On Spiritual Stress Tests

Tags

challenges, mental health, resilience, spirituality, stress

What a difference a week makes. As we take steps out of the shadow of the pandemic, we find ourselves in an equally long, if not longer shadow — the shadow of another Cold War. The stress levels for millions of people went up so rapidly that one could feel the energy shift palpably towards fear, angst, anxiety, grief and disorientation. By Thursday evening, my mind was perturbed enough that I decided to shut off the faucet for a day or so. It was time to take a ‘mental health’ day and try and restore a bit of inner peace. 

I didn’t really imagine that this unraveling would be happening in our world, and happening so quickly. We live in a hyper-connected world of supply chains, social media, travel, food and energy dependencies, global partnerships and more. I have been asking some questions. How did we get here? How prepared are we to cope with these unprecedented stresses? How can we support each other better in these times?

It seems like we are all being given a stress test of the mind, the heart and our spirit. It reminds me of engineering school, where we used to perform stress tests on materials to determine their ‘breaking point’. There were tensile tests to measure stretchability, compression tests for crushability, torsion tests for bendability, and more. In medical science, we have stress tests to assess the heart’s health and functionality. What serves as a good stress test for our spirituality? 

A good stress test will stretch us, bend us, squeeze us, and maybe even break us in some ways.  It will make us question the efficacy of our practices, our ability to maintain inner peace.  On my ‘mental health day’, I shut down social media, the news stayed off, and I stayed off the internet at large. These steps helped stanch the inflow of stress-producing inputs, and yet, it wasn’t enough to reduce the effect of the accumulated peace-disrupting thoughts from the week gone by. I realized that I had to do some additional work to start restoring my equanimity. 

The work began by adopting a contemplative attitude, by asking questions. How could I, as an individual, influence the outcomes of the events that were stress-testing my mind? This contemplation led me to regain some focus of those things that I could indeed influence through my actions. Regaining focus led me to ask — what are my core, go-to practices, that best help to calm my mind? The four-fold answer was relaxation, meditation, inner cleaning, and prayer. Any and all of these practices work well to help me de-escalate stress when my mind is under attack. 

In the past twenty four hours, every time my mind has tended to wander off into the field of stress-inducing thoughts, I have used my awareness to pause and contemplate. What can I control? How many details do I need to know? Is this bit of information a consumer or a contributor to my vital life-force? With every contemplation, I develop a higher sensitivity to what is happening outside and within me. With greater sensitivity, I feel that I have better answers to respond to life’s stress tests. With better answers, I can create better outcomes, trust myself more, and orient my awareness towards peace, which creates happiness. 

Maybe the occasional stress-test is a good thing. Maybe I need to be grateful for the gifts of courage and resilience that stress tests bring with them? They can help me give me a reality check on how much spiritual progress I am really making! I don’t know of any curriculum that will prepare me for all of life’s stress tests. Awareness that love, truth and inner peace are all worth fighting for — perhaps remembering that is preparation enough?

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly twitter chat with the #SpiritChat community, Sunday, March 6 at 9am ET / 2pm GMT. We hope to gather and share techniques to pass our stress-tests with flying colors. Namaste – @AjmaniK

Nature often uses symmetry to cope with her stresses… or so it appears…

Do You Remember?

Tags

clarity, memory, mental health, mind matters, nutrition, purity, remembrance

As I was doing some early spring cleaning of the audio recordings on my phone, I came across a Vedanta lecture titled “Do You Remember?” from a 2017 visit by Swami Tyagananda to Cleveland. I remember his visit clearly, and the impact it had on me, and so, in this week of remembrance of my Mother’s transition, I decided to listen again. Allow me to share some highlights from the talk.

The phrase ‘Do you remember?’ was often used as a greeting by a particular senior monk when he met other monks. The question served as a reminder to the monks — to think back to their energy, enthusiasm and idealism when they first decided to become a monk. Of course, the analogy can be extended to us – do we remember the excitement when we first stepped into a project, relationship or spiritual journey in our lives? How does our current enthusiasm compare with that of when we began?

The opposite of remembrance is forgetfulness. What makes us forget? Let us examine. As humans, we tend to form attachments because they make us feel more safe, give us security. With attachments, come desires and expectations – we want people to act and behave in certain ways. When these desires aren’t met, we tend to respond with irritation, and then anger. Anger changes us, and causes us to act in ways contrary to our nature — we can become anger itself. Anger creates delusion — a state of mind where we lose awareness, forget what is appropriate, forget how to live and how to think.

This is the process of forgetfulness according to the Bhagavad Gita. Attachment, unfulfilled desires, anger, delusion, forgetfulness, loss of memory — we forget who we are. So how does one strengthen the memory and the mind? We strengthen the awareness of what we feed our mind. We are often very mindful of physical health, and the quality and purity of what we feed our body. The mind-body connection also gives us feedback from our mind about what we are feeding the body.

But what about what we are feeding the other senses that directly feed our mind? What is the purity and quality of the books we read, the media we consume, the conversations with our friends and family, and such? In order to strengthen the mind, the mind needs our commitment to purity in all the ways we feed it. It is that daily commitment through our spiritual practices, of awareness of the ‘junk food’ we feed our mind, that will help keep the mind in good health and keep our memory strong. With a strong memory, we won’t easily yield to delusion, anger, desires and attachments, because we will have clarity of mind. With clarity of mind, remembrance of our values, our principles, our purpose, and our path, will become our lifestyle.

May our practices be such that they yield an unqualified Yes to the question – ‘Do you remember your true Self?’

Namaste.

Kumud

P.S. Join us in our weekly twitter chat with the #SpiritChat community, Sunday February 20 at 9amET / 730pm India. I will remember to bring tea and questions – you bring the cookies! – @AjmaniK

The rose – a great example of the mind and its thorns…

Creating Our Mental Sanctuary

Tags

healing, mental body, mental health, sanctuary, wellness

He would often be standing by the wrought iron gate that led to the small stone patio in front of my grandparent’s home. A tall, handsome figure, his silent presence would convey some unknown greeting from behind his large, sunken eyes. On every weekly visit, we kids would wonder – what kind of mood is he going to be in today? We kids  were told that he was a brilliant young man, and that he had an ‘almost drowning’ while serving in the Navy, which affected his brain. I hoped that my aunt (his older sister, who raised me) or my grandfather (his father) would be spared his rage which would sometimes pour forth in an unmitigated verbal barrage of obscenities.The two people that he rarely tangled with were the two ladies of the home – his mother and his sister-in-law. I remember watching him drink his evening cup of tea with such peace, standing outside the kitchen or at that wrought iron gate. His moments of silence seemed to be as deep and impactful as his lapses of rage. 

On Tuesday of this week, I stumbled upon the fact that many organizations across the world were observing “World Mental Health” week. I am not sure why, but after all these decades, the memories of my dear Uncle came flowing through my mind. Buried deep within my own brain’s cognition, the memory of his pain returned to my awareness. It made me ask the question – what actions and practices can we, as travelers on our spiritual journeys, take, to create mental sanctuaries – for ourselves, and those who cannot create them for themselves? Some answers were revealed in a live webinar titled “Love and Compassion for Mental Well-Being”, which I attended on Wednesday morning. The three practices, not in any particular order, that emerged from this conversation were:

1. Work to remove Isolation. Those, like my Uncle, who suffer from chronic inner pain due to improper mental health, often choose inner and outer isolation. Isolation becomes their sanctuary, because it is perhaps their only safe space. When we observe such a tendency towards isolation, within us and in others, we can work towards reaching out and taking action towards its mitigation. Even though my Uncle lived in the same house with his family, I am sure that he felt isolated in many ways, because nobody really knew how to  engage with him in a way that would be meaningful to him.  

2.  Choose Self-Compassion. We, in the #SpiritChat community often talk about the practice of compassion, and how we ought not to forget to apply compassion to our own selves. We are often more aware of being compassionate towards others, than towards ourselves. Why is self-compassion essential to creating a mental sanctuary? One reason is that “self-compassion is necessary because it is an antidote to shame”. We may have been raised in a family, a relationship, a work environment that inflicted shame upon us. Self-compassion helps us break the circle of shame, and allows for healing to enter the mind. With compassion, we can create an environment for a new, healthy mental sanctuary to emerge. 

3. Create a New Self-Image. How do we see our own self? Our image of our self is often created on the lens of our mind by the impressions of our past experiences, our current life situation, and what we expect our future to be like. A mental lens that is overly clouded with impressions, weak and strong, can affect our mind and heart. Regular practice of (self) forgiveness can help us clean some of these impressions. As our heart forgives, we become lighter, we admit new light that can create a clear, new, radiant, brilliant self-image. A new self-image, when combined with self-compassion, erases self-hatred. 

Those who are suffering due to poor mental health, often do not have the resources to break the triangle of isolation, lack of love, and lack of compassion that becomes their ’sanctuary’. It thus becomes our responsibility – all of us who have the resources of love, compassion and companionship to offer – to offer the sanctuary of these three, to them and to ourselves, with kindness and grace. Will we choose to share, to create a new sanctuary? Or will we let the suffering continue?

Kumud 

P.S. Join us in our weekly twitter chat, Sunday October 13 at 9amET / 630pm India. We shall share some love, compassion and companionship – and share our practices which can help each other create healthy mental sanctuaries. I also invite you to reach out to someone you may not have heard from in a while, who may be feeling ’isolated’, and ‘check-in’ on them. Maybe even invite them to some ‘tea and cookies’. Namaste – @AjmaniK

The bridge that leads to one of my ‘sanctuaries’