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)

On Giving and Privilege

Tags

giving, privilege, receiving

The idea of giving and receiving really does not need to know any season. However, the first inescapbale fact is that the ‘holiday season’ which dawns upon us in different parts of the world tends to shift our focus to giving and receiving, and many other nuances that are connected with them. The second fact is that many of us find it much, much easier to give than to receive. I have many past #SpiritChat transcripts as lasting proof of this fact. A related fact, which is connected to the first two, is that we associate kindness, kind-heartedness, and spiritual expansion with giving to others, and the scales are heavily weighted against receiving.

But the fact of the matter is that, in most cases, we have been inadvertently receiving more than we have been giving, for most of our lives. Once we cast the nets of our senses and our minds a bit wider than our immediate surroundings, we will know this to be true. From the moment we started growing in our mother’s wombs, we became receivers of nourishment. And when we leave our physical frame and transition to the next phase, we will be receivers of the grace of those who will facilitate that transition for us. It is in the interim, when our awareness grows in the fact that most of our immediate needs have been met, that we find ourselves in a position to “give”, and perhaps even ‘help’ others with our giving.

In higher awareness, the seed-idea of ‘giving is good’ finds root in our heartspace. Once we make ‘giving’ a regular practice – whether it be giving of material things, giving of our time and attention, giving of a genuine smile, buying that cup of coffee for that stranger in the car behind us at the drive through window – we find joy and fulfillment in giving. We find a little bit of enhanced purpose, even if it be for a brief fleeting moment, when we realize that we have made someone’s day a little bit better. We add one more thread to the fabric of our life and theirs, when we practice giving. The open circle of receiving wraps its arms around itself with the open circle of giving, and we find ourselves in an infinite loop of privilege…

Why privilege? Consider the obvious. If there were no receiver, the giver and their giving would be bereft of joy, purpose, and the sense of sharing. So, yes, it is indeed the giver who is privileged that the receiver actually exists. As Vivekananda has pointed out in one of his essays, “it is the privilege of the servers that they are able to serve…” – so, the givers should be grateful, and give thanks that they can share of what they have received. One corollary is that the receiver ought to partake of the joy of the giver, and give the giver the opportunity to exercise their spiritual need to experience their infinite nature in the act of giving…

For those of us who have children or are around children, we may be familiar with the joy that we get from giving them the best of everything that is possible. For those of us who have grandchildren, I am told that this joy is multiplied many fold. So, as children of That divine, let us make our list, check it twice, and rejoice in receiving the best from the greatest giver of all. In that giving and receiving, we have the priviliege and the opportunity to find the infinite expression of our spiritual nature…

My sincere thanks to you, for reading and receiving ~ I invite you to give back with your thoughts ~ Join us Sunday, November 29th 2015 at 9amET on twitter, as we disccus Giving and Privilege.

Namaste,

Kumud

The Spirit of Giving – with @MtizvahCircle

Tags

charity, giving, spiritchat, spirituality

Our featured guest on our weekly twitter chat #SpiritChat this week is Fran Held, founder of @MitzvahCircle foundation. In celebration of the United Nations effort called #GivingTuesday on December 2nd 2014, we will discuss the Spirit of #Giving with the intent to raise awareness about the work that @MitzvahCircle is doing, and examine the different facets of how #Thanks and #gratitude can lead to #Giving. ~ Kumud

All you need is one person to say “Yes!”

Mitzvah Circle Foundation—was created without seed money or donors—our goal—is and has always been–to meet needs of people in crisis. This means we walk with people through the tragedies of their lives. Mitzvah Circle Foundation helps people who have fallen through the cracks, providing assistance—tangible items like; diapers, clothing, toiletries, school supplies and shoes—along with guidance and referrals. We do this quickly, with care and compassion.

At Mitzvah Circle Foundation, we don’t speak of –making an investment in a person or a family. We don’t think about people in these terms. We believe that—every person and each and every family is of value and is worth our time and resources. We believe that every person matters.

We also believe and I know that Sometimes you just need one person to say yes…to offer help… and to care at a critical moment and life is changed forever. This is why Mitzvah Circle Foundation doesn’t put up barriers to help— instead we open our hearts. For the last 5 years, Mitzvah Circle Foundation has been the only organization to say yes to thousands of people in need who have heard a lifetime of Nos.

At Mitzvah Circle Foundation, we really see people—not defined by their wounds but through their unique gifts. We see the light that shines from the deepest part of every person’s being—even in times of pure darkness.
I want you to know that you matter. You—our supporters are the reason that Mitzvah Circle Foundation has served over 30 thousand people in need this year. Your kind words, time, and donations make our work possible.

You are the reason that babies on ventilators receive free diapers from our diaper bank. It is because of you that Steven’s dad who is dying of cancer has new pajamas today. You are the answer to every child who is hungry—who has no food at home and receives our Food4Hope bags. This work—our work– is only possible because you said “Yes.”

~ Fran Held
@MitzvahCircle on twitter
MitzvahCircle on FaceBook
MtizvahCircle web page
A short video ~ It Just Takes One Peson to Say Yes!

Fran is the Founder and Executive Director of Mitzvah Circle Foundation, a 501©(3) that provides hope and dignity to individuals and families during times of crisis, poverty, homelessness and serious illness. She cares deeply about people who have fallen through the cracks, and created MCF to remove barriers and bureaucracy, to provide support and guidance with care and compassion.

I invite you to join us Sunday, November 30th at 9amET / 2pm UTC / 7:30pm India for this conversation with @MitzvahCircle ~ More importantly, I invite you to take action, and give what you can, where you can, in your chosen way, big or small. Know that it will make a difference, to you, the giver, and the receiver.
If you choose to give to @MitzvahCircle, you can do so at their #giving page ~ our #SpiritChat partner for December 2014. If possible, please mention #SpiritChat in your donation, so we can keep track of our #giving effectiveness for future efforts. Thank you! – Kumud