Focusing on Contentment

Tags

bliss, contentment, focus, joy, walking

I am sitting on the hilltop of the bird reservation, surrounded by water on both sides of the narrow path that brought me here, immersed in the sounds of geese calls and wrens, the silent flight of a pelican, the occasional screech of an orange-breasted blackbird, and more. An almost warming breeze blows from the East as the sun reaches high enough in the sky to cast a shadow longer than me on the bench in front of me. I try and pick one element to focus on, to let it all absorb me on this Friday morning, perhaps to even fill me with contentment.

It isn’t happening. My senses are all over the place.

A pair of great white egrets takes off from the western side of the marsh, flies within a few dozen feet of me, and circles around to the eastern side of the waters, gaining height with every flap of their four foot odd wingspans, and disappears on the far side of the marsh where the forest is thick and they perhaps have nests with babies. The swathe of their wings and their soundless flight helps with focus, as I only engage sight and sound.

Getting closer to contentment?

There are a couple of humans on the far side of the western marsh, towing their ten thousand dollar camera rigs with zoom lenses as big as the egrets that just flew by. The day is perfect for their excursion, and I am sure they are doing better with focusing in their own activity than I am. You can tell the ones who have been there for a while, the experienced photogs — they seem a lot more relaxed than the newbies.

Maybe I need to just relax and contentment will follow?

A pair of geese emerges from the waiter into the grassy shore in front of me, chaperoning their five newborns between them for safety. I don’t know how much of contentment they have, but they have surely have parenting work to do. How can parenting, or any type of ‘work’ bring us contentment? Maybe I digress.

And so goes the morning. More water fowl, more music, more light, another pair of pure white geese floating by, geese pairs in various stages of nesting and resting, and so much more. I could stand on this hillock all day long, keep writing, keep absorbing, keep taking photos, and keep renewing the heart — and maybe some day I will just do that.

The work of relaxation, of focusing on the heart rarely ever gets old because of the result is the feeling of contentment that one feels within. Sometimes, the work involves detours. My regular Friday morning trail was closed due to all the rain this week – and so I decided to come to the bird reservation instead. As I walked back, as slowly as I possibly could, absorbing it all like i do at the end of every morning meditation, I am filled with gratitude that this nirvana exists, is accessible within a few minutes of where I live.

It is said that if we can focus on what we truly want in life, if we develop a single over-arching spiritual purpose or goal in life, contentment will want to be with us and within us. Maybe that’s the question from today’s walk for me — can you primarily focus on one thing at a time, maybe even for all time? Would you be content with That?

P.S. join us for our weekly twitter chat, Sunday May 7 at 9amET / 1pmGMT / 630pmIndia in #SpiritChat. Namaste – @AjmaniK

Focusing on the walk… we can start to see the light of contentment

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…

The Heart of Bliss

Tags

bliss, heart, heart matters, heartmonth, joy

There is a certain clarity about those winter mornings where the sun finally breaks through the grey gloom which has been seemingly hanging around for weeks. You look out at the sprinkling of snow that has turned into a film of scattered ice on the driveway, crystals shining in the sunlight cresting over the homes across the street. You want to take a walk, but you know that it is better to wait because the brilliance is deceptive. The temperature is still in the single digits and there won’t be enough layers to keep you warm. 

Such is the majesty of a winter morning where the sun is now fully streaming onto your face as you have pulled back the last bit of curtain from the front window where the puppy has claimed the one warm spot on the bench along the split windows. You sit cross legged on the divan, just as you had sat on the floor a bit earlier for morning meditation where the waves of light from your connection to the earth and sky had filled you with the same warmth that you had felt when you last walked the beach at sunset on a Caribbean island.

Your heart is quieting as you keep writing, taking an occasional sip from the coffee mug which has “baby it’s cold outside” inscribed in a half circle around a snowflake. You can taste that special taste of fresh ground beans from a freshly opened bag of coffee seeping through your tongue, combining with your next breath, as it sends a unique sense of aliveness into the deeper layers of your awareness. More sunshine, more stillness comes your way as the puppy is now transitioned into an early morning snooze while she waits with me for the rest of the household to come awake.

Oy. Stop already. When are you going to talk about the heart of bliss? Ahem. What do you imagine I’ve been doing in the last three paragraphs? I’ve been trying to put my stream of thoughts into words. You can’t really plan this stuff, can you? You can practice to move your heart and its awareness towards silence, stillness, and warmth. You can practice to quieten the noise and filter out more of the daily perturbations. You can practice to be open to the remembrance that you have been through the glooms and storms  before.

What does the practice yield? You wake up to days like this when the Universe and its energy transports you from the walk along the shore to a deep dive into the ocean and whispers to you…

You are truth. You are awareness. And above all. You are the heart of Bliss. You belong. 

Remember That. 

Kumud

P.S. February is “heart” month. We will celebrate the heart every Sunday this month. Please join our kickoff celebration by joining our weekly chat with the #SpiritChat community on twitter, Sunday Feb 7 at 9am ET / 730pm India. Bring some #MomentsOfBliss to share. Namaste. ~ @AjmaniK

The heart of a rose, no matter its name is defined by bliss…

Creating and Sharing a Spirit of Joy

Tags

bliss, grief, joy, spiritchat, spirituality

As December dawned (two weeks ago) and we started getting endless reminders of “how many shopping days left for Christmas” and other assorted commercial messages, I stopped to reflect.

Whatever happened to the holiday messages of Peace. Of Love. Of Joy? Yes. Peace, Love and Joy. Remember those?

My moments of reflection took me back to my first holiday season in the United States in the mid 1980s. I was a graduate student sharing a ride from Virginia to Michigan, trying to connect with my only Uncle in the USA. On Christmas Eve, we were supposed to meet at a pre-defined location at a highway interchange in Ohio, where my fellow students were going to hand me over to my Uncle. We were then going to drive to his home in Michigan. My Uncle gave us specific instructions as to which hotel and what time we were supposed to rendezvous, to have a smooth exchange.

You can guess the rest. We spent at least an hour looking for that Holiday Inn which was supposed to be the drop off point. Neither one of us knew that it had been renamed to a different hotel. Remember, this was before the day of cell-phones. So, we had no choice but to go back – my Uncle, to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and me and my friends, to Cleveland, Ohio for the night. We reconnected over the phone, and made firmer plans for an early Christmas morning drop-off.

Yes, all went well on Christmas morning. We connected in Maumee, OH, and I made it to Ann Arbor in time for a late Christmas breakfast. I don’t know who was more excited – me, to see the family, or my two young cousins, who had been waiting patiently for me to arrive so they could all open their presents. Over twenty-five years later, I still remember the looks of pure Joy on their faces. And I thought that they were just that happy to see me 🙂

It was a beautiful holiday week – that first “real” Christmas with a family that celebrated family togetherness, community (yes, I attended a lot of holiday gatherings with my Uncle’s family). There was an unhurried sense of serenity to their celebrations, which communicated a sense of peace, love, and above all, Joy. It just seemed to envelope everything they did – that sense of Joy. I am grateful for those gifts – they taught me that we can create our own Joy when we honor family and community, celebrate with family and community. And those two cousins? They continue to celebrate with their now growing families, with Joy as the center-piece of all their family gatherings.

As I look back at that week, I am reminded that we don’t have to let our present challenges, big or small, take away our Joy. For true Joy lies beyond happiness, and the small (disappointment) or thrill of (not) receiving that trinket or two that we really wanted. It also reminds me that the magic of Joy can happen in our lives if we let it, be open to it. In every snowflake lies the potential to create magic…

So, let us resolve to keep Joy front and center, as the center-piece of our being. Let us resolve to spare a thought for those who may be in pain, or who may be grieving this season – listen to them a little bit longer, and share a piece of our Joy with them. For, in choosing to share is when we grow in heart, in spirit, and in Joy.

Kumud

P.S. This post was written for our weekly twitter conversation on Sunday mornings – Sunday, December 15th at 9am ET. Join us on twitter or at at http://chat.spiritchat.org as we discuss how to create and share Joy. Namaste!