Heart Paths and Practices

Tags

awareness, distractions, heart matters, mind, practices, spirituality

Some autumn mornings start off cold, dark, gray and wet, and mostly stay that way. The state of the outdoors really ought not to matter much to our indoor practices; and yet, our mind is adept at sending us all the old messages to distract us from our path. “Hit the snooze again.” “It’s cold outside the blankets.” “Just foe today, sleep through the hour of meditation.”

I let the mind run through its games and then smiled at it. “Not today. I’m having none of your wiliness,” I said. “You will move on to other things in a flash, but if I listen to you, I will miss out on the best part of my day!” For the practitioner who has experienced even one of them, the morning-hour is rife with possibilities of peace, joy, light, lightness, relaxation, silence, stillness and more. What would the irascible an unruly mind know about any of those rewards?

Forty five minutes after stepping out of the warm cocoon of sleep to sit in the warmth of daily practice, I feel the familiar glow within. As often happens, the heart is lighter, and the still dark morning feels a little brighter. The small decision to ignore the entreaties of the mind often results in rewards that cannot be described in words. I sometimes wonder why the mind keeps doing this same song and dance every so often, despite the fact that I can’t remember the last time it was actually able to convince me to ‘sleep in’ on my morning practice.

When we succeed in creating a new habit or practice which adds a sense of permanence, stability and value to our life, the mind isn’t going to be able to break us away from it. The practice can take any form. The form of the practice May not matter, as long as we remember to practice it. Our daily practices help us remember who we are, where we are and where we are going. The duration of the practice may not matter, as long as the practice creates a measurable, qualitative difference in our life’s path over time.

A mentor once told me that “ten years of your life will go by, just like that, whether or not you are paying attention – so wouldn’t it be better to pay attention?” Yes. The question becomes: what are we going to pay attention to? How are we to take back our attention from our mind, which is always driving awareness outwards, and re-direct it inwards, towards the heart?

I have to admit that I don’t think much about the next ten years, the next year, the next month, and so on. Why? Too-much forecasting can empower the mind and its games, and make us forget that it is our daily practices that build the heart‘s resilience for the paths ahead.

I’ve been up for two hours, and yes, it’s still cold, gray and damp outside. But so what? Time to put on some layers, walking boots, a warm hat, and go visit with the trees, the waters, and the birds. No matter the weather, it’s a practice that has yet to do anything but lighten my heart. Even the mind now knows not to try and sway me from the trail. What else is it to do after watching me walk the heart path for all these years?

Kumud

P. S. Join us for our weekly gathering with the #SpiritChat community on Twitter on Sunday, October 24 at 9amET / 630pm India. We will talk about the heart, the mind and the path. Namaste ~ @AjmaniK

Treasures found on the path… keep inviting my heart back to the trail

Celebrating Our Spiritual Cores

Tags

beliefs, celebration, healing, practices, renewal, values

Summer is often a season of travel, of new explorations and discoveries that often lead to further explorations. It is a season of days with long hours of sunlight, of watching fireflies and sunsets and moonrise. Summer brings heat and sweat and thunderstorms and awareness of climate change. It is often in the early morning coolness and long, late evening twilights that I find opportunities to reflect on, to review and renew my cores.

The core components that I find myself focusing on are the physical, the mental, the emotional and the spiritual. While they are all distinct cores, they are also all connected like the members of a multi-dimensional honeycomb. Our mental core affects our psychological core, which in turn affects our physical core, and so on. When the state of any of our cores is less than optimal, all our states suffer, and pain in one core begets in in another.

Self awareness teaches us that it takes a bit of (self) discipline to develop and maintain sustainable, holistic practice for the best health of our cores. Our practices are influenced by our core beliefs, our core values, our core inputs and our core connections. These can be viewed as our four core quadrants. They are like the four legs of the lunar lander – if any of the legs were to be unduly compromised, it could lead to a failure of our spiritual core, our journey and our mission.

Inertia is often what stands between us and the adoption of new disciplines and practices. Our unexamined state of idleness, or even our accepted state of motion, takes a certain amount of ‘force’ to effect internal change of speed or direction. It often takes an (unanticipated) life event to shake us out of our inertia or reverie to ask – what are my core values, beliefs, connections and inputs? How do they influence my daily core practices? How do they affect my spiritual core?

For me, it all began with a simple question – how do I get out of the state of my spiritual inertia? I made small changes in my physical core (waking up rested, walking in nature, eating better), my mental core (guarding my input gates, meditating) and my emotional core (friend and family connections, my reactions, my judgements). Over time and space, every meditation hour, every small nature walk, every new association with fellow travelers, has added up to a perceptible change in my spiritual core.

The result of a renewed spiritual core? I have good quality fuel and oxidant, guidance, and company for the journey ahead. I have appreciation and gratitude for all those who have inspired me, walked with me, celebrated with me, and continue to do so. Awareness, joy, silence, solitude and stillness have become my reservoirs. ‘Thou art That’ has become my internal engine. ‘For the benefit of All’ has become my charioteer. All the quadrants have become focused on the center, where the heart flows love and light abundant, which empowers me to share freely, without hesitation, and with a core spirit of celebration.

Kumud @AjmaniK

P.S. Join us as we gather for our weekly chat, Sunday July 28 at 9amET on Twitter in #SpiritChat – we will celebrate our cores, all of them, as we complete eight years of our journey together – Kumud.

A return to the core space – where the five elements meet for renewal…

Our Spiritual Commitments

Tags

accountability, commitment, practices, spirituality

Memorial Day, the traditional beginning of summer here in the USA, seems like it was a ‘lifetime’ ago. The twelve weeks or so have whizzed by like a summer breeze and we stand at the doorstep of autumn. Some of us may already have made the shift (see last week’s ’back to school’ post) in mind and heart while some may be holding on valiantly to the last threads of summer. And even though we may have done this transition many times before, I find that it useful to reevaluate my commitments for the upcoming season as I move into fall.

Most of us find ourselves playing many roles in the living of our life. Women in particular, have so many ‘boxes to check’ every single day. In general, we stretch ourselves in many different directions. The ‘starcompass’ of our life is rarely ever symmetric, for that is the nature of life itself. What does your starcompass look like? Here is one way to construct it.

Divide your life commitments into eight broad areas. Feel to pick any or all from social, mental, spiritual, physical, financial, emotional and add some of your own. Now, evaluate how much life energy you spend in each area, say on a scale of one to 10. To create the starcompass, think of the eight major points on a compass. Mark the score for the first area, with a point at ‘N’. If the score is a full ’10’, your point would lie at the outer edge of the circle. Next, move to NW, and mark the score for the next area with another point. If the score is ‘5’, your point would be halfway to the periphery of the circle. And so on.

So, what eight areas did you choose to create the ‘starcompass’ with? What do your life’s commitments and corresponding energy investments look like? Are the eight points on your compass equidistant from the center? Is your starcompass symmetric about any particular axis? Do the areas with ‘large energy’ correspond to where you want to be investing that energy? Which areas with ‘low energy’ investments would you want to put more energy into? Is there one particularly ‘overweight’ commitment area that has your ‘starcompass’ to the point of tipping over?

The ‘starcompass’ exercise is only one of many ways to make an evaluation of our commitments. The important thing is to do an evaluation in some way and establish a ‘baseline’ awareness. Then, as we shift our actions through our energy, develop new habits, establish new practices and form new commitments, we can watch our ‘starcompass’ evolve over time. One year from today, we may have twelve monthly ‘starcompass’ drawings. We can lay them side by side and observe our ‘spiritual’ commitments – and maybe even make a ‘flipbook’ of our life… Imagine that!

Namaste,

Kumud @AjmaniK

Join us in our weekly #SpiritChat – Sunday, August 28th at 9amET/1pmUTC on twitter. Let us talk about our spiritual commitments. And, if you would like to share your first ‘starcompass’, please bring a graphic with you. Thank you!

Inner Conditioning and Habits

Tags

conditioning, habits, practices

In last week’s discussion on Inner Workings of the Mind, we had started an exploration of the mind and its multifarious ways. We asked some questions, got some answers, and, like any good research project, created more questions in the process. One aspect of the working of the mind is its conditioning and one of the consequences of this, which is the formation of our habits.

Let us go back to the analogy of a calm mind, a possible container for consciousness, and its similarity to that of the surface of a still lake. As a part of our daily life, the stillness is disturbed by inputs which create ‘surface waves’ of disappointment, irritability, anger and such. These ‘surface waves’ are visible on the outside, as they form expression in our interaction with our near and dear ones, or even complete strangers. In addition to the visible ‘surface waves’, every disturbance also creates a cumulative effect in our mind. This cumulative effect of inputs becomes our “inner conditioning”, and can create triggers points in our mind.

What is the effect of such trigger points? They become activators of conditioned reflexes – any encounter with the trigger, however innocuous, will set off a distorted, exaggerated, reactive, inappropriate response… of disappointment, irritability, anger and such. For instance, there is an irritation in the response that isn’t warranted. Your spouse or sibling or child may say something totally innocuous, and it create a disproportionate response from you – because your ‘disappointment’ with them is just waiting to be triggered. This is true of physical responses too – you have a bad day at work, and you come home and eat a gallon of ice-cream… the food trigger.

We have talked so far of triggers which set off ‘negative’ inner conditioning reactions. One role of our spiritual practice can be to attain freedom from this negative inner conditioning, our ‘negative’ habits. As we replace our negative triggers with positive ones, we can move from a default response state of ‘things just make me so angry’ to a response of ‘things just fill me with joy’. However, it takes inner work, and in most cases, inner work done with self-discipline over a period of time to reverse our habits. If you have ever tried to make a lifestyle change – say, give up smoking, or give up too much coffee, or eat healthier – you know what I am alluding too. Positive change which brings long-term positive effects, takes time, work, and patience.

Good habits, triggering positive inner reactions, are a reward of practice, cleanliness, contentment and process of self-reform. The payoff of moving towards positive inner conditioning is tremendous. As BKS Iyengar says in his “Light on Life” book –

“Those with good habits of Life are agreeable, able to make their way in Life.

We need tools. Tools that will help us move towards freedom, by liberating us from the unwanted ingrained patterns. Tools that will help us identify, acknowledge and progressively change our patterns, our habits. Yoga is one of these tools, that is all the rage these days. Meditation is a component of Yoga, and there are many ways of doing meditation and Yoga. We have to find what works for us! Some use writing and journaling as a tool – ingrained patterns emerge as we write – and we can identify the ones that we want to get rid of. And the list goes on.

What conditioning-reform tools are on your list? What habits are you trying to change and replace with better ones? What are your triggers, which set off negative reactions within your ‘lake’? Is freedom from negative habits enough? Is it possible that we may be equally ‘bound’ by our positive habits?

Join us in #SpiritChat Sunday August 24th 2014 at 9am ET / 2pm GMT / 6:30pm India, as we discuss the subject of inner conditioning and habits. I hope you will give some thoughts to the ideas suggested here, and share openly with the community. We can all grow towards unconditioned freedom in the process!

Namaste, and Be Well.

Kumud

P.S. This topic was inspired by, and dedicated to the Yoga Master, BKS Iyengar, who ascended the physical plane on August 19th 2014. Though I never met him personally, his writing strikes a unique chord with me. Peace.

Ready? Q1. Inner conditioning - what idea does that phrase convey to you? #SpiritChat

Q2. How does our inner conditioning develop? How does it impact our Life? #SpiritChat 

Q3. If inner conditioning creates #habits, what are some that have served you well? Not so well? #SpiritChat 

Q4. Disappointment, irritability, anger. How would we identify the trigger? Is there a common trigger?  #SpiritChat 

Q5. If you could, what would you replace disappointment, irritability and anger with? Why? #SpiritChat

Q6. Imagine that you only had 'life-affirming' habits. What would your life look like then? #SpiritChat 

Q7. "Good habits may be as (spiritually) binding as bad ones" - Agree or disagree? Why or why not? #SpiritChat 

Q8. Habits, serendipity, spontaneity. Is there a conflict? What is/are the connection(s)? #SpiritChat 

Q9. What are some 'tools' that have worked for you in changing your conditioning, your habits? #SpiritChat 

Final Q10. This question belongs to you. What would you like to ask the community about #habits? #SpiritChat 

Full transcript link: http://bit.ly/sc-tr-0824

Storify summary link: http://sfy.co/hqzf

On Traditions and Spirituality

Tags

practices, spirit, spiritchat, traditions, values

What is a tradition? The classic dictionary definition is

Tradition is the transmission of customs or beliefs from generation to generation, or the fact of being passed on in this way… To transmit, to hand over, to give for safekeeping.

Traditions have symbolic meaning or special significance, with some of them being more special to us than others. Traditions can help add color, light, sound, taste and flavor to our occasionally mundane lives. As we go and grow through life and spend time with different cultures, and their ways of doing certain things, we may also have an opportunity to absorb their traditions and enhance our own.

However, there are hurdles that face our traditions. For instance, when crossing national boundaries, the desire of immigrants to preserve traditions can become a challenge. This is particularly true when the cultures of the immigrant and the host country are vastly different. One choice is to compromise – to bend but not break, to allow the tradition to flex, and be infused with the fragrance of the new culture. Some of us may be resistant to assimilate the traditions of the societies we live in – for fear of losing our past traditions. We may choose to be hard, non-compromising and rigid in our attitude. This may keep the tradition(s) pure for a little while, but invites the inevitable conflict(s) within families and communities.

Religion and its practices are well-known for their affinity for tradition(s). Holidays, celebrations and festivals are opportunities to renew old traditions, and, on occasion, establish some new ones. The memories and records of these traditions in our lives become intertwined with, and may even surpass the religious significance of these celebrations! The traditions can hence become the means with which to preserve those specific values which the particular religious community wants to nourish and grow.

A traditional Rangoli decoration for ‘Diwali’ – India’s ‘Festival of Lights’

Photo by S. Majumdar / CC BY 2.0

In a spiritual context, we my inherit certain practices, and we may develop some of our own as we weave our way through life. How can we decide which of these practices will eventually become traditions which we may want to preserve? How do we preserve our own traditions, while remaining open to the traditions of others? Do you feel that this need to preserve traditions is a ‘red-herring’, a distraction on our spiritual journey? Or do you feel that this is part of our purpose, our mission, our legacy?

I invite you to reflect on this topic, and then join us in our weekly #SpiritChat on Sunday, November 3rd 10th at 9amET on twitter. Share your thoughts, and some of your traditions with us. These Sunday morning conversations on spirituality have almost become a tradition for many – I hope you will get to meet some of these good folks! Namaste.

Kumud

P.S. I invite you to test out the special chat site developed by @tchatio for #SpiritChat at http://chat.spiritchat.org – we hope to ‘filter’ the displayed chat stream of any ‘non-traditional’ visitors during the live chat 😉