Life, Liberty, and How to Pursue Happiness

I struggle to understand responsibility. I get that it can be broken down into Latin roots that mean 'the ability to respond,' and that it differs from reaction in that reaction means 'to act again' usually in the same manner as before. But there has always been some part of the equation missing for me. In my meditation yesterday, I had an experience that I think may fill in the blank.

Someone told me once that responsibility leads to freedom. But I never quite understood what that meant. To me, responsibility just meant that there were more things that I had to live up to, had to take care of, be responsible for... and that just sounded like a lot of work, or even a burden. How could taking on more stuff possibly be freeing?

The thing is, responsibility also has to do with what you let go of.

As I already mentioned, I had an experience in meditation. Part of the meditation I've been practicing involves mantra. The same abstract syllable mentally repeated as a focal point for my attention. Whenever I find that my attention has wandered down a path of thought, I simply return my attention to its focus on the mantra. Thus, I train my will and cultivate inner silence. Yesterday, I found my attention wandering as it usually does, consumed by some emotion or another, but for some reason when I returned to the mantra, I was stricken by the awareness of the freedom I had just created for myself. The feeling I had had was a rather heavy one and not at all enjoyable, but with a simple exercise of my will, my attention was placed back at a neutral focus. I was now free from that emotion.

Now, of course, I could return to it. I didn't defeat it or stave it off forever. What I realized, though, was that it is just so simple to apply the will and create freedom for oneself. The nagging emotion and the heavy feeling are what had enslaved me, and to entertain them would be succumbing to them, and to do it continually would be reaction. Yet I had learned to respond. Not only that, I recognized its value. This was the lesson I had been praying for.

All too often do I let myself fall into the trap of feeling worthless, feeling like I'll never make anything of myself, or feeling guilty or not good enough. I have these thoughts and feelings so often that I've nearly paralyzed myself by the fear that I could be different, that I could perhaps be better. I have made them part of my identity in a way that I find it hard to separate myself from them. I have altered my ego into one of paralyzation, of fear, of worthlessness, of being unworthy, and just plain being less than what I am.

It's funny how fear manifests itself in ridiculous ways. My fear is of changing. I've become so used to these self-defeating feelings, the self-loathing, that I am afraid to feel otherwise. Who would I be? What would happen?

And I know from experience that whatever thoughts you dwell upon are the ones that manifest. Situations in life are made from your deepest thoughts. When you direct your attention to them, you give them power, you give them energy, and slowly that energy begins to coalesce and solidify, and eventually it is made manifest by your feeding it--it becomes reality.

What I have discovered is how to apply my will. And with practice it will turn into will power. And through responding to these emotions and feelings and thoughts and physical life experiences, I can alter my reality. I create freedom for myself. I no longer have to be a slave to my thoughts or emotions. I can choose to be different and to let go of negative thoughts. All I have to do is respond by placing my attention on the stillness. In that way, I can purify my mind. The more stillness I can hold in my mind, then all the more stillness will there be made manifest in my physical existence. And when I place my attention on positive thoughts, my ego can be changed. It can be molded into a construct of positivity, and it will reflect my innermost being, my highest Self, and my Creator.

Truly, responsibility is the path to freedom. And I embrace it, for all humankind.

What patterns do you let yourself be enslaved by? What situations do you allow to recur and feel powerless to change? What sort of image do you keep of yourself? Do you dwell on the negative more than the positive? You can change the thought instantly with your will, and continually changing it with will power makes the new thought permanent, bringing you change. Once you realize you can do this whenever you want to, you are free. You no longer have to be a slave to your faults, to your pet peaves, or to your emotional outbursts and reactions.

Many misunderstand responsibility. It just takes a new perspective and you can be free.

Namaste.

Tapas and Other Food for Thought

Discipline.

Not usually a word that I have a positive feeling about. That is, the first image that comes to mind is of punishment or having a drill sergeant screaming in my face. In fact, it's an idea that I'm still coming to terms with. I do have an alternate image in my mind for discipline, and the feeling that coincides with it is one of respect, of a can-do attitude, of pride, and of freedom. You see, there are a few different definitions of discipline that appear when you search the dictionary. Perhaps the most common understanding of the word does have to do with punishment. However, there is a definition that refers to learning, to practice that improves a skill. I think the latter definition ties in with my previous post about yoga practice. Discipline is the practice of practicing.

Only through discipline do we become better, do we gain more knowledge, more affluence, more comfortableness with a skill. And it could be any skill of your choosing. How many times have you sat down to do something that you've done at least a million times, and still you learn something about it that you didn't know before? For example, just the other night I was going through my asana practice, and something new opened up for me about grounding into the earth. This revelation, which would be fairly difficult to describe without physically taking you through the sequence, led me to a greater opening in my lower body. It helped me connect the sky energies to the earth energies.

I am fairly systematic with my asana practice. I have a series of 'rules' that run through my head about alignment and lifting and lengthening and which chakras are active; where's my drishti (gaze)?; where's my mind? Grounding has been a somewhat difficult concept for me. It sort of mirrors my tendency to be mentally somewhere in space a lot of the time. I tend toward the busy, masculine, mental energies, and I am somewhat lacking in the more physically attuned, feminine, earth energies. That's not to say, however, that I'm an aggressive person; on the contrary, I'm rather passive, a pushover most of the time. Anyway, the point is that I busy myself with thinking more often than doing, which doesn't bring about a whole lot of manifestation of my goals.

The answer to this quandary comes with the application of discipline. The Yoga Sutra speaks of discipline as tapas, one of the niyamas. Whereas yamas are attitudes we should restrain, niyamas are attitudes we should embrace. Obviously the application of tapas is to quicken one's spiritual development. It has nothing to do with punishment. The definition of discipline that denotes punishment must have been developed by someone who did not like to live by the rules, did not want to better himself, and felt restricted. But even as I write these words, the picture becomes clearer. Punishment is associated with discipline because one who does wrong must practice right in order to improve his character. (Yet another illustration of how the ego takes hold of us and creates this fear of dying, of change.) The only restriction that occurs with discipline is the restriction of the ego, and for those of us on a spiritual path, restriction of the ego is a healthy thing--it cultivates control, and ultimately leads to freedom. When one is free from egoic mind chatter, she is free to respond to a stimulus in any manner that she chooses; she is not bound by egoic re-action, which by its very definition means to act again in the same manner as before.

When we are stimulated to change, we quite often have an egoic reaction: "Why should I change? I wasn't doing anything wrong," or, "You can't tell me what to do! I'm just fine the way I am!" These are reactions of the ego wanting to stay the exact same way it always has been. The ego doesn't want to die, it doesn't want to change, so instead, it opts to kill you; for if you consistently choose the ego, your energies slow down. They stop evolving, stop moving. They become sluggish and will most likely manifest as a disease or an unwanted life experience.

At which point, it must seem like punishment.

My own relationship with tapas is sporadic at best. It's one thing to understand these ideas conceptually, and quite another to know them through practice. There's that word again.

You know, many who are afraid of change become so because they are not the ones causing change. They wait it out until the change happens to them. They sit in fear of the inevitable change that is to come and wipe out everything that they have taken to be a certainty. They build their life-houses on the shaky sands of the ego whose grains provide an illusion of stability, and solidity--yet it is fragmented. Those who practice change and discipline have built their life-houses on the secure rock of ages: the soul. They know that if they practice tapas, if they change and mold themselves into an image more like that of the Creator, more like that of the highest Self, they will have freedom, and they will be safe, and they will not die.

In the Bible, there were only twelve disciples (meaning those who are disciplined). It is a relative few who seek out change on their own, who are disciplined in becoming, which is the continual evolution toward the ideal self. But I believe there is a quickening, and many more have decided to be disciples to whatever spiritual path they may follow. They choose to change; they choose to live; they choose to be free.

Discipline: the practice of practicing life.

Namaste.