occupy your heart
This mini-manifesto is personal, not political.
It's October 2011 and it seems like an awful lot of people are really really ticked off. About the economy. About greed. About dependence on foreign oil. About gas-guzzling cars and Wall Street and unemployment and foreign oil and terrorism and violence at the southern border and taxes and inequality and the &*#! liberals and the &*#! conservatives. The raw energy is powerful. Almost electric. And I'm not immune to shaking my psychic fist at injustice. I'm no Gandhi. I'm no Amma. Anger and exasperation need some kind of expression or we humans become seething, bitter, and more contracted than ever. (Oh, you should see me lose all my hard-won equanimity in a nanosecond during a simple trip to the local pet superstore. Long whole other story.) Outrageous behavior by anyone that's devoid of any whiff of compassion and causes harm has to be quarantined - no arguments there. I don't think 'the system' is working either. But the idea of us all being at each others throats and the idea of not channeling some of that raw energy into addressing its source makes less and less sense to me. Anger is exhausting. And depleting. Love is not. I don't know about you, but I'm tired. We get so busy throwing ourselves wholeheartedly into objecting to the effects - unemployment, the deficit, outrageous injustices - that we easily lose sight of cause. When the energy is all directed at effect, the result is always more separation. More isolation. More warfare. | An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind. Mahatma Gandhi |
Greed isn't cause, it's effect.
Insensitivity to the needs of our brothers and sisters isn't cause, it's effect.
The rumor that makes sense to me is and the one where I'm placing my bet is the one which holds that the cause of injustice is always separation. Separation is what happens when we cling to our habitual commitment to the notion that there is an "us" and a "them." That's not yoga. It's not the "business" of yoga to add another brick in the wall of separation on to which we can plaster fresh posters that declare, "Keep out! You're the enemy! You're not welcome in the club!"
The day jobs I've had for the past two-plus decades have been - I see now - amazing laboratories for watching these earth lessons play out. I've watched things fall apart, big and small, and seen how applying love - especially in those places and situations and with people where it seems the hardest and most impossible - changes the subject, rewrites the story, manifests miracles.
When we look into another pair of eyes, if all we're determined to see is someone who is wrong, whose behavior and actions we abhor, who is "other," then that's all we're going to see. And that's all they're going to see us seeing.
But if we take a little leap of faith to ask, "Is there something else going on? Is there love here?" Then a whole new paradigm becomes possible.
My teacher, Erich Schiffmann, once told us that the very best thing we can do for another who is behaving in ways we we find intolerable is to know the deepest truth about them. To see it on their behalf.
We begin first by wanting to know the truth about ourselves. And once we figure out that the truth about ourselves is only good news, the next step that only then becomes possible is to see that same truth in others.
It's a fresh spin on "hate the sin, love the sinner." I know I haven't discovered gravity here. It's just seeming more and more realistic. More and more like the saner choice.
I think Erich was right.
Sometimes we have to ask over and over and over again to hear the right, the true answer, about our brothers and sisters. There can be tremendous resistance to hearing the truth when our eyes are half-shut and our hearts are so closed and our ears so filled with angry noise that it can't register.
I'm going to keep asking. Worth a shot.
Insensitivity to the needs of our brothers and sisters isn't cause, it's effect.
The rumor that makes sense to me is and the one where I'm placing my bet is the one which holds that the cause of injustice is always separation. Separation is what happens when we cling to our habitual commitment to the notion that there is an "us" and a "them." That's not yoga. It's not the "business" of yoga to add another brick in the wall of separation on to which we can plaster fresh posters that declare, "Keep out! You're the enemy! You're not welcome in the club!"
The day jobs I've had for the past two-plus decades have been - I see now - amazing laboratories for watching these earth lessons play out. I've watched things fall apart, big and small, and seen how applying love - especially in those places and situations and with people where it seems the hardest and most impossible - changes the subject, rewrites the story, manifests miracles.
When we look into another pair of eyes, if all we're determined to see is someone who is wrong, whose behavior and actions we abhor, who is "other," then that's all we're going to see. And that's all they're going to see us seeing.
But if we take a little leap of faith to ask, "Is there something else going on? Is there love here?" Then a whole new paradigm becomes possible.
My teacher, Erich Schiffmann, once told us that the very best thing we can do for another who is behaving in ways we we find intolerable is to know the deepest truth about them. To see it on their behalf.
We begin first by wanting to know the truth about ourselves. And once we figure out that the truth about ourselves is only good news, the next step that only then becomes possible is to see that same truth in others.
It's a fresh spin on "hate the sin, love the sinner." I know I haven't discovered gravity here. It's just seeming more and more realistic. More and more like the saner choice.
I think Erich was right.
Sometimes we have to ask over and over and over again to hear the right, the true answer, about our brothers and sisters. There can be tremendous resistance to hearing the truth when our eyes are half-shut and our hearts are so closed and our ears so filled with angry noise that it can't register.
I'm going to keep asking. Worth a shot.
