fill your heart with warmth. It may even bring back pain, anger, grief and hurtful memories. And yet, allow me share a bit of my personal story with you.

I was fortunate to be raised, and influenced, by three wonderful men who played tremendous father figures in my life. My birth Dad, my Uncle whose family I spent fourteen wonderful years from third grade on, and my Uncle’s brother in the USA whose family pretty much adopted me from the moment I landed in the USA for graduate studies. All three of these men played roles in my life, most of which I did not understand until I became a Dad myself. 

All my Dads taught me more about sacrifice and grace in motion, than I could possibly hope to learn by myself. And this was all before I had ever read a single word of my ’spiritual guides’ like Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Yogananda, Ramakrishna, and more. Perhaps I was too busy taking notes in my heart about what my ‘real Dads’ were trying to teach me with their lives. Over the years, one by one, they all went to the eternal flame, as all mortals do. In their passage, they each left me with a hidden challenge —  to keep their flame in motion in the world around me. 

I became aware of the challenge when I was presented with the gift to raise my own. In the process, In raising her, I gained greater understanding that I was really raising myself in small ways every day. Could my daughter be raising me through direct experience of empathy, kindness and listening? Could it also be that the tough challenge of raising me had helped raised my Dads in some way? 

Psychologists stress upon the critical role of ‘fathers’ in their children’s lives, but what if the ‘fathers’ are resentful or afraid of the role presented to them? It is hard enough for willing and dedicated Dads to ‘do raising right’, so one can imagine the challenges of those who feel unprepared or unwilling.  In such cases, could the role of ‘raising’ be done more effectively by teachers, mentors, willing relatives, spiritual guides and more? 

There are no easy answers, because no matter how much we talk about ‘simplicity’, life is messy and complicated. The best advice that I got from my Dads was that they gave very little advice, if any at all. They left the door open for me to figure it out on my own  because they had no way of forecasting what I would be facing when doing my own ‘raising’. If anything, my Dads’ best ‘advice’ was in the kindness with which they all treated their family, friends, guests, and those who asked them for help.

The older I get, the wiser my Dads’ life lessons seem to get. I have a ways to go on my journey, and yet I know that they, and my guides, are raising me up every time I stumble and fall. I also know that there is a loving energy in the universe that raises you too. I hope you believe the same. 

Namaste,

Kumud

P.S. Join our #SpiritChat community in our weekly twitter chat, Sunday June 20 at 9amET / 630pm India. We will talk about Fathers, imperfections, and raising each other on our path. I will bring the usual goodies and questions. I hope you join us – @AjmaniK

 

The three who raised me… they show up often in nature…

A Spirit of Acceptance

Tags

acceptance, healing, knowing, knowledge, pain, remembrance, suffering

ery time I tried to come out of it, I kept falling back into the light – that’s what happened multiple times as I tried to emerge from the morning meditation session. It was a bit like the oceans current pulling you back as you try to come ashore after a swim. I did not resist the pull of the light. Every time I was pulled back, I emerged a bit lighter as a result. 

It was a good thing that this happened on a Saturday morning and I could engage this dance without any time constraints of a work day or a school day. Any other day, and I would have resisted being pulled back or falling back, because I had ‘other things’ to do. Such is the nature of the balance between acceptance and resistance. 

How much time and energy are we willing to give to the clearing of our mind and the opening of our heart? When the messengers of pain and suffering come our way, are we going to be accepting of their messages and sit with them, or are we going to rush them away like unexpected guests at our doorsteps? 

Acceptance has another dimension. Our acceptance of our own beauty, our talents, our abilities and our frailties often meets with internal resistance. At some point in our lives, we all have perhaps had a nagging sense that we are not enough, that we don’t belong, and that we are somehow even deserving of our undue share of pain. Our emotional and mental health suffers as a result. 

One pathway to acceptance of our selves is knowing who we are. This self-knowing is different from the knowledge (about who we are) given to us by others, no matter how well (or ill) intentioned they may be. It is useful to ask the question, and ask it often – who am I in this moment? What is my truth? What am I feeling and where did this feeling come from? And so on.

Eventually, when we have had enough immersions in the answers, we may not need to question any more. We come to realize that we are the ocean, and that our separateness from it is a form of forgetfulness of that knowing. 

Through remembrance, comes the knowing of “I am That”. From knowing, come acceptance. With knowing, we can then stay in the ocean or emerge from it. It does not matter either way, because we are then in constant remembrance that we belong to each other. True healing and helping can then begin.

Kumud

P. S. Join us for our weekly gathering with the #spiritchat community on Twitter, Sunday May 16 at 9am ET / 630pm India. We will talk about acceptance over tea, fruit, flowers and cookies. Namaste – @AjmaniK

The sun crests over the trees on a spring morning…

On Mothers and Perspectives

Tags

caregiving, divine, fostering, mothers, mothersday, perspective, universality

How can I write about a Mother’s perspective when I am not one according to the world’s definition? One way to attempt it is to write from my viewpoint as a child of a mother. Another way to write about it is through listening, watching and observing the Mothers around me. Yet another way is to consider the varied qualities and roles that ‘Mothers’ play in the world. Let me dive in and try a blend of all of the above.

The biological mother is the physical reason for our being, the conveyor of our existence. All of us have a connection to her through blood, tissue, genetics, and in most cases, nurture and nutrition. From a woman’s perspective, becoming a mother (or wanting to be one) requires a complex investment of physical, emotional, mental and financial energy. My own mother told me the stories of her challenges of getting married at nineteen, and then almost dying while giving birth to my older brother within a year. I often wonder – how would have her life been different if she hadn’t been handed the Mother role at that age? Yes, her three children were her great pride and joy, and yet the way she talked about her dreams, I sometimes wonder – what more could she have accomplished in life if she had had more ‘freedom’ in her role? Do you ever wonder the same about your biological mother?

There are many whose lives have had little influence of their biological mothers. For them, grandparents, fathers, foster parents and even teachers, may have taken over the traditional ‘mother’ role of nurturing, caring and loving. What is the perspective of those children and their ‘mothers’? I happened to stumble upon this perspective through my neighbor’s writing this week. It is titled “The Strength of Surrender” – I invite you to read her powerful story where she says that ‘Courage is a Mother’s first name’. Yes, the perspective of courage can often be overlooked by those who have lived through an ‘ideal’ upbringing – if there is even such a thing as ‘ideal’.

Yet another perspective on Mothers and children is that if the “Universal Mother”. I often refer to “Mother Earth” or “Gaia” as the one that provides unlimited and unconditional love and caring to humans, animals and plants alike. Mother Earth’s various energies manifest in diverse ways, recognizing and filling the needs of growth, development and healing for all her beings. The Universal Mother evokes a perspective of deep gratitude within me – what m’a your perspective on her?

The fourth perspective I would like to present for your consideration is that of the Divine Mother. For me, She represents the ultimate ‘safe harbor’, the ever available giver of warmth, understanding and forgiveness, the fountainhead showering constant love, and the firmament of grace and protection for her beloved children. Every instance of remembrance of such a Divine Mother has the tendency to fill me with light, lightness and joy. How about you? Do you have a similar perspective about her existence, her presence in your life?

I realize that I may not have covered all the perspectives of Mothers today. In fact, it isn’t possible to do so. There are those for whom the Mother perspective is that of pain, suffering, estrangement and more. There are those who have lost a Mother, and Mothers who may have lost children recently. There are those…

My hope and prayer is that whatever your perspective on Mothers may be, may it in some way eventually help you walk towards more love, more light, more healing and more living.

Namaste,

Kumud

P.S. Join us in our weekly chat, Sunday May 9 at 9am ET / 630pm India with the #SpiritChat family on Twitter. I will bring some of my Mom’s favorite chai and snacks – @AjmaniK

The Spirit of Goodness

Tags

action, COVID-19, goodness, grief, healing, spirituality, suffering

It is the first of May. Over the last ten days of April, my mind has been all over the place with all that has been happening in India. If my social media feeds are any gauge, a lot of my friends and family are in the same situation. We are all witnessing the pain, the grief, the suffering – some are in the midst of it and others, who are at a distance, are doing whatever they can to offer help and support.

The anger and rage, despair and despondency, seemed to grow exponentially, as the situation deteriorated at a rapid rate. It seemed that almost everyone that I talked to knew someone who was affected in a big or small way by the virus’ spread in India. A lot of folks, including me, were asking – how could this (be allowed to) happen?

It isn’t unusual for us to ask this question when unprecedented pain, suffering, and death is brought upon humanity – how can a loving God (or higher power) allow so many to be subject to all this? How can this be a just outcome? Where is the goodness in all this?

I believe that these are all good questions to ask. I also believe that darkness and dark times can awaken us, remind our hearts of our empathetic nature, and inspire us to yet again focus on creating goodness and healing through our actions.

My belief in goodness is being re-affirmed every day by the same social media streams that are carrying pleas for help. For every individual plea, there seem to be dozens of people stepping up with ideas, resources, messages of hope and prayers. Non-government organizations, faith groups, corporations, and countries are taking action to provide all kinds of resources.

In the midst of the tragedy, when I refocused my mind, my heart began to see an awakening that led to an outpouring of goodness and goodwill towards India and her people. The questioning and blame setting and analysis of ‘what went wrong’ will continue for a while, and yet there is affirmation that goodness of human hearts is alive and well.

Hundreds of pop-up food kitchens. Folks lining up to donate plasma. NGOs creating makeshift hospitals. Doctors creating zoom networks to provide free consultation around the clock across the country. Teenagers creating “GoFundMe” campaigns to raise money for UNICEF India. Healthcare and frontline workers working untold hours at grave personal risk. The list of goodness and good people goes on and on…

What have I learnt? Darkness is an opportunity to create more goodness, or awaken the reservoir that already exists in our heart. We belong to goodness, because we have breathed it through the live of our parents, our caregivers, our well wishers, our friends and family, our spiritual guides and lights, and even the kindness of strangers.

If there is a winning or losing, then Goodness wins. Let us remember, and stay focused on helping the helpers who embody the hearts and hands of the divine.

Namaste,

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly conversation, Sunday May 2 at 9amET / 630pm India. India and I are grateful for your love and grace, and look forward to sharing tea and cookies with you again. – @AjmaniK

Sunrise on a morning walk. April 2021.

On Life and Dignity

Tags

compassion, dignity, justice, kindness, purity, simplicity, spring, walking

What is dignity, and why is it important to us as human beings and our human experience? Rather than try to define dignity in physical terms, I feel it easier for me to define its experience. One such experience was the soft spoken-ness of my grandmother, which was inherited by her children, and perhaps by me to some extent. By lowering their voices and weighing their words, particularly in times of great stress, all my elders showed me that dignity can flow from speaking softly, kindly and with deliberation.

Why may we need dignity in speech? Perhaps because it isn’t even possible to have dignity in our actions if our speech is corrupted by indignities of the mind.

How may one develop dignity of thought? One way is to purify the heart, whence the mind’s layers of dirt get flushed with silence, beauty and awareness of the truth that we are.

Yes. We are back to the work of the heart’s purity. One way to purity is to work with an attitude of loving service, as we remind ourselves, and those we may be privileged to serve, of our shared human dignity. Every verdict that “bends the long arc of the moral universe a bit more toward justice”, every invitation by someone to break bread with them, every softly spoken word whispered to us in the hour of our awareness, seeds dignity within us.

It is with these new seeds of dignity that we find the courage to rise yet again, and continue our walk towards that permanent love and grace which is available to all. Our walk need not be complete or complex. In fact the simpler the better, the more dignified it usually is.

This reminds me. It’s time for a cup of tea. One join me. Namaste,

Kumud

P.S. Join in our weekly chat on Twitter, Sunday April 25 at 9amET / 630pm India as we share some tea, fruit, flowers and cookies. Namaste – @AjmaniK

The simplicity, purity and dignity of Spring

On Life’s Diverse Colors

Tags

celebration, colors, diversity, spirituality, unity

As I walk outside on to the deck just after sunrise, I am greeted by a symphony of sounds and colors that are unmistakably spring. The blue hues of the lake shimmering reflections of the sky remind me of the much more expansive palette of the skies and waters of the Caribbean at sunrise on any given morning.

The greens of new buds on plants and the tiniest of leaves on trees in the forest encourage the grasses that are meandering their way back to life. There aren’t many reds or oranges or yellows or such yet, but I am sure that that palette will appear later during the sunset hour. I muse over my cup of tea…

What would our lives look like without the existence of color, or our ability to discern the beauty that the myriad colors of people’s experiences add to our lives? If our true wealth is the sum total of our shared experiences, then would we not be paupers without having experienced a multitude of hues of faiths, beliefs, cultures and such? Why is it then that…

There are so many who continue to insist that it is their color, their truth, their experience, their waters, their way of life, their spiritual practices, their books, their philosophy, their mythology, their culture and such that is superior and deserving of domination — and that all else must go.

It is like me trying to color the world around me with “my favorite color”. Or, perhaps it is like a color-blind person (yes, that’s me in real life) saying that a particular color doesn’t exist or cannot possibly exist or has no value because I literally cannot see it. Imagine if the extent of our universe was limited to our senses and their perception – would we not be living in denial of a large part of our human experience? I perhaps digress…

On this full moon of March, a weekend that marks the “festival of colors” or Holi in India, my heart asks more questions. What is the color of the falling rain or the dew drop or the tear in a mother’s eye? What is the color of the breeze that awakens the buds in spring? What is the color of the heat that warms the earth and causes the roots to stir to life? What is the color of love or fear or hate or joy or awakening? I don’t really know…

I do know that it is perhaps in embracing all our transitions through the experiences of all the myriad colors of our life, that we can prepare ourselves for the experiences which are colorless, formless, infinite and permanent. It is a form of Yoga. If we were to deny or negate the diversity of color in our world, how would we ever arrive at unity, let alone experience Oneness in our heart?

So, bring on Holi, I say, with all of its vigor of color, joy and celebration of all of humanity. Let there be color everywhere through light, so that its source can infuse love for all in our hearts.

Kumud

P. S. Join us to celebrate and share the colors of your life in our weekly chat – Sunday, March 28 at 9amET in #SpiritChat on Twitter. Namaste – @AjmaniK

What colors can your eye see in Spring?

The Heart’s Purpose

Tags

fulfillment, heart matters, heartmonth, purpose, significance

Sometimes, you can live a lot of life in a mere five minutes. Sometimes, it may take you five hours, five days, or even five years to life a lot of life. Sometimes, even fifty years may not seem to be enough to live the life that we feel we ought to have lived or hope to live.

Before we go further, let me ask a question. What is the most significant ‘thing’ that you can remember about the last five years of your life? Some will ask in return – well, what do you mean by significant? One way to answer the ‘what is significant’ question is to ask – how well did it align with my purpose? To go further down the rabbit hole, we then ask, what is my (heart’s) purpose?

Purpose can be a very wide-ranging thing. Some of us (ahem) tend to spend a lot of time – a bit more than five minutes – wondering about purpose. Does my purpose need to be something I love (to do)? Does purpose need to align with what the world needs? Does purpose have to focus on what I can make money with? Or can purpose be drawn from my natural talents and what I am good at? 

The four questions related to refining and defining of purpose, so that we can arrive at significance, and what the Japanese have called  Ikigai – a reason for being. 

Ikigai entails actions of devoting oneself to pursuits one enjoys and is associated with feelings of accomplishment and fulfillment – Michigo Kumano

I was pointed to this perspective on purpose by my very good friend, Gopi Maliwal, following a discussion four weeks ago after he had cryptically (and uncharacteristically :)) tweeted… “this is one of the happiest days of my life”. We talked more via DM, and the reason for his “happiest day” became abundantly clear to me. He shared that he felt a sense of fulfillment because he had taken a step “to make his life truly useful”.

The brief conversation made me ask the question – what would give my heart and its actions a sense of accomplishment, of fulfillment, of significance, of having fulfilled its purpose? I further asked – five minutes, five days or five years hence, how much of my living will contribute to bringing me closer to my heart’s purpose?

I invite you to ask some of these questions. If it helps, sit with a loved one in your heartspace and reflect on the four quadrants – what are  you really good at, what is your current work, what does the world need, and, what do you love? What is it that lies at the intersection of the four quadrants? What emerges from the intersection?

Kumud

P.S. Heartmonth continues in our weekly conversation on twitter – Sunday, Feb 14 at 9amET / 730pm India. Join us as we explore our heart’s purpose and share the love. Namaste – @AjmaniK

The heart’s purpose is often revealed by Nature…