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…

On Sustainable Living

Tags

compassion, discipline, ethics, giving, sacrifice, self control, sustainability

Sustainability. It was the central theme of the annual Aerospace conference called SciTech that happened this week. I attended virtually, along with thousands of other professionals, academics, students, policy makers and more. Five days of new ideas and conversations about how to create sustainable solutions for earthly aviation and beyond-earth exploration.

New technologies, new vehicles, new fuels, new investments. These were all proposed, to meet the challenges that climate change presents to the (aerospace) world. It did not take long for me to ask the question – what sustains, what creates sustainability for the humans creating the sustainable solutions?

I had to wait till Friday evening for the answers to emerge. As is often my wont, I return to the library upstairs, pick a book from the ‘spiritual’ section, and open it to a random page. I landed in the middle of a chapter titled ‘Ethics’, and the author was speaking to the three core virtues of a life of value.

Self-control (or dama) is the first virtue that sustains us. It is when we offer resistance to our desires that we develop strength, discipline and resilience. Each act of resistance adds another layer of sustainability to our spirit. Solitude and silence are two practices to develop self-control. “Progress in silence is progress to realization by connecting us to the creative power of the divine.”

Self-sacrifice by letting go (or daana) is the second virtue that sustains us. Letting go is the practice of giving or providing assistance to those in need, and also freedom from greed. What is the sustainable way of letting go? “Give with faith, do not give without faith, give liberally, with modesty, with sympathy.”

Compassion (or dayaa) is the third virtue of sustainable living. Compassion is the practice of being at peace, of forgiveness, of avoiding ill-will and cruelty. “It is through compassion that we can overcome selfishness and develop patience and forbearance.” If we can tune into the extent of suffering in the world, we can remember to live a compassion-first lifestyle.

Self-control, self-sacrifice through letting go, and compassion — three sustainability keys given to me — and I share them with you. Sustainable and simple habits are easier to integrate into our lifestyle, aren’t they? With sustained practice, we can transform our heart to a kinder, gentler, lighter, quieter, and healthier version of itself. With a transformed heart, we can discover a well-spring of love to create a brighter world for our life here on earth and beyond.

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly twitter chat, Sunday January 9 at 9amET / 730pm India in #SpiritChat. We will gather and talk about sustainability on our journey ahead. Namaste ~ @AjmaniK

Ref for the ‘three keys’: ‘Ethics – An Idealist View of Life,’ by S. Radhakrishnan, The Hibbert Lectures, 1929.

Harmony with the elements… a key to sustainability

On Giving and Fragrance

Tags

fragrance, giving, heart, learning, lifestyle, light

It had been an exhausting day and a half of work as I was trying to wrap up the technical paper and presentation that was to accompany it. Finally, after what seemed like a really long day by the time it came three o’clock, I made some time for afternoon tea. I could tell that it was a brisk day outside what with the almost leaf-shorn trees standing still against the clear blue sky and the brilliant sunshine quickly fading to the south east.

Walking upstairs to “close up the office”, I noticed that the sun had created hundreds of spot-lights off of the stained-glass-like lamp sitting by the window. The reading chair called to me, and I walked over with the cup of tea, pulled the “Rumi” book off of the shelf and let the sunshine soak into my soul.

The next half hour felt like I must have traveled into a different universe where the silence becomes you. The sunlight lit up each page as I read poems about love without rules, the nature of what we are given when a loved one holds us to their chest, true silence that makes you feel like the soul’s belonging, and how spring awakens autumn from its slumber. Who says you can’t stumble into spring in the middle of a late afternoon on a late November day in autumn?

And so it went as I faded in and out of what seemed like forever. My tea sat on the small round table by me, slowly exhausting its warmth like the setting sun as it was fading quickly behind the rooflines of the homes in the distance. The thirty minutes of warmth felt like the fourteen years that I had spent being raised with love by my Aunt who had been born on this day ninety two years ago. The divine had blessed her with the ability to share her light. She gave of it freely to her kids, to strangers, to the fruit and vegetable sellers, to the part-time maids who came to do myriad home tasks, and so on. I was fortunate to bear witness to a lot of her giving.

Giving and its lessons can come to us from any direction at any time. The nature of giving is such that we often do not not know what we have been given until it comes our turn to give in a similar way. She would often remark that I would understand why she acted in the ways that she did, even when exacting discipline, when I would become a parent myself. When that day came, my understanding began to dawn, but it happened in an unexpected way. The medium was the giving nature of the one who gave birth to our child.

And so my slow learning continues. Now, our child teaches me through her peace and her gentility and her passion for social justice. The spiritual masters teach me by about limitless giving by their transmission of spiritual energy to all those who are willing to receive. And so on it goes.

Some of you may say that I look at life through rose-colored glasses. And that is okay. For one, I like roses. The rose keeps on spreading its fragrance, regardless of how many thorns are nearby. The rose knows who it is, and what its purpose is. Is that not a great example of the nature of giving? In addition, I can use the same rose-colored glasses to look at myself with love, kindness and compassion. If I only look at my own thorns, what is the world going to see when they look at me?

Yes. The spiritual path can be long, arduous, daunting, and even seem futile for the seeming lack of progress. There seems so much more work to do. Tagore says in his translation of one of Kabirdas’s poems:

“So, when I give up passion, I see that anger remains;

And when I renounce anger, greed is with me still;

And when greed is vanquished, pride and vainglory remain;

When the mind is detached and casts Maya away, still it clings to the letter.

Kabîr says, “Listen to me, dear Seeker! the true path is rarely found.”

So what is a practitioner to do? ‘Rarely’ does not mean ‘never’. One solution is to keep on practicing our nature of giving. Sustained practice improves our inner state, which enables us to create tangible changes in our outer state, create a new lifestyle. If we embrace giving by fully engaging our heart, we can find ourselves in oneness with the rose, whence the petals and thorns are indeed one flower. The fragrance of our giving than shall then know no limits.

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly Twitter conversation, Sunday Nov 28 at 9amET / 730pm India in #SpiritChat ~ come share your fragrance with the community. Namaste ~ @AjmaniK

Fragrance of the rose… attracts morning dew

Harbingers of Hope

Tags

faith, giving, holidays, hope

It was one of my Grandmother’s favorite quotes. When I would ask her about the minuscule impact that her giving of yesterday’s flatbread to the the sadhu (monk) who would come and clang the wrought iron gate every morning to announce his presence, she would say — “doobte ko tinke ka saharaa’ — “to the one who is drowning (in a whirlpool) in the middle of the river, even a blade of grass floating by seems like a lifeline”.

As you can tell, I never forgot her interpretation of giving. She wasn’t merely giving yesterday’s flatbread – she was giving Hope. She was giving light for another day, or maybe even for a few hours, to a single human being, who would arrive daily in the hope that his hunger would find some relief. She was helping to sustain someone who had chosen the life of detachment — not beggary, mind you —  but a conscious, aware choice of total, unconditional surrender to divine sustenance. 

There are very few among us who can practice that  level of complete faith. Our faith is often an incomplete one, where we think of our spiritual practices as tools in our tool belt. Today, I feel emotionally down, so let me meditate a bit more. Today, I feel really good, so maybe I’ll give my meditation tool a rest in my too-belt. One of my Vedanta teachers describes it as a “faith of convenience”. We employ faith as a tool of bartering with the divine and the universe. 

And then we are left wondering why our faith does not work as and when, and in the way, we expect it to. Imagine that we were to only breathe when we found it to be convenient for us to breathe. We wouldn’t last very long, would we? Then why do we expect our intermittent faith to sustain us? I posit that this is where Hope enters our practice. Hope fills the voids and cracks that our incomplete and intermittent faith and half-hearted actions create. 

This is not to say that Hope isn’t necessary for the world at large. It is. In Rabindranath Tagore’s famous verse, he says — oh, wait. As I google the quote, I see that many have used ‘hope’ and ‘faith’ interchangeably… “Faith (Hope) is the bird who feels the light and sings while the dawn is still dark”. And then there is Emily Dickinson’s poem which begins with… 

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –

That perches in the soul –

The practicality of life necessitates that we may need both, faith and hope. When one flounders, the other shores us up. When we lose faith and start drowning in life’s storms, hope steps in and becomes the blade of grass that keeps us afloat. We can then find strength to sing our song while the dawn is still dark. With both hope and faith, we can discover Joy in the gaps between the breaths of our life, and make every season a season of giving.

In the pure spirit of Joy that emerges from a complete faith, we can choose to become harbingers of Hope. Our giving is then complete. That’s a season worth celebrating. What say you?

Kumud

 

P.S. Join us for our weekly gathering of a community of faith, hope, joy and giving in #SpiritChat – Sunday, Dec 13 at 9amET / 730pm India. I will bring some tea and fresh flatbread (with a drizzle of caramelized brown sugar) to share. Namaste – @AjmaniK

 

On Giving Through Conversation

Tags

conversation, giving, speech, thankfulness, thanksgiving

Sometimes, it isn’t easy to find what we are looking for, particularly when it’s right in front of our nose. This challenge seems to get even  greater as we grow older in years. We walk into a room looking for something with intent and then stand there like icicles frozen in a stiff winter wind, wondering — what did I come in here for? We rush out of the house because we are running late, and halfway to the car, we realize we’ve forgotten our phone. We rush back to the front door, and realize that we can’t turn the door handle because one hand is holding the keys and the other hand is actually holding the phone! 

Do you remember how you felt on New Year’s Day, January 1, 2020? In a decade that started with great hope and aspirations for millions, it is perhaps difficult for many of us to find reasons to give thanks as we approach the end of November. And yet, here we are in the USA, staring at the annual holiday of ThanksGiving. The “third wave” of Covid-19 cases has brought stay-at-home orders, curfews, overflowing hospitals, case and death numbers that are difficult for our minds to comprehend. As if that weren’t enough, we are squarely in the middle of a constitutional crisis and a threat to our very democracy from within. 

At the individual level, life as we know it, is in some ways, unrecognizable from what it was at this time last year. We may have lost a loved one, lost our jobs or endured business losses, suffered a physical or mental health setback, and more. We may have become way too familiar with the workings of Zoom or Google Meet or other video conferencing platforms. For those with kids of all ages or older adults at home, we may be feeling overwhelmed in our new roles as full-time care-givers, educators, and more. 

I am sure that I am just scratching the surface of the ‘litany of woes’ that this year has brought our way. And yet, you well know that I wouldn’t be writing all this if I weren’t going to eventually ask you to pause and take a deep breath. Let’s do it together. Let’s pause, close our eyes for a minute, and take a deep breath and feel the inhaled air travel deep into our lungs, purifying the blood, returning it to the heart, and then bringing the impurities out of our body with a deep exhalation. Go ahead and do it a few times. I will wait. 

If you did what I suggested, you should have felt a bit lighter. Breath awareness creates an environment which shuts off the wanderings of our mind and activates the light of our heart. In moments of pure breathing and its awareness, we give our mind permission to breathe too, and allow it to let go of our micro and macro challenges. As the mind exhales the chatter of challenges and preoccupying it, it creates space for giving and gratitude to enter the conversation. Once gratitude enters the heart-mind, we can then give it forward to others, can’t we?

One Sanskrit word for expressing gratitude or ‘giving thanks’ is dhanya-vaad. The first part of the word is dhanya – its root is the word dhan – which literally means ‘wealth’. However, as is often the case in Sanskrit, the word dhanya has many meanings, depending on the context in which it is used. According to the Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English dictionary, dhanya refers to one who is fortunate, who is blessed with wealth, happiness, goodness, virtue and joy. The second part of the word is vaad – which means ‘having a dialog or conversation’. Hence, dhanyavaad can be said to be the sharing and giving of our wealth through speech, dialog and conversation. 

Awareness of our wealth has to precede its giving. If we are unaware of the wealth within our heart’s treasury, we will feel that we have nothing to give or share.  Millions of families will attempt to celebrate ‘Thanksgiving at a distance’ this year. As we gather, we can perhaps share a few seeds of kindness, shine some rays of the heart’s light, and nourish each other with some sweet waters of gratitude. If we can do any or all of that, it will be a celebration full of healing and remembrance of the power of giving. 

Let me say dhanyavaad to all of you for being you. May peace, health, wealth, and yes, breath, be always with you and yours, and may you share of your moments of abundance with joy. 

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly twitter chat with the #SpiritChat community on Sunday, November 22 at 9amET / 730pm India. We will share some moments of giving (and receiving) through conversation. Namaste – @AjmaniK

 

When the heart is engaged in giving, sky is indeed the limit… Breathe the sky…. 

On Creating Contentment

Tags

abundance, contentment, creativity, giving, sharing

It is perhaps not an accident that one of the newest, if not one of the youngest members of the community shared the change that a shift to abundance mentality can bring into our lives. She first joined our monthly Zoom chat in November. In the December conversation, she wisely shared:

“Every morning when I wake up, I say to myself – there is enough for everyone” – @Quratulain

This simple and straightforward affirmation reflects a profound truth that we often tend to forget. Yes, we all have our daily challenges and conflicts. On some days, it may even seem that some parts of us are living contradictions of what we were just yesterday. And yet, it is when we find the courage to be open to the big abundance that is the nature of the universe, we take a small step toward creating contentment.

How is energy of contentment different from the energies of happiness and joy? In order to create and sustain happiness, we may often invoke an energy of ‘doing’. Our accumulated life experiences inform our heart and mind that certain people, communities, things, events, actions, seasons, holidays and such tend to make us happy or unhappy. Our natural inclination to avoid pain feeds into our ‘pursuit of happiness’, no matter how temporary that energy of happiness may be. “Do that which makes you feel good” – haven’t we all heard that mantra?

Ah. I have now infused ‘feeling good’ into the energy of happiness. If ‘feeling good’ equates to ‘optimal health’, then, yes, it would indeed be a welcome infusion. The good health of our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual containers energizes and elevates us towards joy – a more permanent energy beyond happiness. We move from merely ‘feeling good’ towards ‘feeling better’. After moving from ‘good’ to ‘better’, the natural question to ask would be, what’s next? (My gratitude to @GaryGruber for asking that question in our December zoom meeting).  

Perhaps the answer to the “what’s next” question can be found in our attitude towards abundance and  an evaluation of our state of contentment. On self-examination, if we find ourselves in a better state of contentment than we were a month ago, a year ago, or even a decade ago, then we are closer to the answer. If not, then we perhaps need to examine the breadth and depth of our discontent. What is its root? Where did its seed come from? What feeds it? What feeds on it? What role do happiness, joy and abundance play in our state of contentment?

The journey to answer these questions often raises more questions than it answers. And yet, content is the traveler who remembers that joy can be infused in every twist and turn, every spring and autumn, every dawn and dusk, every breath. And that there is enough for everyone. Namaste.

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly twitter gathering – Sunday, December 8 at 9amET / 730pm India. We shall share on the topic of (dis)contentment, and start planning on our “what’s next” for the forthcoming decade. Bring some answers, will you?! – @AjmaniK

A state of contentment flows from a walk along the river (Dec 6 2019)

On Forward Giving

Tags

arts, giving, hospitality, science, spirtuality

I had not been to my Aunt’s house for the Thanksgiving holiday in almost twenty years. This past Thursday, a congruence of time, space and causation, and her decision to host, brought me back. I could not help but marvel at how her gatherings had grown from five to seven in the 1990s, to twenty seven this year. The artwork and handprints of all five of her grandchildren, girls ranging from four to fourteen, were all over the holiday’s decor. 

At the dinner table, the blank notecards were passed around to each family member and the guests. The “suggestion” was that each of us were to write down “what we were thankful for” over the past year. There was some rolling of eyes, some who hid the notecards under their dinner plates, and even some feigned outrage by the three teenagers. During the break between dinner and dessert, my Aunt, the host, invited those who would like to share to read from their notecards. There was a lot of beautiful sharing, and when it came to the the second youngest of her grandchildren, she was too shy to read. On her Mom’s nudging, she haltingly read out her words in the softest of voices….

I am thankful for the trees, so we can breathe through them together…

There was a hushed silence, and many smiles spread across the room. It had taken one of the youngest in the room to show us the long-term impact of a simple forward-giving act of planting a tree. She had shown us that when we focus  on what we are grateful for, and listen to what others are grateful for, we cannot help but be filled with gratitude. The result of us ‘getting filled’ during Thanksgiving – and I’m not just talking about pecan pie and sweet potatoes – is that it energizes our hearts and hands. It is this renewal of gratitude and giving thanks which gives us new energy  that propels us towards giving forward.

It is perhaps when we give with an attitude of forward giving that we are reminded of our access to the infinite source of energetic wisdom. Sometimes, it speaks to us, it lights up our heart, through the heart of a six year old. Thank you, Layla, for inspiring me to think and work forward in my acts of giving.

It is the lives that we may help today, in any small or big way, we plant the seeds for a healthy society. Our forward giving can create a sustainable forest of trees where we can all breathe love and light. Will you join me? 

Kumud

P.S. Join me and the #SpiritChat community in a weekly gathering of ‘forward giving’. We will meet on Sunday, December 1 at 9amET / 730pm India on twitter. I will bring some tea and cookies to share, and yes, some questions too. Namaste – @AjmaniK

P.P.S. If you would like to engage in ‘forward giving’, I invite you to join me in supporting two of my favorite organizations who create a daily impact in thousands of lives. The first is Mitzvah Circle, founded by my long-time friend (who I met on twitter), Fran Held. Their motto is: “When a family faces a crisis, we are here”. The second is Akshaya Patra, whose mission is to provide midday meals to school-going children across India. Please donate. Let us, the #SpiritChat community, raise a $1000 each for these two organizations in the month of December. Thank you! 

“I am thankful for trees… – Layla”

The Thanksgiving Table…

On Giving and Grace

Tags

giving, grace, gratitude, poetry

It is mid November. The tall trees slowly shed their leaves in an act of seasonal giving. The forest floor cradles the precious gift of glorious colors with autumnal grace. The winds seem to shift from their warm hue to a coooler shade of blue. There is much talk of the upcoming ‘holidays’ in the air, and ‘thanksgiving’ is less than a week away.

It is perhaps time to reflect on how our practice of ‘giving’ and ‘receiving’ has evolved over the years. How can we make this ‘thanksgiving’ more filled with purpose than the ones of years past? It is relatively easy for us to be graceful and thankful in our acts of giving. How can we attach the same level of grace to our receiving? Can we become like the forest floor in autumn and let our hearts be wide open in our receiving?

As the wind whooshes through in the ‘wind tunnel’ between my home and the forest behind it, I clutch my cup of warm tea a little bit more firmly. It is as if I am trying to hold on to the sliver of summer’s residual warmth, before the onset of winter takes it away from me. The open book of Rumi’s poetry in front of me reminds me of grace…

Who is this with his hand out
saying, please, give just a little,
so I can give you a kingdom.

A little further on, I am reminded of eternity…

He makes this dying world eternal
His greatest alchemy
is how he does the unbinding
that keeps love from breathing deep.

And the value of patience…

Every second he changes cruelty
to loyal friendship.

We think of ourselves as ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’, and then there is this reminder…

Out of unconditioned emptiness
comes this planet with all its qualities.

And then, a nudge towards the grace of silence, of being, of becoming…

Be silent now.
Say fewer and fewer praise poems.
Let yourself become living poetry.
– Rumi in ‘Soul Houses’

Ever so slightly, I loosen my clasp on the warm cup of tea. I walk over to the tightly shut window, and loosen the latch to crack it open a little bit. The whooshing wind rushes in. Ever so slightly, in small actions performed with love, I yield. I am going to greet winter with grace. For it, I shall be thankful. Let me receive it with the same heart-filled-with-joy that I received summer, spring and autumn.

I may be excessive with my giveaway impulses,
but I still have what you gave
when you held my head against your chest
– Rumi in ‘What You Gave’

Let me take this opportunity to express my deep gratitude to every single one of you in the #SpiritChat community… Thank you for adding your grace to my life.

I will be silent now…

Kumud @AjmaniK

P.S. Join me and the #SpiritChat community as we explore ‘Giving and Grace’ – Sunday, November 19th at 9amEST / 2pm UTC / 7:30pm IST on twitter.

On Living and Giving

Tags

giving, living, spiritual practice, spirituality

In a lecture given in England in 1896 by the Indian monk, Swami Vivekananda, he said:

“While the West tries to measure how much it is possible for them to possess and to enjoy, the East seems to take the opposite course, and measure how little of material possessions they can do without…” – Swami Vivekananda on ‘Vedanta as a Factor in Civilisation’ (1896)

Having read a lot of his works over the decades, I believe that Swami Vivekananda was alluding more to perhaps an attitude of the heart, than just the physical notion of ‘West’ and ‘East’. As the world has grown more mobile over the past hundred plus years, the intermingling of people’s attitudes towards life and living, and how individuals choose to live their lives, has led to many a transformation. East or West – physical location is no longer an indicator of how each of us choose to live and give.

When I first moved to the USA as a graduate student, I arrived with all my possessions in two suitcases, and maybe a carry-on bag. In the course of living, and growing more ‘prosperous’, the process of ‘accumulation’ has brought me to the point where I have way more ‘things’ in my home than I could ever hope to use or need. This has been brought into perspective during the process of my impending move to a new home in a few weeks. In order to ‘stage’ my current home for sale, we began the process of emptying and decluttering a few months ago. We ended up renting not one, but two storage spaces – both of which are now full of stuff from the current home that we do not need or want to take to the new home. Consider the silliness of this – I am actually paying to store stuff that I will perhaps never ever use – not very ‘life-smart’, am I?!

I call it life-creep. The stuff creeps up on us. We stow the stuff away in little corners, thinking we may need it ‘some day’. After a while, we even lose track of what we really have. So, when we actually need something, say a tool, we find it easier to just go buy it, instead of looking for it. And so it goes. Fourteen years later, we end up with two storage units full of ‘life stuff’. We rationalize our ‘accumulating’ by calling it the ‘price of living’. Or the price of ‘maybe someday I will need it’. A poor return on investment, if you ask me.

All this accumulating isn’t just limited to ‘physical’ objects. In fact, physical objects are relatively easy to ‘give away’ – that is one (albeit ‘low-end’) form of giving. But it’s a good start. A useful one. The entire story of Nachiketa emanates from the ‘nature of giving’. But I digress. We accumulate a lot other stuff too. There are memories, emotions, beliefs, grudges, and yes, even stores of knowledge. A lot of these are much more effective at ‘weighing us down’ than the physical stuff that we accumulate. For example, storehouses of outdated beliefs may be much more efficient at preventing us from discovering our true (lighter) selves – don’t you think?

So, as we look forward to spring and the eventual ‘spring cleaning’, we may want to look a bit beyond the physical ‘giving’ or ‘letting go’. We may want to examine all the other layers of our life, our living – and raise the level of our giving in all areas. We may want to consider giving away with Joy, with a Smile. The season of what we hold on to, even indavertently and subconsciously, may well be past. And when we do give fully, life will be waiting in the wings to exuberantly fill us with new purpose, new color, and a new attitude towards living.

Join me. Let us learn to give to live (with a smile).

Namaste,

Kumud @AjmaniK

Join the #SpiritChat community Sunday, March 5th at 9amET / 2pm GMT / 7:30pm India – we will chat about ‘Living and Giving (with a smile)’. Thank you.

On Giving and Gratitude

Tags

giving, gratitude

As we head into the last few days of November and the ‘shopping’ season for gifts and giving seems to be upon us with the approach of the holidays, I pause and reflect on the nature of Giving and its connection to Gratitude (which has been the #SpiritChat theme for this month).

First, a look back. What was given to me in the past year that I am truly grateful for? For me, this question is relatively easy to answer, as it pertains to my personal sense of gratitude. Last November, I was given an invitation to begin a new practice of #meditation. For that, I am very grateful. My practice of the morning meditation has become a habit that has brought many hours of ‘struggle’ and many moments of joy to my heart. And as I grow in this practice of sitting, silence, serenity and surrender, my heart knows that my sense of gratitude will only increase.

As if to balance my sitting practice, Nature gave me an invitation to walk amongst her over the past year. I admit that I am not much of a ‘goal setting’ kind of person, but the fact that I set (and then carefully tracked) a goal of walking 10,000 steps everyday worked wonders for me. On days when I didn’t ‘feel like it’, my goal energized me to put on my walking shoes and many layers of clothes and go be in solitude with nature. By giving in to my goal, I received the gifts of hundreds of miles of walking in nature, in every season.

I was given an opportunity to volunteer at my daughter’s school. I was given a chance to renew and revitalize friendships that go back many decades. I was invited to from new partnerships, get involved in new projects in my professional career. I was also given a choice to walk away from beliefs and relationships that were toxic to my spiritual and personal growth. For all of these, I am grateful.

In the face of what was perhaps the greatest challenge given to me this year, I discovered some resilient parts of me, and those around me, that I never knew existed. In the wake of my mother’s sudden passing in February, I was the grateful beneficiary of the outpouring of words and actions of many in the #SpiritChat community. Thank you. In the process of healing, I (re)discovered the gift of empathy for those healing from grief of loss of loved ones.

It seems that this has become a post about (my) ‘receiving and gratitude’. And that is okay, because this was a good exercise for me to reflect on the receiving of the intangibles in life. And from the receiving springs the giving. Maybe I could have asked a different question at the beginning. What did I give to others – or enable and empower them to receive in the past year, that they were truly grateful for? Maybe I did not ask this question because it requires feedback from the receivers – only their heart knows… 🙂 I invite you to do this exercise. Take a few minutes and blog/journal/write your answer to the first question – What was given to me in the past year that I am truly grateful for?

In conclusion, a short story from Indian history about the nature of giving and gratitude…

Poet and visionary, Tulsidas asks Rahim, who was a great ‘giver’ and one of the nine ‘jewels’ or advisors in Akbar’s court:

where did you learn such giving? the more you seem to give, the lower you seem to cast your eyes, averting the receiver! why do you avoid the gaze of those that you give to?

And Rahim, knowing that Tulsidas already knows the answer, replies anyway…

The True Giver is someone else, bestowing, day and night. So that the world may not give me undue credit, downcast are my eyes…

In our giving, may we be conduits. Namaste,

Kumud

I invite you to join us for our weekly twitter chat – Sunday, November 27th at 9amET / 2pmUTC / 7:30pm India – we will talk more about ‘Giving and Gratitude". Thank you.

The Zentangle Heart of Giving (art by AA)