Devotee

“If you are not devoted to the Divine, you are devoted to something else. You make the choice. How do you live your practice? Start small. Make a commitment. Follow through. Keep doing it until it works for you. Test it out. Try it in real-life situations. If you have something you need to address, do your practice, face the situation, notice what happens, and see the learning that comes. You can always make use of practice. It’s not something that sits in your room – it comes out into your life…

At the beginning, when I first started to study yoga, I remember being stunned by the questions I was asked: Who are you? Can you take responsibility for your actions? Can you see how you have manifested your world? Do you see your selfishness? Questions that turned everything upside down, questions that have no answers or have answers so big that they can’t be fully formulated. I was thirty-six years old. I had two children, an unhappy marriage. I was stuck. How was I going to live in that, and how was I going to bring consciousness into my life, take responsibility for my actions? How could I think more deeply about the people I was living with, and how could I truly grow up and live my life with purpose?

Our birthright is to know that we were born of Light, that the vibration was somehow set in motion for everything to develop… The mind has a tendency to want everything to be black or white, good or bad. We demand that questions have answers and that the world be concrete, not subtle or complicated or inexplicable. But life is complex. No one has all the answers. Our questions and problems can become the teachings as we face our challenges. We have to live life to find out, and the tools of yoga can help. Through self-inquiry we can crack the shells of our narrowly held concepts and find our strength of character. We also start to understand the symbolic meaning of life events…

It’s been over twenty-five years since I started yoga, and this winter marks my ten-year anniversary as a sanyasi and the president of Yasodhara Ashram. It’s definitely not the life I expected, but in looking back through my journals I see over and over how the plan for this was drawn out in daily activity, dreams and thoughtful reflections. The path was there and it required me to put my full attention to those signposts, to listen intuitively, allowing the events to unfold and surrendering my expectations. As the path becomes clearer and clearer, I acknowledge the divine whisperings of affirmation and confirmation: “Keep going...”

What is the potential of yoga? In the West, most people have a very limited perception of what yoga is… The physical dimension of yoga, Hatha Yoga, is just one tiny part of yoga philosophy. Yoga can take you from where you are now to liberation, from earth to heaven, from the concrete to the very, very subtle. You may start out in a yoga class practising asanas, but where will this lead you? I remember my first Hatha Yoga class, and the first time I did savasana. I thought, “My god, there’s another level here.” I went deeper and deeper, but where was I going? I had never gone there before, but I knew immediately that I had been searching for this place.

For Westerners it is often hard to see the mystical possibilities of our own spiritual traditions. I was attracted to yoga because it was, on the surface, so far removed from the conservative church I went to as a child, with simplified stories and sad hymns. The foreign images of the East shook up my idea of divinity with an array of gods and goddesses. Yoga promised that I could experience the Divine myself. Through dreams, practice and reflection I became aware of the vast array of possibilities and attributes of divinity. The Divine was not someone else’s idea to be planted in my mind. In yoga, I grow and evolve through a deepening understanding of the mystical in my daily encounters.

My life is my unique path. The Western challenge is to bring yoga into our daily lives. We can’t easily do what Eastern tradition prescribes: sit in a cave, or wander India leading the ascetic life. We have to go inward, and that knowledge has to be brought out again. We need to transplant the seeds of yoga into our lives… The Self is timeless and knowledgeable. Start asking yourself the questions that you want answers to. Listen. There is a part of you that knows. Beyond the modern east-west-global fast-paced world, there is a part of you that can ask the question, listen and hear the answer. What is the purpose to my life? Who am I?

The future of our world depends on bringing our knowledge into action. As human beings, we are aware enough to make choices that can affect our evolution. We can question how to evolve toward being fully human and ask: What is the purpose of this life? We are also interconnected on other levels beyond the physical. As the world becomes a global village, can we recognize this oneness on the subtle, spiritual levels through kindness and peace? Can we find a path to our cosmic roots, and become rooted in an all-encompassing, compassionate view of life?

We are given hard lessons of survival on earth… If we don’t learn life’s lessons, painful situations will present themselves. Disasters pierce our mechanical behaviours, our unthinking ways, our inability to give back to life. Can we rise out of our inert mineral state, our weed-like desire to take over in order to control and manipulate others? An intelligent attitude will encourage the cultivation of finer thoughts… Yogis see individual paths of evolution in the same way as good parents view their children growing into physical and mental maturity… Evolution is mysterious and never ends; there is always more to learn. But the learning requires dedication in order to actualize it into life, in order to change and to become more of who you really are.

When I first met my teacher, her voice pierced through the layers of the habitualized life I was living, bringing at first a great sadness that I had not heard such words before. Her words pierced through and connected with that little bit of consciousness hidden within me like a seed, and the seed started to grow. There is something within each one of us that can be sparked to life under certain circumstances and can begin to grow… There are great gurus and examples of people who can incorporate what happens on the level of daily life with what is happening on many more subtle levels. They fulfill their potential and are helpful to so many people. Isn’t that what we were born to do? To love and help others, to bring Light and goodness into the world? Can we evolve to the place where world peace is possible?

When I first started visiting Yasodhara Ashram, I found that each time I came here I could bring back a new perspective to my family and work… When I moved to the Ashram, I made a conscious decision that I was going to surrender to the community, but my guru said, “No! Don’t surrender to the community. Surrender only to the Most High.” That shifted my vision of community life. Something higher was connecting us all, and it was greater than people’s personalities or agendas or even my own ideas. People all have their own reasons for coming to live in a spiritual community, and most of us think we are prepared, but usually the experience turns our worldview upside down. Failure may be success if the lesson is to learn humility; learning a simple task brings self-knowledge.

By using the community as a mirror, we learn to know our own minds and can proceed toward Light and wisdom. There is a fine balance between the personal and the communal. We are independent beings, yet we are together in a community, and we have to learn to live on this edge. The human tendencies of procrastination, ambition and preferences need to be addressed in our personal and group work. Our divine spark is nourished and encouraged through community respect and personal spiritual practices. The independence we want to foster is an inner strength – the ability to make decisions, to think clearly, to be courageous – rather than a selfishness or a desire to do things our own way... Community can help foster that independence, but it requires making a commitment over and over and over. When the commitment is made, the ashram becomes everyone’s, and they care for and respect it not from rules but from understanding and love. 

A firm commitment to the Divine is a powerful reality. By keeping to my commitment, I build the foundation to face whatever is on my path as I live in the ashram community. I was thinking of this the other morning when I walked around the enclosed garden. The day was sunny and the garden full of garden sounds. The ashram cat decided to walk with me too. As we came to a chattering chipmunk, she hesitated...and then kept on walking. Around and around she went with me, each time making a commitment to keep on.

Looking back, I can see how it all fits together – from my experiences as a child to first discovering yoga to where I am today. I can see my life as a path that was started and traveled on. Self-reflection is such an important part of yoga. It is said that consciousness knows everything but the mind can’t hold all of that knowledge. It just gets little glimpses. So you need to put the glimpses together, keep gathering up the clues. Writing down your experiences helps you train the mind to concentrate and observe, and it creates a record of your own personal wisdom.  Perhaps you already keep a journal and want to find a way for writing to be a part of your yoga practice.

A powerful way to start a spiritual reflection practice is to create a dialogue or a conversation with a deity, a god or goddess you feel connected to. For me, it was Divine Mother. I would ask a question and She would respond, or I would write to Her, knowing She was listening. The intention of having a divine conversation makes the act of writing much more intimate and meaningful than just sitting down and writing the details of your day.  Instead of just writing what happened in your day, ask: What is important for me to remember about today? What did I learn? What did I observe? How did She appear? What was Divine Mother doing today in my life? By using an image or creating a feeling of being with Divine Mother as you write, you help cultivate that wise, compassionate part of yourself… Divine Mother is very accepting. She will respond from Her point of view, from the point of view within you that knows…”

~ Swami Radhananda, Living the Practice: Collected Writings on the Transformative Potential of Yoga.                                     Swami Radhananda was a mother and educator named Mary-Ann McDougall when she moved to Yasodhara Ashram in 1991 to pursue the in-depth study of yoga that culminated in her taking sanyas in 1994. During her many years as a householder yogini before that, she had developed a unique understanding of how to incorporate her spiritual practice into daily life.