The Heart of Service

Tags

awareness, duty, privilege, service

As best as I can surmise, today’s twenty minute stint was perhaps my shortest weekly walk on the trail in quite a while. The weather front was turning rain to sleet, which meant that it was cold, blustery, pellets were coming at me sideways from all directions and it was as grey and foreboding feeling as winter can be imagined.

And yet I wasn’t deterred because it is these weekly walks that have become my inspiration for the ideas that turn into the weekly blog post which I often write after the walk. The clarity, lightness and simplicity that flow from walking in solitude and observing the dynamics of flora and fauna creates a portal through which the thoughts flow into words on the page.

At the start of today’s walk, I set the intention to invite feelings and memories related to ‘service’ into the heart. Swami Vivekananda talked about the notion of ‘service as duty’ and how we often engage in service as a means to fulfill our sense of duty. In 12th grade, we actually had a ‘subject’ called SUPW — socially useful productive work — which was on the schedule for one hour a week. As a teenager, I used to often scoff at the idea that one could do any meaningful ‘service’ in one hour a week. As is often the case, I was wrong. It was during SUPW that I discovered the work of organizations like UNICEF, and gained some awareness of how privileged my life was as compared to millions of children around the world.

As I walked the trail around the pond on the soggy grass, skirting temporary lakelets created by yesterday’s heavy rains, I remembered my ‘service’ projects in engineering school. The Saturday morning hours set aside to meet the requirements of volunteer hours for the National Service Scheme (NSS) brought familiarity with the Red Cross, learning about blood donations and such. However, the sense of ‘service as duty’ remained.

It wasn’t until my visit to a ‘nursing home for disabled children’ on an NSS Saturday that my heart towards service finally shifted. The hands-on and heart-filling experiences of seeing, listening, simply sitting and walking with those with life-long impairments, mostly children of my age and below, was transformational. The heart-shift meant that I couldn’t wait for Saturday mornings to arrive so that I could go visit the home and spend time with those that I had formed mini-friendships with. Service transformed from a sense of ‘duty’ to a sense of ‘doing good’ — over time, the one benefiting most from the ‘goodness’ was actually me.

At the halfway mark on the trail, where the wind had died down because the path was flanked by thickets of trees, I took a pause and reflected on my experiences with service through SUPW and the NSS. It is said that there are no small acts of kindness, and I am convinced that it was those small acts of giving that opened my heart and mind to the power of small acts of service. To paraphrase Swami Vivekananda, the world doesn’t need our help — we need the world in order to exercise our ability to serve. Our heart needs the world, so that it can feel the joy of serving and eventually arrive at a state where we feel that service becomes a privilege, not mere duty.

It is said that in the midst of our serving, when our heart is fully immersed, we become observers of the One who is truly serving and the One who is truly being served. Service thus becomes the unifier of people.

We realize that the day’s walk is over, the storm has becalmed us and it is time to return home to warm up with a cup of green tea and share our heart of service with the world.

Thank you for serving. Namaste.

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly twitter chat with the #SpiritChat community on Sunday, Jan 15 at 9amET / 2pmGMT. We will pause to remember Martin Luther King, Jr and discuss the topic of ‘heart of service’. Namaste – @AjmaniK

The heart of the rose has a unique aptitude for service…

On Setting Intentions

Tags

goals, guidance, intentions, obstacles, preparation, spirituality

Intention is important in the sense that it can give a sense of purpose, of meaning, of direction to our actions. At the start of every New Year, or month, or week, or day, or hour, we can set an intention for whatever time-interval we choose in the future. The New Year is perhaps the most popular time to set intentions and goals, make plans, and define how we may want our life to look at the end of the year, or maybe even at different points in the year.

And yet, setting an intention by itself is often not enough in itself. Preparation is also needed, because our intent is going to inevitably run into obstacles. What are we going to at the first significant hurdle, which will most probably be internal — fear, uncertainty, doubt — not external. We can prepare ahead by using the learnings from past hurdles that maybe heavily distracted us from our intentions or even stopped us cold.

Preparation is one key to success in fulfilling our intention, no matter how we may define ‘success’.

Imagine setting an intention to climb Mt Everest without any preparation? Or even intending to go for a simple morning walk, say a few times a week for the next week or month. You wouldn’t need much preparation in fair weather, but what if you woke up to wintry weather with sleet and frost like I did today? If I hadn’t prepared well enough by wearing adequate layers of clothing, with gloves, with a warm hat, proper shoes to navigate the slippery and wet trails, I probably would have gotten to the trailhead, parked my car, looked at all the obstacles including the heavy overcast skies and said — Nah, I’ll skip today and go back home to my tea. Maybe tomorrow!

And yet, I walked because I had learnt from past years how to prepare for such weather. As I set out on the now familiar trail, I sis meet some new obstacles in the form of fallen tree branches, water channels formed by melting snow, and so on. Preparation helped, but if I had guidance from someone who had recently walked the trail, I could have saved time and energy, and even some risk, on my walk. Can you imagine how Tenzing would have fared on Mt Everest without the expert guidance of Sherpa Norgay?

Preparation multiplied with proper guidance can help create an environment where our intentions have even greater chances of success.

What else may be needed to succeed with our newly set (or even ongoing) intentions? We can perhaps use simplicity in the setting of our intentions to create meaningful successes, which then in turn create confidence, build resilience within to set new intentions that stretch us even more than before.

What role may flexibility play in our journey with our intentions? What else can you think of and share with us — practices that have worked for you in setting, fulfilling your intentions?

Is there a specific, singular, over-arching intention that guides all other intentions that you may have set for your spiritual journey?

Kumud

Join us for our weekly gathering and twitter conversation in #SpiritChat, Sunday January 8nat 9amET / 2pmGMT / 730pm India. We will discuss intentions and more. Namaste ~ @AjmaniK

My Friday walk with Nature often helps me set intention(s) for the week ahead…

Mastering our Emotions

Tags

awareness, ego, emotions, intellect, mastery, mind, senses

The heavily overcast skies that had brought intermittent rain all morning, ought to have been an indicator for me to delay the morning walk. And yet, the breeze through the partly open window brought a warmth as it fluttered over the ‘morning pages’ of the journal that I had been writing over the past half hour or so. The restless ego nudged me to ignore the distinct possibility of more rain, and off I went around the development, to discover more of Nature’s variations.

I only made it halfway through, before the wind must have shifted, and I saw the first signs of the shift in the form of a multitude of small circles in one of the retention ponds at the end of the street. Turning around, I was now headed back home, but facing rain and wind as they gained speed, painting my face. The heron sitting by the pond must have seen me turn around, as it took off with its ever majestic flapping wings, perhaps towards one of the other ponds in the development.

I was only ten or so minutes into the walk and yet I had already run through a whole bunch of different emotions. The pride in having decided to walk despite the conditions, the annoyance at the onset of the rain, the relief at realizing that I wouldn’t get totally drenched before I made it back home, the exhilaration at the unexpected sighting of the heron, and much more. Ten minutes, and a plethora of emotions, many, if not all of them, seemingly ‘arising out of nowhere.’ Can one even imagine how many emotions we encounter in an hour, in all the waking hours of a day? How many of these emotional waves or currents are we even aware of, before one wave is replaced by the next? What con we do to develop better awareness of our emotions and their origins, if we want to develop ‘mastery’ over their effects on us? Why is it even important to gain ‘mastery’ over our emotions, and are there any particular ones that we need to focus on more than others?

We can begin to address the question of emotional mastery by first understanding the origin of emotions. According to the Ashtavakra Gita, “The ego can recognise the world only through its instruments of sense organs, mind and intellect.” The sense organs are the receivers, the mind is interpreter, the intellect is the instrument of discernment. The ego’s reaction to what the world feeds it on a regular basis is perhaps the seed-bed of emotions.

If we can learn to reduce what is fed to the sense organs, we can reduce the minds vagaries and restlessness, can’t we? If we quieten the mind, we can then refine, purify and strengthen our intellect, can’t we? Slowly but surely, by reducing the influence of our senses, withdrawing them from the world, we can reduce the outer noise and increase the inner signal. It is said that this is the essence of spiritual practice, of spiritual work. The result is that we purify the intellect by slowly getting rid of both, hyper-activity and aversion to activity. Dwelling in purity, the intellect will then be strong enough to control the mind, which will then control the senses, which will then control our emotional disturbances.

By taking back control from our senses, and giving it to the intellect, we can achieve emotional mastery and resilience. What comes next? We will be ready to evolve to the next level of self-mastery — the dissolution of the intellect and hence the ego, and the realization that we are one with the Infinite.

We can all get to realization — let’s begin by working on our senses and emotions, shall we?

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly twitter chat and gathering of the #SpiritChat community, Sunday Dec 4 2022 at 9amET / 2pmGMT / 730pm India. We will discuss emotions and their mastery over tea and cookies. I am grateful to my good friend Gopi Maliwal for the topic suggestion. Namaste – AjmaniK

Nature and its variations have a unique ability to influence our emotions…

Towards Integrity

Tags

awareness, harmony, integrity, Tao Te Ching, zen

What would our life and living look like if we were to experience it with spontaneity and without any ideological filters? What would happen if we were to remove the dichotomy and the separation between the material and the physical? What if we were to live in harmony with the silence, the silent balance between the yin (the seed) and the yang (the spark)?

Some of these questions, and many more variations of the same, are posed in the Eastern classic, the Tao Te Ching. I pulled out my dog-eared and dog-nibbled copy of the translation by Ralph Alan Dale on Friday evening, as the rain that had been falling all day kept me indoors, in the company of multiple sessions of tea on the reading couch with the very puppy who had nibbles the bindings in her first year of life.

Earlier in the week, on Tuesday evening, I had taken my weekly walk in the reservation at the location where the East and West branches of the Rocky River meet at the base of a 350 million year old shale cliff. The lack of recent rain meant that I could walk halfway into the river on the shale beds by the shore, some of which are probably only a few million years old. I noticed immediately that the river bank had been cleared of a lot of older, dying brush and trees, and the shale beds were much more accessible and walkable. In the evening hour of sunset, I was grateful that I had half the river all to myself.

Kneeling on the layers of compacted shale to take some photos of the shale cliff in the distance, I noticed that some new layers of leaves from the trees on the river bank had started to cover the shale deposits I was kneeling on. It struck me that here, right before my autumn colored eyes, I was witnessing the seeds of a new layer of shale in their seeding. In that moment, with one knee on the river-bank, I realized that thousands of layers of existing shale were eventually going to accept, and then integrate this autumn’s offerings into their existence.

I imagine that that is how moving towards integrity, living with integrity actually manifests? One spontaneous experience at a time, one season at a time, one layer of Yin and Yang at a time, one layer of silence and song at a time, we chip away at the ideologies and dichotomies that keep us encrusted in dogma and duality.

In moving towards integrity, we may realize that we were always there, that we never left. One knee pressing new leaves into the layers of shale, one arm raised towards the sky, eyes flooded with golden sunlight, chanting our mother’s songs by the very river on whose shores the natives traveled for hundreds of years…

The spirit of life  
never dies.  

It is the infinite gateway  
to mysteries within mysteries.  

It is the seed of yin,  
the spark of yang.  

Always elusive,  
endlessly available.  

- Tao Te Ching (verse 6)

Kumud

P. S. What are the moments in which you feel that you are moving towards integrity? What do those moments feel like? Do share with us in the comments and/or our weekly twitter chat, Sunday Nov 13 at 9amEST / 2pm GMT / 730pm India in #SpiritChat. Namaste – @AjmaniK

The golden sunlight that integrates everything in its path…

The 350 million year old shale cliffs that form one bank of the Rocky River… (November 2022)

Choosing to Thrive

Tags

choices, creativity, spirituality, surviving, thriving

You wouldn’t imagine that the pre-dawn fog could get thicker as the morning wore on, and yet that’s exactly what it seemed to be doing. It got so heavy that the water condensing on to the once-leaved branches eventually started dripping en-masse… and it sounded exactly like a light rain on a quiet summer morning. The stillness of the breeze was remarkable in that the leaves still on the bushes lining the forest were only rustled awake by the backyard deer who was taking advantage of the fog and undertaking a later than usual morning excursion.

What is it about the presence of heavy fog that tends to make us pause and observe in wonder at its mystery as it seemingly slows down everything that it envelops in its embrace with its arrival? What is it about its often slow but inevitable dissolving into all that it briefly enveloped that can connect us to the phases of light and shadows of our own lives?

We are perhaps designed to experience all of the seasons for reasons that often elude our mind’s capacity — just as the fog and the sunlight that dissolves it eludes our physical grasp, no matter how hard we may try. We can behold the ephemeral but we cannot hold it. We can reprise many of our life’s ‘heavy fogs’ in our mind’s eye, and yet, it is said that wisdom is about learning to choose to retain those experiences that can help us thrive.

My grandmother used to say that the decision to choose to thrive is perhaps the greatest personal decision we can make in our lifetimes. History is full of examples of people who made such a choice for themselves. Can you think of a few people who embodied and manifested their ‘choice to thrive’ in their lives, and inspired you to do the same? What are some character traits of ‘thrivers’? One reason we may remember such ‘thrivers’ is because no matter how thick or persistent or frequent the ‘fog of life’ became from them, they kept investing actions fueled by their heart’s light and warmth into their decision to thrive.

It is said that ‘the universe is no respecter of persons.’ If we choose to believe that, then what is stopping you and me from choosing to thrive? Are we to believe that our existence, our awareness, our bliss, our connection to consciousness, is in the hands of those few mere mortals who cannot apparently find the way out of their own fogs of disillusionment?

Surely that cannot be. Who is capable of taking away our choice to remain connected with the divinity within us, and thrive in the process of doing so? I, for one, choose to believe that no mortal has domain over the power that flows to and through me from the infinite source. What if we all make choices that help us thrive within, help us manifest our creative selves, help us keep waking and walking the path of love and light?

It’s time to thrive. Let’s choose well, shall we?

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly gathering and twitter chat in #SpiritChat, Sunday Nov 6 at 9amET / 2pmGMT / 730pm India (note the one hour time-shift for locations outside North America!). Namaste – @AjmaniK

Autumn’s fogs come and go, and the roses choose to keep thriving…

Spheres of Belonging

Tags

autumn, belonging, letting go, transformation

The warm weather over the middle of last week, sandwiched between the cold days that preceded and succeeded it, has jolted the leaves on the trees into transformation. What started as a meandering change from the greens of summer has dramatically accelerated into a color palette of yellows, reds, oranges, some maroons and a multiple hues, tints and contrasts.

In a very short time period, autumn has changed the sphere of the leaves’ existence. Last week, they still belonged partially to summer. This week, they have their feet firmly planted in autumn. Some of them, whose transformation is complete, have found detachment from their sphere of existence among the branches and descended to the ground. Their existence in the sphere where they reached towards the sun, moon, stars and summer skies is complete. After what seemed like infinite grace in their flight between spheres, they now belong to the earth, where they mingle with those from far and near trees. They go from one sphere of belonging to another, creating new richness through variety, to eventually become the soil for new seeds that spring will bring unto them.

It isn’t as if I am watching this dance of autumn leaves for the first time. So what is it about their change in color and subsequent falling to earth that evokes so much child-like glee, awe and sense of wonder within me? Is the awe because the leaves and trees can effortlessly ‘give up one sphere of existence’ and fully embrace another sphere of belonging in the same instant? Is the child-like glee because the witnessing of the change reminds me that when the time comes, I too will be able to let go as easily and accept a different sphere of belonging? Is the sense of wonder because any given leaf represents hundreds of billions of leaves, and in being aware of one leaf’s journey I can experience the journey of all of them?

All of it comes together when I relate it to the spheres of our own belonging. The largest sphere is the one that connects us to the outer world and all of its influences, and encloses our individual sphere. Depending on our level of awareness, some may sense that we belong to the world and each other, while others are convinced that the world belongs to them. Within our individual sphere, we have a sense of belong to our experiences, our emotions, our feelings, our actions, and much more. It is said that there are multiple levels of existence within our individual sphere, which create different experiences of awareness for us. The deeper we descend into our inner levels, the more we transition from belonging to the physical body to the subtle body sphere, and finally the causal sphere of belonging.

With all the possible spheres of belonging available to us in our lives, how do we remain in that sphere where we can have the deepest connection to existence, awareness, and bliss? What can the leaves of autumn teach us about acceptance, letting go, and trust in transformation to a different, more blissful sphere of belonging?

Autumn, in the midst of all her messengers, often asks some questions. I convey some of them to you, along with her seminal message that you belong to the bliss-sphere. Don’t you feel it?

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly twitter chat and gathering with the #SpiritChat community, Sunday Oct 16 at 9am ET / 1pm GMT / 630pm India. We will share some autumn colors and warmth, ask and answer some questions, and take another step towards belonging to each other. Namaste – AjmaniK

By undergoing a change of colors, leaves transition to a different sphere of belonging…

On Life and Perceptions

Tags

awareness, bliss, mind stuff, perception, reality

It was perhaps the first time ever that I did my Friday morning walk on the school trail without my phone. I forgot it at home when I went for drop off, considered going back to retrieve it, and then thought… perhaps this will be an interesting experiment!

On a typical walk in the trails, I walk, pause, observe, take photos, walk some more, pause, and so on. It often ends up that it can take me almost forty five minutes to an hour to walk a mile or so. However, today’s walk was different, not just for the pace, but for the nature of the pauses and what I felt during those pauses.

Walking phoneless felt less like I was gathering, and more like I was simply observing. The lower angle of the Sun in the same hour as compared to last week. The hearing of leaves rustling and the raised white tail of deer bounding away as they sighted me. The almost complete coverage of the pond surface with green algae and slivers of rising sun reflecting in the blue patches. The wooden sign that said that the pond is a ‘scientific observation facility’ and hence ‘no swimming, fishing, skating’ and such. And so much more different views and perceptions on a trail that I have walked at least a few dozen times over the last year.

The experience made me ask. Why does perception matter anyway? How does it change over time? How we change it when necessary? What is its origin, and what is its connection to our spiritual journey?

It is perhaps no coincidence that I have pulled my weather-worn “Upanishads” book off of the shelf this week, and have stumbled upon a chapter describing the ‘five layers of existence’ within us. Perception is one of the layers — it is the fourth layer, sitting between the third layer, which is the mind, and the highest layer, which is bliss.

One may infer that in order for us to travel from the mind towards the highest layer of bliss, one has to walk through through the layer of perception. How do we best accomplish this? Are we aware of the quality of our perception in our daily life? One way to evaluate our quality of perception can be to observe our reactions to what is fed to our mind, voluntarily and involuntarily. Another way is to examine our fears, particularly those we had in the past, and what were the outcomes of those fears in our life?

We can further ask – to what extent did the perceptions of the possible outcomes of our (worst) fears keep us from experiencing bliss? What have we learnt from those self-limiting perceptions of self? What have we learnt from past perceptions and then adjusted our awareness, in order to get closer to and remain in bliss more consistently?

Some say that ‘perception is reality’. I would tweak that and say that ‘perception is the doorway to reality’. What is reality? According to the Upanishad, reality is the awareness that we are ‘well made’, perfect beings in the eyes of the divine. Our destiny on the path is bliss, except that we tend to get ‘stuck’ in the perceptions fueled by our mind, which is fueled by our senses, and so on.

Towards the end of the walk — a walk that was uncluttered by my desire to take a bunch of photos and share the best of them with all of you — I realized that there was a unique clarity born from this new experience for me. By removing the tasks of fiddling with the phone-camera’s filters of framing, perspective, lighting, focusing and such, a different kind of perception of the trail was revealed.

The ‘full-frame’ of nature, as designed, as intended to be perceived by us by the grand designer, was unfolded. I believe I had a sighting, for perhaps the first time during a walk, the doorway to bliss. Perhaps the door has always been there and I have been busy fiddling with trinkets? Perhaps next time, I will walk through the doorway of bliss, and even stay for a while.

Now where’s that phone? I need to write down my perceptions of today’s walk before I forget. I guess it will have to wait till at least my return home. Maybe I’ll just take the blog-post photo in the backyard and share that with all of you.

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly gathering and twitter chat with the #SpiritChat community, Sunday Sep 18 at 9amET / 1pmGMT. We will discuss the perceptions of our weekly walks, and I welcome you all to join in. Namaste. – AjmaniK

Ref. ‘Five layers of being,’ Taittiriya Upanishad, Chapter 2

The last(?) of summer’s roses blooms in the backyard…

Paths of Openness

Tags

awareness, fear, lightness, openness, vibration

Rarely, if ever have I not felt better after walking in Nature’s embrace. I have often wondered during my walks – how does this happen every single time? Is it the stillness and the silence and the vastness and the constantly changing variety of the path? Or is it something more, something that logic and intellect are unable to adequately explain?

Perhaps what fills the heart and soul when we get out of our own heads and walk the open path, beyond the limitations of our knowledge and even our knowing, is beyond mere reason and words to explain?

And yet, having experienced the heart-affirming outcome of every single past walk in vast openness, there are days when I hesitate to walk… why is this? The world and its seeming urgencies and pressures of time and space create mental barriers.

How do I overcome the barriers to openness? I remember the light, the flow, the radiance, the glow, the energy transfer that creates temporal transformation that lightens the heart and points me upwards. The gravitational pull of the final destination, the path to it, winds through openness, does it not?

The open path often finds us walking alone. This doesn’t mean that we need to stop living in the world, isolate ourselves from feelings and emotions. Being open can help increase our awareness of the feelings and emotions that are creating excess and imbalance within us. Our ‘practices’ are ‘working’ when they open us, orient us towards equilibrium, and harmony with the world. Over time, openness can teach us how to conserve energy, so that we can do our best work while moving in the direction of our heart’s destiny.

The alternative to openness is closedness, driven by fear. What does the path to closedness create? Perhaps more fear? The first law of thermodynamics states that ‘an isolated system cannot change its internal energy, and hence do no work’. The corollary is that the work done by us depends on how we un-isolate ourselves, connect with energy sources around us, and allow for change in the level of our internal energy.

Maybe that’s the answer to the original question. Why does Nature, and by extension, some people, raise our internal energy and vibration when we associate with them? Is it because we allow for them to do so, by being open to them? If yes, then the choice becomes – what kind of path and what kind of energy association will we open ourselves to, to get closer to our destination?

Sunflowers on the open path by the river… some thrive, and some…

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly twitter gathering and open conversation, Sunday Sep 4 at 9amET / 1pmGMT / 630pm India in #SpiritChat. Namaste ~ AjmaniK

On Living Transitions

Tags

awareness, change, transformation, transition

It begins with a silent, almost imperceptible drizzle… maybe a leaf or two from every other tree 🌲 or so, as their soundlessness matched the sun filtering through the leaves on its ascent upwards in the morning hours, creating infinite patterns of yellow and gold with the multitudes of shapes and sizes still very much present on the branches…

The overcast nature of the morning creates even more variations as the transitioning clouds modulate the light intensity that comes through the forest… you look up from your pause near the vintage house and notice the tallness that you have been waking amidst…

The mosquitoes trailing you have finally left you alone… have you ever noticed how a single mosquito will bite you multiple times even before you realize the bumps on your neck, your jaw and your ear? Someone had once asked me – what purpose do mosquitoes even serve? I said then that I’d get back to them. Today, I realized that they perhaps exist to teach us persistence? And yet I digress…

Let me get back to transitions. They are everywhere, they appear in all forms, and we would be dead in no time without them. And yet we often resist them, because we either aren’t ready for the unexpected ones or we take the routine ones for granted…

We may resist transitions because we may associate them with turbulent experiences in our lives. While that may be our past, it doesn’t have to be our present. For one, we can choose a different past, in the sense that we can ask – what did we learn from that previous transition, inspire of the turbulence that it brought our way?

In Vedic practice, the times of nature’s daily transitions, turbulence and all, are considered to be optimal times to pause, rest, reflect and prepare for the next phase of the day. You may recognize them as sunrise and sunset, dawn and dusk, and such. The rate of energy transfer between the layers of existence is said to be highest during these times…

And just as I finish my walk, jotting down my thoughts for this post, a gust of breeze brings down a multitude or so leaves. I look up and the Sun is still at play with its backlighting of the trees. Now that I am fully awake, I am aware that I better not stand still too long or else the mosquitoes will find me, the lone human in a quarter mile radius around the lake which is partly covered with thick algae. It’s a living lake – the algae will be taken care of by the next big rainstorm…

Living Transitions. How do we best do that? Perhaps we can be more aware of them, accept them, find joy in them and live our best life amid them. Need some hints?

Look within the moment. What’s transitioning? What’s remaining still? What’s lightening you? What’s enlivening you?

Until next time. Be well.

Kumud

Join us for our weekly gathering and twitter chat, Sunday Aug 28 at 9amET / 1pmGMT in #SpiritChat ~ we welcome all of you to share with us. Namaste – AjmaniK

One hydrangea cluster continues living its best life… amid the transition to autumn

Focusing on Abundance

Tags

abundance, awareness, focus, opposites, spirituality

Abundance is often only a few feet away… we may have to get off the carefully laid out trails, follow the ones running narrow and winding that trace the rivers’ curves and bends, teeming with greenery of all shapes and sizes…

And then you come at the resting spots where the silence and stillness invites you to be part of it all of its resplendence on a late summer afternoon. It is beginning to feel like autumn beneath cloudless blue skies where the only filter for the streaming sun are the leaves still in fullness of green and the cicadas let off some accumulated heat by tuning up their orchestra…

The ‘lack’ that was following you intermittently all week long seems to vaporize with the gentle breeze that takes it all away. The energy of anger at the lack of civility and decency, the weight of heavy memories that you thought were long gone, the struggle between being and doing – are all replaced with a calm, confident and clear sense of simplicity and abundance, an assurance that all becomes well when we focus on the fields of wellness within us.

We aren’t often aware of or give expression to abundance because, like breathing, it is one of our natural states. We instead tend to feel and give words and voice to pain and lack and hunger and thirst. Why? Perhaps because we have been deluded into believing that we are ‘more alive’ when we feel those things which remind us of what we lack? How do we refocus on abundance?

It takes a certain effort, a certain attitude, a certain commitment to going beyond happiness towards joy and bliss, and the willingness to even surrender those when the time is ripe for realization. Then, we can be aware of the ocean of abundances that we live and breathe and see and taste and smell and hear in every single moment of living.

The question isn’t whether abundance is present. The question is how much of our energy and awareness is attuned to it, focused on it, from moment to moment. Yes, we have access to infinite energy, but we surely aren’t in any position to harness more than our heart and mind can handle in any given moment. We surely aren’t going to be given freedom for the asking when we aren’t ready for the abundance that comes with it, are we?

It is said that in order to know the abundance of the ocean, we have to be willing to get wet, to be able to be at peace with the rising and the falling of the waves, to be accepting of the times of happiness and misery alike. And yet there is more. In order to truly know the ocean, we perhaps have to be willing to be one with the ocean – “to be like the salt which dissolves our i into the I – and then, abundance will be us.” – Osho

No reminders will then be necessary. We will be beyond all opposites of arrivals and departures, life and death, truth and untruth, higher and lower, light and darkness, and all that separates us in name and form from permanent abundance.

Are we willing to focus on what we truly want, nay, what we already are and have?

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly gathering and twitter conversation in #SpiritChat on Sunday, Aug 14 2022 at 9amET / 1pmGMT / 630pm India. Yes, we have abundant space to welcome you all… Namaste.

Focusing on Abundance… on the trail…