On Spiritual Enrichment

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enrichment, obstacles, prosperity, spiritual goals, wealth

It felt like an early autumn morning as I walked out on to the deck after a night of storms. The remnants of the coastal storm had brought some welcome relief from the heat along with overcast skies. However, one glance at the thicket of trees filled with green leaves was enough to bring me back to summer.  It was going to be a great outside day. Perhaps I would work in the garden and  pull weeds in the flower beds, I mused. 

My musing turned to three hours of first removing the overgrown grasses on both sides of the fence, and then working around the rose bushes on the weeds. Why do these weeds keep showing up, particularly in a six-foot portion of the flower beds? I know that I have put down landscaping fabric (weed barrier) and covered it with layers of river rock over the years. What’s missing?

As I dug into the six-foot portion with my special tool that helps me extract the weeds from the roots, I noticed that I wasn’t hitting any fabric beneath the rocks. Aha. Mystery solved, or so I thought. I now remembered that I had run out of landscape fabric when in that six-foot portion when I did the flower bed project a few years ago. No wonder the two rose bushes in that portion would always be out-shone by the ones that bloomed in the adjacent twelve-foot portion that does have the weed barrier, and a lot less weeds. 

A single shortcut taken by me three years ago, and I have spent an inordinate number of hours paying for it in maintenance and  lack of enrichment in that part of the garden. I essentially left the door open for the weeds to create ‘poverty’, right next door to the ‘wealthiest’ part of the flower bed. I felt like the farmer who keeps watering his fields while the back-stops on his sluice gates are left open. Do you ever feel that way in life, in your spiritual practice?

I felt like that for years. My progress, my heart’s growth would happen in fits and starts. I did a lot of reading, which I still do, because I love to read.  I spent a lot of time and learnt a lot in years of my visits to the local temple. I still do. I rarely missed an opportunity to attend day(s)-long retreats with spiritual Gurus visiting town. That didn’t happen over the past year, but I look forward to them again. And yet, something was missing. The aspect of long-term enrichment of the heart and soul remained elusive. I didn’t feel like I could call-up deep inner peace, silence, stillness, and such, at a moment’s notice. And then something changed.

I decided to try a new meditation practice. My ‘trainer’ asked me for a favor. “Make a commitment to practice for ninety days.” Ninety days? I had been practicing on and off by myself for years. Ninety days was going to be a walk in the garden, weeds and all! And so it began. Morning practice. Evening cleaning (weeding!). Night-time remembrance. Repeat next day. Weekly ‘deep cleaning’ (weeding!). Slowly, days turned to weeks, which turned to months. It has been over four years. Why am I still practicing?

My practice makes me feel enriched. Every morning – okay, more mornings than not – I feel like a kid in a candy store as I sit for the morning meditation. What new treasures am I going to discover today? In the evening, as I do the inner weeding, I prepare for the dreamless sleep that is going to come after bedtime remembrance. More enrichment follows. Some days I feel like I am immersed in all this wealth at random moments during the day. I can carry my peace with me because I feel like I have access to a secret treasury. 

Except that it wasn’t a secret. All it took was wondering, asking the right questions, waiting for the answers, and when offered the help of a new practice, accepting the invitation to make a small commitment. It was like deciding to fix that six-foot piece of missing fabric, and see if the weeds would stop taking the roses’ bloom away next season. It was learning that enrichment isn’t about accumulating a wealth of practices, but more about doing that One practice which consistently gives us great joy, peace, harmony and whatever makes our hearts glow with purpose. 

What is that enrichment practice going to be for you? If you are already practicing, you are already on the path to enrichment unlimited. If you aren’t, then pause and consider. Ask some questions. Be open to the answers. And keep sight of the knowing that you, just like anyone else, deserve to be enriched beyond your wildest dreams.

This is your time. Don’t shy away. Be still. Listen. 

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly conversation with the #SpiritChat community on twitter, Sunday July 11 at 9am ET / 2pm UTC / 630pm India. I know that you have the ability to enrich someone with your experience and insights. Come share with us. Namaste – @AjmaniK

 

Let’s make no mistake – weeds and thorns contribute to enrichment too!

Spiritual Work and Wealth

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prosperity, spiritchat, spirituality, wealth, work

The final Sunday of the month tends to bring about a sense of reflection, a sense of self-evaluation on the events of the weeks gone by. It also tends to bring a sense of anticipation, of expectation, of looking ahead to the month to come, and the work that remains to be done. But this sense of reflection does not need to just belong to months and weeks… we can coalesce the sense of time into days, then hours, then minutes, and then moments.

The awareness of the moment is perhaps the greatest “work” that remains before us. This has been very beautifully elucidated by Pema Chodron in her book, Living Beautifully (with Uncertainty and Change). I had bought this book a few months, maybe a year ago ~ I don’t exactly remember, and it doesn’t really matter. As is my wont with new and shiny books, I read it for a bit, maybe a few pages, but the “timing” for a deep dive wasn’t really right. And so it sat in one of my many bookcases, with all my other books to be read at the “right” time.

“You can buy as many books as you want… but you will only read the ones you are supposed to!” – Swami Vivekananda

The time arrived earlier this week, as Pema Chodron invited me back to “Living Beautifully”. And so, the “work” began in earnest, in the form of three steps… to “be present”, to “feel your heart”, to “engage the next moment without an agenda”. These three steps, referred to as commitments, are designed to create awareness, opennness and engagement. The practice of these, at a level beyond the mental, may seem like a lot of “work” at the outset. But we are all engaged in some kind of work, so why not engage in “work” that will produce (spiritual) “wealth” for us?

What is this “wealth” that the work of the first commitment, awareness, can produce for us? When we pause, take a step away from the opposites of hope and fear, we can learn to be “in the flow” of awareness. Osho refers to it as “observing the observer”, or just being. For that matter, we can pick any pair of opposites that tend to define our lives – success and failure, pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness, and so on. The work of awareness can give us freedom from our clinging to these opposites of life. We gain the wealth that comes from saying to ourselves, to those around us, and to the universe. Here I am. No labels. No judgements. No past or present. Just me.

The second commitment, feeling the heart, flows from the “Here I am” awareness. The “work” in this step is to open our inner self, our heart and spirit, to those around us. We open our heart to feel the light of their consciousness. We open ourselves to their joy, their pain, their needs – it is the work of compassion. Of course, when we do this “heart work”, we take a chance that we will perhaps open too much, or open to those who don’t “deserve” to be open to, or those who have intent to cause hurt and harm to us. That is where awareness, the first step, comes into play. We need not abandon our awareness when feeling the heart. We do the heart work gently, in layers, like the gradual opening of a flower in bloom.

Does the flower that comes into bloom, even for a very short time, have an engagement agenda? The third commitment, engaging the moment without agenda, is perhaps the epitome of “work”. When we master the first and second steps, we are perhaps two-thirds of the way “there”. Or maybe only halfway there to the attainment of true, lasting wealth. I guess the measure of our “progress” depends on our starting point. Some of us may need a lot more “work” to master the first two steps, before we can do useful work to engage without agenda. This step reminds me of the Indian philosophical exhortation ~ “work without motive, without being attached to the fruits of your labors”. It’s a tough hill to climb, for even the most advanced of spiritual workers!

It is not to imply that the pot of gold at the end of the “engage the moment without agenda” rainbow is not worth working towards. Far from it. Because engagement is about love. And love cannot lose. When we know, in the core of our being, the nature of love, then work and wealth and love become synonymous. It is a meeting of the two banks of the river, with the middle of the stream, where all presence, heart, and engagement flow in harmony.

I appreciate you spending a few moments in awareness here. Be well. Just Be.

Kumud

Join us in #SpiritChat on twitter, Sunday June 28th at 9amET/1pmUTC where we will discuss the ideas of Spiritual Work and Wealth. Bring your sunshine, or rain, and if you bring both, who knows, we may spot a rainbow or two! In closing, “I wish the deepest of well being – Pema Chodron”. Namaste.