|
Welcome to day 2.
Life offers us all the lessons we need - just not necessarily the ones we want.
When I had my accident over the summer I was miserable, I was in so much pain that life was really hard and yet, as it turned out, one of my worst life experiences was also a gift.
I described in an earlier email newsletter how I felt that all the plates I had spinning in the air crashed down at once.
Had I not had the abrupt halt lord knows when I would have stopped spinning those plates? Maybe never? I’m not really one for voluntarily putting things down. My accident turned out to be a blessing. It gave me the time and space to come back to myself. This sense of coming back to ourselves and feeling in alignment is what the yogis call dharma.
Our personal dharma is a deep, driving desire and sense of ‘rightness’. Dharma refers to our active participation in the world, it is the outward expression of our inner guru. According to yoga, dharma is the law of the universe - but its not a 'legal' law, nor something that can be made into doctrine or codified - it's a flow that we are either in or not. When we live according to our dharma we are actively living in synchronicity with the universe and our own soul.
And as much as we can be living our dharma, we can very easily be out of sync with it.
We might have everything we want; career, family, status in the community, the ability to freely travel, money, a roof over our heads etc but the flavour is somehow off. We should be grateful? We have everything we want? Yet it doesn't feel 'right'.
Because living our dharma is rarely taking the easy road. In fact it can be really hard and utterly terrifying.
Dharma can be described as having your wheels on correctly - when the wheels are aligned you can handle whatever bumps and potholes you encounter, but when your wheels are out of alignment even a little bump can feel catastrophic, so either we derail, or, more often we just choose the easy smooth roads to avoid the risk.
This poem by Naomi Shihab Nye encapsulates what being on the 'easy road' feels like...and how we might not realise.
|
|
|
“Missing the Boat”
by Naomi Shihab-Nye
It is not so much that the boat passed
and you failed to notice it.
It is more like the boat stopping
directly outside your bedroom window,
the captain blowing the signal-horn,
the band playing a rousing march.
The boat shouted, waving bright flags,
its silver hull blinding in the sunlight.
But you had this idea you were going by train.
You kept checking the time-table,
digging for tracks.
And the boat got tired of you,
so tired it pulled up the anchor
and raised the ramp.
The boat bobbed into the distance,
shrinking like a toy—
at which point you probably realized
you had always loved the sea.
Naomi Shihab Nye Different Ways to Pray- Breitenbush Publications, 1980
|
|
|
As the poem above illustrates, often we don’t notice when we are out of alignment with dharma. It’s possible that dharma is aligned in some areas of your life but not others - eg your work could be awesome but your home life isn’t or vice versa.
Sometimes dharma can take us on a path that is so uncomfortable that it is terrifying. This was what happened to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita.
The Gita was written a few hundred years BCE and it details the story of a prince, Arjuna, who must fight a war against his family (who for various reasons have turned on him). He is a warrior and yet he doesn't want to fight, he cannot bear the idea of killing his cousins and uncles. He is questioning his life's purpose, his dharma.
On the eve of the battle Arjuna asks his charioteer, Lord Krishna (a God in human form) to drive him into the middle of the battlefield so that he can take stock. This he does. Arjuna sees the armies facing each other he has what we would now call a panic attack:
"O Krishna, I see my own relations here anxious to fight,
and my limbs grow week; my mouth is dry, my body shakes,
and my hair is standing on end. My skin burns, and
my bow, Gandava, has slipped from my hand. I am
unable to stand; my mind seems to be whirling." 1:29-30
A feeling of being out of alignment may not always be this extreme but it is often felt in our body long before our minds have found a way to put it into words. The trap is that when we start to feel 'off' we reach for a quick fix. Which is why the self care and wellness industry has grown so immense - Big Business knows that most people would rather spend money than face up to what is difficult. Genuine self-care is massively important but we must stay alert to putting a plaster over what needs more attention.
As I mentioned at the head of this email - the universe sends us all the lessons we need - and it is my experience that those lessons can start pretty gentle but that if we ignore them they get gradually more and more intense until we get a great big cosmic slap in the face - does "Why does this keep on happening to me?" ever pop into your head?
But it can all seem so baffling - so hard to fathom - we might know that things are off but what do we do about it? How do we make the necessary changes? Arjuna also describes his confusion:
"My will is paralysed, and I am utterly confused.
Tell me which is the better path for me.' 2:7
Arjuna is fortunate that he has a wise God as a charioteer and best friend. Krishna at length explains to Arjuna why it is his dharma to fight the war no matter what. That, like all humans, he has has duty to perform and he must do it without fear and without attachment to the to outcome. In one of the most well known lines from the Gita Krishna tells him that "it is better to struggle in your own dharma than to walk easily in the dharma of another".
The Bhagavad Gita is set on a battlefield (and history tells us there was an actual battlefield) but what this story really details is the war within ourselves. In the Gita we are all the characters at the same time - we are Arjuna, the warrior in crisis, we are the all-knowing God Krishna with his wisdom, we are the two opposing factions standing ready fight, we are the good, the virtuous, the skilled, the devious, the mean-spirited and the greedy, we are those that die and those that survive. This is our battle and it is our true path we are fighting for. The Gita tells us that all of the answers to our inner conflicts, to our confusions, lie within us.
One of the easiest ways to spot dharma is to look to nature. Nature is dharma.
It is quite simply impossible for a tree or an animal to live outside of their dharma, they do what they do or they die trying. Unlike Arjuna & unlike us, a tree will not have a crisis when it has less than enough light to grow, it will just change its course to ensure its best chance of thriving.
Walt Whitman (1819 –1892) describes this beautifully in except from Song of Myself, section 32:
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
|
|
MEDITATE ON NATURE
As mentioned above, nature is dharma. That is why immersing ourselves in nature is such a powerful way to help us align with our own path.
Here are two simple suggestions to help make those connections:
- Take a walk. Try to find a place where there has been as little human influence over the environment as possible. Notice the fallen leaves, broken branches, rotting vegetation, mushrooms, you might even see buds. Can you see identify dharma?, can you see nature 'doing it thing', can you see how somethings need to die in order that others can grow? Nature is birth, death, life, past, present and future in every moment.
- Spend time by or in water - stand by a stream, a river, the sea, go for a wild swim or a paddle. Water is a brilliant way to cleanse things we don't want from ourselves. In order to move towards our dharma sometimes we need to wash away the past - sure we can pick this over our experiences and analyse them but sometimes it is nice to just let it all flow away...to let the water take away what you no longer need.
|
|
|
JOURNAL PROMPTS
Yesterday I offered you an exercise designed to help you connect to your intuition. It is a connection with your intuition that will help guide you to identifying areas in your life when you have felt out of alignment with your dharma and when you have felt in alignment.
It is important to note that dharma is fluid - it evolves and changes throughout your life - eg something we have done for years can start to leave us cold - so staying aware is crucial.
The notes we make in our journals can really serve as a clarifier and a reminder.
When we moved house I found and old diary from my twenties, back when I was a magazine fashion editor. In it I wrote about how amazing my job was but how it wasn't making me happy, it was a bit of a miserable entry but ultimately I noted that I loved to be happy and that happiness should be my goal. Fast forward to now and I can reflect on how much has changed, how much I have been through and grown and that even though life can be very bumpy - I am happy.
Take yourself off somewhere quiet and grab your journal and pen.
Make yourself comfortable and take 10 calm breaths - count the breaths.
Inhale 1, exhale 1, inhale 2, exhale 2...and so on.
Now, try to identify a moment when you have felt in alignment with your dharma, when everything 'felt right' even if it was tough, even if you felt fearful. This moment could be related to loved ones, money, work, your health, pleasure or your spirituality.
Bring to your mind a moment when you have felt in tune and connected to dharma.
- Can you describe the moment?
- What inspired it?
- What events led up to it?
- How did you feel?
- Was there a theme - being in nature, travelling, meditating, listening to music, activity, art, laughter, logic etc.
Now open your eyes, pick up your notebook and pen and for 2 minutes (or longer if you are so inclined) allow yourself to write freely...ramble, write whatever comes to mind, it may be a few words of full pages.
Now stop, close your eyes and come back to your breath.
Count 3 calm breaths.
Thank yourself for your practice.
Namaste.
|
|
|
Affirmations for dharma
I am my own authority
My life is a work in progress
Life is practice; practice is life
I am potency and courage beyond fear
I am attempting something difficult and I appreciate myself for trying
|
|
|
|
|
|
