Freeing Yourself from Expectations! by @AwakeningTrue

Tags

expectations, freedom, lightness, spirituality

Over the past few months, the weight of expectations has been a frequent topic in conversations with family and friends, and in my own thinking, journaling, and choices.  Each of us has a very personal relationship with the many expectations in our lives — our expectations of ourselves, what we expect from others and, of course, what we believe other people expect from us.  

Can expectations be positive? Of course! My parents had expectations that my brother and I would be kind and compassionate, that we would study while we were in school, and that we would become “responsible adults.”  I am certain that there can be many positive effects of expectations throughout our lives.  What I have been considering recently, though, are the other types of expectations, those that become the SHOULDs that weigh us down.  Those expectations can add stress and pressure to our lives, and often result in self-judgment and self-criticism. They distract us from our experience of inner-peace and joy.  

Expectations come in all shapes and sizes, and they can be REAL expectations that have been communicated to us or by us, or they can be IMAGINED expectations that are born in our assumptions about what others want from us.  Either way, expectations can become invisible burdens that we carry with us every day.  They weigh us down, but we carry them only because we decided to carry them.  We are the only ones who can create the pressure of expectations in our lives.  It is true that other people can expect things from us, but what they expect from us can only create pressure if we allow it.  The choice is always ours.

I have decided to surrender my habit of creating unrealistic expectations for myself, and my habit of accepting the weight of other people’s expectations.  I have decided that being free of weighty expectations is a state of mind, and a state of heart.  I invite you to release the pressure of expectations, real or imagined, and to let go of what others think of you, want from you, and expect of you.

Let’s explore feeling free!  Let’s explore moving through our days listening to our heart instead of listening to that voice – ours or someone else’s – telling us what we should do.  Let’s explore a life where there is no SHOULD.  Let’s imagine ourselves as beautiful, brightly-colored balloons, floating without resistance, gratefully choosing to soar above the tethers that would weigh us down. 

Sharon Kathryn D’Agostino —@SharonDAgostino, @AwakeningTrue and @SayItForwardNow 

Author’s bio: I believe in the power of love, compassion, kindness, forgiveness, and gratitude! And I believe that each of us has an important role in shaping a kinder, gentler, more compassionate world for all.

Kumud’s note: Join our weekly twitter chat, Sunday March 26 at 9amET / 1pmGMT / 630pm India with Sharon as she steps up to lead #SpiritChat with her insights and questions. Thank you, Sharon!

Freedom from Expectations…

Photo Credit: © Blueenayim | Dreamstime.com

The Joy of Inner Peace by @JanetNestor

Tags

inner peace, journey, joy, spirituality

We are all on a journey to our sacred inner oasis. We want to connect to ourselves, life, and the divine. We want happiness, joy, safety, and inner peace. The issue is we don’t always know how to create it. However, if we find it once, we will keep striving to find it over and over again!

Our spiritual journey lasts a lifetime. When did you first become aware that you were a spiritual seeker? I was about 30 years old at the time and attending Adult Children of Alcoholics 12 twelve step meetings. Before ACOA I had no understanding of self-care, meditation, and no concept of how to create joy or inner peace.

In the beginning and throughout our journey we need teachers; people who can show us how to find the gifts of joy and inner peace that reside within our own being. And we need communities that support our journey. #SpiritChat has always been one of those communities for me. We grow together every Sunday!

There are mindful ways to learn what joy and peace feel like – how they impact our mind and body.  Mindfulness is focused awareness. We learn to witness our own body and emotions, become aware of our own inner nature, and then learn to live within our awareness. Becoming aware and experiencing heart virtues like joy and peace deepen our spiritual experience.

To really know what joy, love, peace, kindness and other virtues are, we need to experience them when they are paired with negative opposites. We all know that embracing heart virtues bring us energetically to a higher frequency. What we don’t know is what negativity takes from us.

We can use sensory awareness to make fun, laughter, joy, inner peace (and all the other viruses) part of holistic awareness, our energy system, and our heart center. When that happens, the energy of the virtues flow through our body connecting us to joy and inner peace. This activity is easy and is something we can teach our children and grandchildren.

Create a list of heart virtues that you want to adopt. The list might look like this: joy, love, kindness, peace.

Once you have your positive list, create a list of opposite emotions: sadness, hate, meanness, war.

You will need eight 3×5 white cards or pieces of clean white paper. No lined paper or paper that has been used before.

Write each of the words on the card or paper – one word on each card.

Hold the word joy between your hands until you can feel the energy of it flowing through you. You can feel the frequency of joy vibrate between the palms of your hands and perhaps vibrate through your whole body.

Then hold the word sadness between your hands and feel its vibration. Once you have felt the vibration of sadness, hold joy between your hands again. This keeps your vibration high as you complete this activity.

Repeat with each of the word pairs. Love-Hate, Kindness-Cruelty, Peace-War. Remember to hold the positive word, then the negative word, and again the positive word.

You will be surprised at what information you take in somatically, mentally, and emotionally. You intuitively know the importance of choosing a positive, joyful way of life. Words matter much more than we imagine! Words create our body’s chemistry and our quality of physical, mental, and emotional health.

If our body chemistry is positive, we experience positive emotions. which generate a positive, heathy inner environment. That balanced chemistry allows us to feel inner peace and joy.

If our body chemistry is not balanced, we experience emotions that are negative. Negativity limits our ability to experience joy and inner peace. Adding positive thoughts and actions gradually create a chemical change that results in a positive physical-mental-emotional-spiritual change.

If you try this little activity, let us know at the beginning of the chat!

Thank you for inviting me to be a guest host, Kumud. I look forward to our Sunday, March 12th #spiritchat.

Janet Nestor

Editor’s Note: Please join our long-time friend, supporter, participant and advisor to the #SpiritChat community, Janet Nestor (@JanetNestor) as she hosts our weekly chat on Sunday, March 12 at 9amEDT / 1pm GMT / 630pm India on twitter. Thank you – Kumud @AjmaniK

Janet Nestor, Author of “Pathways to Wholeness”

‘Hold the word Joy between your hands…’

On Powers of Observation

Tags

awareness, choices, observation, spirituality

Small though it was, the bridge itself had never actually moved. I thought it had been removed by human hands because it was in relatively poor shape, but the fact was that I had just stopped seeing it. I had assumed that it was gone, and in its place was a relatively small stretch of water which I could just as easily jump move for walk around to get to the other side of the embankment.

All of that changed this morning, after six odd months of getting my shoes wet while navigating the stretch of water. The bridge reappeared in my awareness, where it had always remained, slightly hidden beneath the overgrowth. It hadn’t been touched by human hands, because some of the boards were still missing and others were still broken. A few feet left long, about a foot wide, just enough to support one human’s or deee’s crossing at a time, over an invisible body of water.

My delight at meeting this old friend was instant. It wasn’t that the friend had walked away from me. I had just stopped noticing my friend by thinking that it had disappeared from where I thought it once used to be – over that same patch of water which I was now regularly jumping over or walking around. It was a beautiful reunion today, as I walked through the tall grasses, stepped on the first of the boards gently, and slowly crossed over the few feet that held me as surely they always had in the past.

Once on the other side, I looked back and said thank you for reappearing, for giving me space to explore alternate pathways to the other side. It felt like a reunion with a long lost friend who I had stopped observing because I was too busy or distracted, or because I made the assumption that they did not want to be seen by me any more. The power of observation works in many different ways, doesn’t it?

Have you have ever experienced the sense that you have been observing certain things differently within you on your walk of life? Which observations tend to come from wisdom, and which ones come from assumptions? How has the power of observation affected your relationships with others?

Kumud

As I was leaving for home, the Sun started emerging from behind the clouds above the tree line in the distance and I realized that like the bridge, the divine rarely move away from us – it is we who shift our heart’s focus of observation. The good news is that it remains within our powers to shift our focus back to divine awareness, whenever we so choose to observe it again.

P.S. Join us for our weekly gathering and conversation, Sunday Feb 26 at 9amET / 2pmGMT on twitter in #SpiritChat. We will discuss our powers of observation among friends who are with us in our journeys. Namaste – AjmaniK

Let The Music Play

Tags

awareness, music, spirituality, vibration

It has been at least five years, and I remember the feeling like it was yesterday. During one of my morning walks on a fisherman’s trail by the river, I came around a bend and stepped into a clearing that was filled with hundreds of daisies. It was a clear blue-sky kind of day and there was a spring-like warmth in the air accompanied by the soft gurgling of the river as it flowed lightly. I paused, and did something I had never done before, and have rarely done since.

I took off my light jacket, and lay done on the grass, among all of the daises, face pointed towards the heavens, arms stretched out by my side, letting it all flow through me. I will never forget the coolness of the grass, the softness of the flowers, the sunshine smiling at me and the feeling of the sounds of the vibration of the earth’s hum as it held me softly. It was as safe a moment and space, an opening of the heart, that I ever remember experiencing in nature. The music of the earth and the waters, and the stillness of the sky made it feel like all the senses had come awake simultaneously.

After laying in the clearing for a few minutes, it seemed like all the sounds of the birds, the river, the breeze and the earth had merged into the one wordless harmony of celestial music. I am sure that you have had experiences with natural or man-made music that affect your heart in a way that words cannot describe. We all know that the vibrations created by music can affect our moods and emotions, and transport us to places that transcend our ordinary planes of daily experiences, don’t we? Imagine a state or states of existence where we have developed the ability to be constantly attuned to the celestial or divine music that plays continuously within us.

What would our life feel like if we were to primarily live in a state of higher vibration than we currently do? How do we develop the ability to spend most, if not all of our waking, working, resting hours in tune with that music which helps us live and love our best life?

Yes. It may takes practice, even a lot of practice, to live in that state of attunement with divine music. What do we get in return for all that practice? In my experience, once we have laid down in that field where we have felt embraced by the universe and all her elements, we never forget that state of superconscious joy.

If and when higher bliss is experienced within, we cannot then wait to wake up and walk, sing, write, meditate or practice whatever it is that brings us closer to our natural state of higher vibration, can we?

I invite you to practice to listen to the music play. We can surely all hear it and heart it, can’t we?

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly twitter chat, Sunday, Feb 5 at 9am ET / 2pm GMT in #Spiritchat. Bring some of your favorite music to share. I will bring some questions. Namaste – @AjmaniK

Sunrise on the Caribbean… the playing of celestial music…

Invitations of Spring

Tags

invitation, music, reflection, spirituality, spring

It’s 10am Saturday morning and I have been up for at least four hours, absorbing all the energy flowing around and within me, from near and from 7500 miles away. This same routine has been going on for the past few days, and the energy has taken on a special frequency since the Indian ‘Spring’ festival of Basant Panchami was celebrated on January 26. Spring in the middle of winter in the Northern hemisphere, you say?

We are almost five weeks into winter, seven weeks from Spring. If we lean our hearts a little, and let our mind wander a week forward, we will be halfway there. In some ways, the festival is an invitation to the Spring that is imminent. Yes, winter may still have some questions to ask of us, but so what?

The better question to perhaps ask is — What does Spring mean to you and your heart? The calendar is simply a time-keeper, isn’t it? If we orient our energy towards the feeling that Spring engenders within us, will we not instantly evoke Spring, or any of our favorite seasons at our heart’s behest?

Over the past few days, particularly since I received and accepted Spring’s ‘early’ invitation to play, my schedule has been pleasantly ‘disrupted’ by my attendance at an online festival of ‘music and meditation’ every morning. As a result, I can feel that my internal energy has been shifting daily, slowly but steadily towards warmth, renewal and a harmony that is the hallmark of Spring for me.

As I finish writing, the Sun has literally made its way through the heavily overcast skies, the wind has been becalmed by a shift, the reflections of the trees in the pond are becoming sharper by the minute, and the geese are slowly arriving for the day. I am sensing another invitation to sing, to meditate, to raise awareness of what lies in the heart.

It surely feels like an invitation from spring to me. I guess that winter without will have to wait. Have you received any invitations of body, mind and heart lately? If so, what have you done with them?

Kumud

P.S. I invite you to join our weekly twitter chat and gathering, Sunday Jan 29 at 9am ET / 2pm GMT / 730pm India in Spiritchat over tea and cookies. Namaste – AjmaniK

P.P.S The second phase of the ‘Spring festival’ of ‘music and meditation’ hosted by Heartfulness India will run from Feb 1-3 2023 at 7amET / Noon GMT / 530pm India. You are invited to attend the Free live sessions at https://hfn.link/youtube ~ Namaste.

Spring invites us in its own subtle ways… to reflect on body, mind and heart…

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…

Celebrating New Energy

Tags

awareness, celebration, journey, lightness

We are down to the last but one day of the year and after a week of fiendishly cold weather and ice-storms and travel havoc over the Christmas weekend a few days ago, it seems borderline criminal that I am walking the dogs in sixty degree weather. The skies are getting overcast and heavy enough with the promise of imminent rain, but it isn’t lost on me that the rate of change of the weather has been anything but dramatic over the past few days.

I would say that these patterns are abnormal, and would even dare say that I would prefer a ‘normal’ winter with its energy of snow and some icy days — but perhaps this is the ‘new’ normal — and we better adapt to it, and fast. The human body does have the ability to adapt quickly, but it has its limits to withstand environmental shocks and such, as we found out during the pandemic. Humans learn that living a full life is about maintaining a good energy balance, keeping harmony between the inner and the outer, discovering new facets of the diamonds that they are, softening their sharp edges as they journey, and more.

As we step into another New Year as deemed by completion of yet another revolution around our life-sustaining star, a lot of us can perhaps feel an infusion of, an immersion into, or even a surge of new energy in one or more layers of our existence on planet earth. I felt this newness of energy on the day after the winter solstice as I asked for permission of the waters, and then gently walked into a cenote in the Yucatán peninsula. It is hard to describe the feeling of freedom when a non-swimmer like me actually floats on his back and looks up at the high-noon Sun filling one with light — for a moment I thought I was seeing stars in the daytime — except that it was all a beautiful melding of the elements playing their celestial harmony within my heart.

Like at least some of you, I am looking forward to the New Year as an opportunity for new darings, new experiments, new ventures, new rediscoveries of what lies within, and more. Resolutions are not my thing. They never were. I can’t explain why. Maybe I am simply too content to know and feel the new energy that is continuously flowing my way, often ‘on request,’ glowing my path as I learn to soar and fly with my fellow travelers and guides.

How about you, dear reader and traveler? How does your energy level feel as you come into the New Year? Is there a sense of newness, of an elevated potential of being, or…? I invite you to consider, maybe even ask someone to help you reflect — they may point you to tools, practices and opportunities that you haven’t considered yet?

No matter which direction you move in, I wish you the best of the New Year’s energy. May it work to energize all those life areas that need harmony and integration, and suffuse more life within your life. May the new energy help you and me remember the directive of “That Thou Art” — the energy without is the energy within — the old and the new are One.

Namaste.

P.S. Join us for our weekly twitter chat, Sunday January 1 2023 at 9amET / 2pmGMT / 730pm India, as we celebrate the energy of the New Year in Spiritchat. – @AjmaniK

The energy of a new dawn brings the goodness of Hope

Unearthing Our Gifts

Tags

awareness, discovery, gifts, giving, healing, receiving

“Dad. Look. The sky is yellow!”

After four straight days of heavily overcast skies, which really felt like forty by the fourth day came around, there was a sliver of a break on Friday morning on the way to school. I was looking to the west to see whether the full moon was still up, and instead, towards the East, between two trees on a farm, there was the Sun in all its glory blazing out from a break in the cloud cover. The underbelly of the dark gray cloud cover was being painted by the rays in the soft yellows that she exclaimed about.

Less than ten minutes later, as I set off for my Friday walk in the school’s trail, cloud service had been restored and the Sun’s remaining slivers cast golden streaks on the pond where the geese and ducks were maneuvering their way in the water as they tried to make space for the new flocks landing in from several directions. The play of light and shadows is very different as the Sun rises behind a mix of dark and light clouds which serve as natural filters for the observant traveler. The gifts that the eyes unearth are unique, as one sees things in silvery light that are hidden by the blaze of an unfettered, golden sunrise.

A beautiful gift it was, just like the gift of the clouds yielding the night before for a fraction of an hour, to reveal the gift of the full moon in all its silvery December glory, hanging like a brilliantly lit Christmas ornament defying gravity in the firmament.

Many of the gifts within us are perhaps similar in nature, unearthed only when we face long periods of overcast skies, storms, and the like – aren’t they? And thus, we of the human spirit, rarely stop waking and walking, remembering to do what we can control, and let what will be, be. Is it not true that as we look back on what seemed to be seemingly insurmountable odds against us in some of life’s moments, that we often unearthed gifts of strength, courage and resilience that we scarcely were aware of?

Can you think of moments where you were in so much pain and grief that you thought that your life would never be the same again, and yet you managed to heal and even smile again?

If yes, I invite you to write a few words about that experience. What gifts did you unearth, both within and without, in those moments of great personal challenges? In addition, are there any gifts you have unearthed, in moments of great joy and celebration? Are there also some gifts that we can unearth in moments when we aren’t residing at the opposite states in our life, when we are in relative equanimity? What may these gifts be?

By the time I came back home from my walk, the clouds had finally decided to move on for good, and the Sun had resumed shedding its golden light everywhere, including on the chair by the front window where I sat and wrote this blog post. The forecast was for rain later in the day, overcast skies for the next few days, but it didn’t matter. I had been reminded that the play of light and shadows and nothingness affords equal opportunities for me to unearth the gifts of my choosing.

How about you? What gifts will you choose to unearth in this season of your life?

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly community gathering and chat on twitter in #SpiritChat, Sunday Dec 11 2022 at 9amET / 2pmUTC / 730pm India. We will unearth some gifts together, and maybe share a gift with someone. Namaste. @AjmaniK

Walking the land, unearthing gifts in every step…

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…