Gifts of Freedom

Tags

celebration, freedom, remembrance, spirituality

The waxing first quarter moon flirted with me from outside the upstairs window as it emerged briefly from behind the clouds at late twilight. I had just finished my evening meditation, and was slowly emerging from the gift of freedom from being immersed in a deep peace from the stillness beyond light. The gift of the moon made my heart feel like a lotus that opens its petals at the first signs of light.

I needed to see more of her magic, so I walked downstairs, and on to the deck outside, just to catch a few clear glimpses before some dark clouds engulfed her for the night. Just as I was to walk back inside, out of the corner of my eye, I saw yet another gift – the first summer sighting of a firefly in the grass. And as I swept my gaze towards the trees, I saw a forest full of fireworks – hundreds of fireflies silently floating, dancing, sharing their light from within. The Fourth of July fireworks from a distant suburb that sent ‘lightning’ into a clouded sky barely held a candle to this gift of Mother Nature.

So often it is the inclination of our human nature to get focused on, get trapped by, or even become despondent in despair about our lack of freedom, or the state of our independence in the world. When we forget about our gifts, it often takes a few courageous men and women to stand up and say – enough. Inspired by divine providence, they draft a new declaration, and then pledge to it their lives and sacred honor. Then, the battle to reclaim the gift of freedom, truly begins.

Such is often the state of our inner world too, isn’t it? Immersed in fear, doubt, anger, envy, and our desire for likes, we forget the gifts of our truths. It often takes a new declaration, a new resolve, a new inspiration for us to be (re)awakened to walk our path of constant remembrance of the gifts of our freedom. It is when we are awake to our inner gifts of peace, joy, silence, stillness and more, that we can pledge to share the same with our fellow freedom fighters.

That is perhaps the significance of the Fourth of July, Canada Day (and similar ‘Independence Day’ celebrations) to me. In addition to the fireworks, the concerts, the picnics, the road trips – it is the freedom to observe and embrace the gifts of light, however small or slivered they may be, that glow constantly within my reach.

Kumud @AjmaniK

P.S. Join us for a community celebration of our gifts of freedom – Sunday, July 7 at 9amET on Twitter in #SpiritChat – Namaste. – Kumud

A (de)light gift of summer that burst forth this weekend!

On Loving Remembrance

Tags

love, memorial day, memory, remembrance

How are our memories created? Where do our memories reside? What makes certain memories indelible while others fade away over time? How do the memories of those we love, those we live with, affect our lives? What is the best way to pause and honor the memory of those whom we never knew, but who made great sacrifices for us?

Some of these questions filtered through my head as I sat in the parked car, contemplating the path I was going to walk in the forest yesterday. I thought of the questions, and then let them go with love in the breeze, as I began the walk towards the river. A few minutes later, I was at one my favorite junctions, and the choice lay ahead – to walk the broad familiar or the unexplored narrow. I did not have my best walking shoes on, so, as if to say ‘what of that’, I chose the latter.

I followed the riverbank for a short while, and then re-traced my course in the other direction, pausing for quite a while on some of my favorite rocks in the middle of the river where the waters had receded enough to allow me passage. And, as often happens, the muse flowed words of remembrance in response to my questions. Some of these, I share with you. Maybe you will find some answers within…

Out of the corner of my eye
I saw the heron with full wingspan fly
Over the river flowing shallow ;

I must have interrupted her morning sojourn
As I knelt and bowed at many a turn
To walk the fisherman’s walk ;

No fishing pole in hand I held
Except for a camera with phone 
To come closer to the river flowing swift
And listen to the bluebells alone ;

And the chipmunk who stared at attention
In his stance from the fallen tree trunk proud
What beautiful solitude awaits us
A mere few yards from the madding crowd ;

I can hear the chirping of fledgelings
And the rumble of motorcycles loud 
I pause to kneel, to sit on haunches
To breathe in the earth's green cloud ;

And the flat rounds on this bank remind me
Of skipping stones in the Indus in Leh
So much is different and yet the same
Water, air, sun and swallows hold sway 
My heart feels like it’s going to burst forth with memories
Of lullabies filled with love from that day;

And the dancing of sunlight on ripples
Asks - does it take much courage to flow?
Or does it take courage to stand...
For the truth we've all have felt from beyond the know ;

Yes, yes it does take courage to admit of tears
Of all our meager holdings to let go 
We swim in the river of desires
Forgetful of love's seeds given us to sow ;

So when this world weighs you down now and then 
Find a river whose other shore you can't see 
Remember -- love's courage helps us walk
And leads us to who we're destined to be... ;

Yet forget not that for love to bloom life
We need to master the courage to die ;

But what is it -- that we are to die to and for?
That is perhaps the question's cry
I often wonder, and try to remember —
As I watch the swallow who's learning to fly... 

Kumud

P.S. Thank you for reading this far, and letting me share my musings with you. May 26th marks the observance of Memorial Day Sunday in the USA. Join us on twitter at 9amET, as we discuss some (spiritual) aspects of ‘loving remembrance’. Namaste. – Kumud @AjmaniK

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Towards the end of the circle of my walk, I came upon this young tree with fresh green leaves, seemingly growing almost horizontally out of the love of the soil accumulated around the tree trunks of fallen trees… #MemorialDay

On Breathing Light

Tags

awareness, breathing, celebration, healing, light, remembrance

The journey began Monday evening, when the iPad which had gone dark over the past few weeks, and refused to start up inspite of my best attempts of geekery, decided to come to life. I went searching in the library app for something good to read, and an incredible journey into breath began when I downloaded, and read, that same evening, from cover to cover – WBBA – but more about that a bit later….

Breath has come into the forefront for me this week. There is a story in the Upanishads where the student asks the teacher – who among sight, speech, hearing, touch and breath, is the most powerful in life? The teacher says – ask each of them to leave, one at a time, and you shall know. When it comes the turn of breath to leave, the student’s question is answered…

I have been led to work with, observe it, and develop a greater awareness of the physical act of breathing this week. When the emotions rise, when I feel the stress level change, I have tried to pause and check my breathing pattern and cadence. The interesting thing about breath is that it is easy to observe, because it is always with us, even when it is temporarily is taken away. My observations have been quite a revelation. It is no surprise that I have discerned a direct correlation between feeling stressed and the disturbance in my breathing pattern.

So, how do I plan to use this breath awareness? I believe that, with practice, one could modulate, if not to some degree even consciously control, the autonomous breath and the nervous system connected to it. When our new breathing practice becomes habit, we shall find an emergence of new patterns, new pathways, new possibilities.

For when breath remains, all is possible in the field of possibilities, and then some… is it not?

What began on Monday evening, came to a head this morning. I share with you, my entry from my meditation journal:

There was a such a surge… a wave as high as me… in the final ten minutes… that it literally seemed to push me sideways… the intensity and breadth of the light was such as if it became like the air around me and that I was breathing it with every breath… it held no force, it’s nature was gentleness and pure being, and I was awash in its wholeness… it felt that the white light was energizing every single alveoli in the lungs… cleaning, cleansing, oxygenating, healing, liberating, and filling me with the life force that travels between every channel of the many layers of my being… it felt like the same way that I might have felt in my first awareness of being born into this physical world… the aggregated energy of all the prayers she might have said from the instant that the was aware of me, until her last… and with that breath of first new light, I felt such immense gratitude for the experience that I was led to celebrate the breath of light and life with you… and I hope… no, it’s more than hope… it is a knowing that every breath you breathe is also filled with light… and that you are enough light in this moment, and you will be enough in the next moment… and when the breath stops and leaves, the aggregate of the light you breathed and shared would also have been enough…

for when we add or subtract the infinite from the infinite, the infinite breath of love and light still remains… and that, breath, in life and what we call death, is worthy of celebration… so, let that celebration of love continue… even when breath becomes air….

Thank you. For awareness. For breath and light. For breathing light into me.

– Kumud

P. S. Join us Sunday, Feb 17 at 9am ET / 730 pm IST as we celebrate, breath, light and breathing light. Namaste – Kumud

Breathing light during one of my walks…

The one who took eternal breath, Feb 17 2016…

Our Spiritual Ancestry

Tags

ancestry, inheritance, remembrance, spirituality

The two week period between the full moon in September and the next new moon (October 9) are observed as Mahalaya (the great wave or rhythm) – the fortnight which honors the gifts of our ancestors and our ancestry at large. I was scarcely aware of my ancestors until my father passed away and I spent some time traveling to the Ganges for the visarjan – the final letting-go of the physical remains.

The current family priest, whose generation was the holder of our family records, unrolled the biggest handwritten book I had ever seen, full of double-sized legal sheets of paper with names of our antecedents – records that must have gone back tens of generations. It was a humbling awareness, to realize that my name would become a part of that record some day.

Beyond our physical ancestry, whose records are often susceptible to be lost to our awareness, there is our spiritual ancestry. Like the DNA that is given to us, the record of our spiritual ancestry is less susceptible to be lost over time. In Indian culture, spiritual inheritance comes in two forms – smriti (oral word) and shruti (written word). Both forms have their significance, but the former is less susceptible to being lost (or destroyed) as it is preserved in the heart’s and minds of families of the preservers.

In honoring our spiritual ancestry, the first step is to remember that we actually do have one. The books, the music, the art, the festivals, the traditions, are all the physical manifestations of our spiritual ancestry. But, it goes beyond that. The greater manifestation is the pull towards self-realization through spiritual practice. Whether it be through the path of selfless, loving action, through deep inner contemplation (yoga), through deep devotion evolving through purity, or through seeking of knowledge – all the paths eventually honor our spiritual ancestry when we walk them with a spirit of open-heartedness and joy.

On the final day of the fortnight of Mahalaya, the day before the new moon, a simple offering of water (tarpan) is made to honor all our ancestors. In making an offering of water, we honor life itself. We honor our spiritual ancestry by re-aligning our heartbeat with the great rhythm – the very rhythm that we feel in the silence and the stillness of sitting on the great ocean-shore of love.

Kumud @AjmaniK

What is your spiritual ancestry? Are you aware of it? How does it influence your daily life, and the lives of those who connect with you? Share with us in our weekly twitter chat, Sunday Oct 8 at 9amET / 630pm India in #SpiritChat. Namaste.

Spiritual Ancestry through shruti

Spiritual Ancestry serves as a bridge…

On Developing Forgetfulness

Tags

forgetfulness, habits, lightness, remembrance

Forgetfulness can be a funny thing. We often joke and laugh about our forgetfulness as we grow older. What did I walk into this room for? Where did I put my keys? What did I eat for lunch yesterday? And so on. There are also things (events) that we would like to forget. However, that is easier said than done. The things we want to forget tend to stick to us like algae on rocks. The river of time flows over the rocks, trying to dislodge the algae, but often to no avail. The harder the river tries, the faster the algae seems to want to cling. Such can be the nature of our attempts at developing “voluntary” forgetfulness.

From a mental health perspective, forgetfulness isn’t funny at all. The growth of memory related diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and dementia, poses serious challenges to our health systems, to families and to communities as a whole. The financial costs related to the treatments of these disease is conservatively estimated in the billions of dollars in the USA alone. The nature of “involuntary” forgetfulness is that it leads to memory and cognitive loss, which, in most cases, is irreversible.

The classification of forgetfulness as “voluntary” and “involuntary” is perhaps arbitrary. From a spiritual health perspective, what is perhaps important to ask is – how skilled are we at forgetting what we need to forget? Once we have learnt what we needed to learn from a particular event, how long do we keep it around in our awareness? In many instances, our brain helps us out by deciding what to immediately discard. The rest of the ‘life-stuff’ then gets filed into short-term, medium-term or long-term storage. The challenge is that we forget what got filed where.

When I moved into my previous home, I brought boxes full of stuff with me that ended up in the basement. There must have been at least two or three dozen of them, of various sizes. I had attempted to label them as best I could, so that I would know what was in them without having to open them. Fourteen years later, at least half of those unopened boxes ended up in a storage unit, in preparation for my next move. I had forgotten that I had filed away my “life-stuff”. My rationale was – maybe, someday, I may need what’s in them.

Some memories are like that. Their impression on us, our clinging to them, runs deep. The deeper the impressions, whether from pain or happiness, the harder it is for us to forget. Their depths become our comfort spaces, the valleys in which we go to hide from the world. And the more we (re)visit those spaces, the deeper they become with our fresh treads. So, how do we break the cycle? How do we make sure that the unopened boxes don’t make it into the basement of our next home?

We may have to make a decision to lighten our load, to develop voluntary forgetfulness towards certain ‘things’. Our decision may create room for other ‘things’, preferably those which leave a lighter imprint than the ones they replace. How may we do this? Any current practice, which is ‘working’ for us, can help us. For example, in meditation, we can decide to ‘forget’ the outer world and our river of ‘problems’. If we can commit to this for even for a few (tens of) minutes a day, we can create space — for remembrance in our inner world.

One unopened box at a time, we can choose to develop forgetfulness and empty our storage unit. Our new home’s basement will be grateful.

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly twitter chat in #SpiritChat – Sunday, July 8th at 9amET / 630pm India. I will make sure not to forget the tea and snacks, and questions. Looking forward to ‘seeing’ you. Namaste.

The hydrangea finally blooms… when it has (perhaps) finally forgotten about what winter was like…

Power of Remembrance

Tags

empowerment, memory, remembrance

One of the lasting memories that I have of my Dad is when he returned home from an out-of-town assignment, exhausted and totally worn out. I asked him – Dad, why did you go when you didn’t really have to? His reply was – “I signed up to do the job, so I wasn’t go to quit halfway and come back even though I wasn’t well”. That one conversation, which barely lasted a minute, has remained lodged in my mind, thirty years on.

There are certain remembrances, that have the power to keep influencing our heart for a very long time like a warm, gentle summer rain. Then, there are others, which we would much rather divert, or even dam, for the pain and the angst that they bring back like the flash flood created by a spring thunderstorm. What distinguishes our “warm rain” remembrances from the “flash flood” kind?

Is it that the mind filters and amplifies different memories differently? Is it that we teach ourselves to “play favorites” with certain remembrances as compared to others? Is it that time and distance from the actual event change our perception of it?

Regardless of our original experience, it often happens that our own inner growth, our spiritual journey can effect a change in our heart’s attitude towards some memories. This can particularly happen with our “flash floods”. In India’s gangetic plains, flooded fields can often be the recipients of rich deposits of minerals, once the waters recede.

Those very memories, which had the power to create pain and angst among us (farmers), with patience, become the fertile grounds for new growth in our hearts. We learn to create better filters, better perspectives through which we accumulate new memories. We begin to trust ourselves more, and build better reservoirs for their preservation. We empower ourselves to let some memories go – yes, even the “warm rain” ones – if we need to lighten our load as we go up higher on the mountain.

One way that we can lighten our “memory load”, is to discover the power of “constant remembrance”. How may we discover this power? We can ask ourselves. What is the “constant” in our lives- That which is beyond the influence of time, space, and the weather of our emotions? Once we answer That question, we can create a practice of “constant remembrance”.

Let us empower ourselves to ask. It is perhaps the best way to remember the “warm rain” of all those who sacrificed their all, so that we still have the power to ask.

Kumud

P.S. Join us Sunday, May 27th at 9amET / 630pm India for our weekly twitter chat. Share some of your favorite memories in #SpiritChat – particularly those ones that empower you towards “constant remembrance”. Namaste.

On Remembrance – Do You Remember?

Tags

remembrance, spiritual practice, spirituality

The topic of the first of two lectures that our local team hosted with our invited speaker on Mother’s Day weekend a few weeks agao was – “Do you Remember?” Swami Tyagananda posed this question in a spiritual context, and led us on a conversational journey that explored “what do we rememeber”, “what do we forget”, “why do we forget” and “how do we strengthen our memory” so that we may remember That which is most important to us. On this “Memorial Day” weekend in the USA, it is perhaps appropriate to share some notes from that lecture – “Do You Remember?”

Many of us our aware of the functioning of our mind, and we often use the phrase “peace of mind” to denote or long for a state that our spiritual practice(s) may lead us towards. However, many of us may not be aware that the mind is the entry point where forgetfulness begins. If we adults try and remember our earliest memories, we can perhaps recall very few from our first five, seven or even ten years of life. The older we became, the more ‘engaged’ we became with the world around us, the more susceptible we became to the influence and the ‘dust of the world’. As we moved in and out of different physical surroundings (schools, localities, jobs and more), the content and complexity of the dust we accumulated kept changing, and often increased.

So here we are today, trying to “remember”, trying to “seek”, who we truly are – beyond what our mind is trying to inform us about us. We are trying to peel back the layers of our “personality”, get beneath our own “skin”, and hope to wash away some of the accumulated dust of forgetfulness. And when we do take the time to pause, to remember who we truly are, we have an opportunity to rediscover purpose. Remembrance of our truth can happen in a flash of insight, but it often may takes years of practice, of retraining our minds, to get to that point.

What may this practice be? The Swami suggested that it may be as simple as taking a few minutes at the beginning and the end of every day to sit, reflect, introspect. Silence helps us strengthen our spiritual memory. So does “food” that is healthy, nutritious and pure. We pay so much attention these days to our physical “food” intake, but do we pause to consider what we are feeding our minds? How much of our “inner peace” are we trading to be “better informed”? And is all that mental clutter not going to weaken our power of remembrance as we overload our capacity to remember so many diverse, transient pieces of information?

In summary, the big question is – how do we keep strengthen our memory muscles so that we can move from instances of momentary remembrance to a state of constant remembrance of truth? And what is this truth anyway? For me, it is the remembrance that I am a being made of love, from love, as evidenced by the eternal flame that glows steadily in my heart. How about you? What “Do YOU Remember”?

Kumud @AjmaniK

I invite you to join our weekly chat on Sunday May 28th, 2017 with the #SpiritChat community on twitter. We will exchange some good memories, and share memory-strengthening practices. I will remember to bring some questions. Remember to bring some answers! Namaste.

Flowers and Rain Strengthen Remembrance…