I have decided to focus my longer-form online efforts around a new org, TechnoTherapy. The vision is to hold a space for the integration of mobile/web technology into the work of behavioral health professionals. Please check out the site by clicking on the icon below. Really excited about this new adventure!
This site will continue to be an archive for longer-form personal reflections and sharing. To connect directly, and for shorter-form shares, connect with me via FaceBook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
I’ve been sad lately. On April 12, I celebrated 10 years of continuous 12-step recovery; it was a moment shared with over 100 people, including my mother and so many dear friends, to celebrate this gift of life I’ve been given. In the moment, one of the happiest days of my life.
On that very day, unbeknownst to me until the following day, across the country, my beautiful six-year-old niece Lara died in a tragic accident at the beach in Santa Cruz. Along with many others who love her and who spoke heart wrenchingly at her funeral, I shared a eulogy.
Today, I miss Lara. I had just felt I’d begun to know her; I made the youthful, natural mistake of thinking there would always be more time, yet I’d also recently made the heartfelt commitment to spend more of it with her and her sister Kaira more regularly, more often, at more length, at any opportunity…
And I find myself missing what I realize Lara represented to me — the perfect beauty of unspoiled youth, the fearless joy of unconditional love, innocent happiness that arises spontaneously from the ground of being… Childhood.
I am feeling heartbroken at the randomness of life. Random is another word for “no meaningful pattern or explanation” — it’s very hard to feel this, as I do, in my gut, in my heart, in my feet, in my head, in my throat, in my teeth, in every cell of my being — about life itself … And to press on just the same.
The last 10 years, I took refuge in self-care, healing, following my heart, clearing my karma, being of service, and doing my dharma the best I could discern how. It has been a revolution in my existence. I am not the same man I was 10 years ago — my motives, my patterns, my interests, my intentions, my bodymind itself — have all deeply shifted. I want to be of service, to experience and give love the best I know how, as much as I can. I am grateful for this change, and for this life.
I know it would have been impossible without faith and perseverance, and that I am, in a sense, still quite young on this path. The seeds were there before, but the field was fallow, and the life of recovery and of faith I’ve found has been, at various times as a bright sun, a sweet rain and a cool breeze to my gently awakening spirit … It was recovery that brought me back to my family, to Lara — as a wholer, happier, better man.
So my heartfelt hope is this time of darkness in my life and spirit evolves into something light and pure and good and true. I have faith it will. I want to be there for myself, my family, my job, my community, be my best for us all.
The Bhagavad Gita begins with Vishada Yoga — Arjuna’s despair at facing the prospect of certain death of loved ones. He throws down his bow and says, “I will not fight!” Yet, somehow, Krishna lovingly teaches him that is just what he must do, to get up, soldier on, fulfill his life’s purpose in the face of certain death and impending grief… I need that quiet certainty now, that hope that there is redemption, salvation, nirvana, samadhi, moksha, heaven, bliss, or just something good in pressing on…
At a friend’s suggestion, I’ve decided to read the classic Dr. Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. I haven’t gotten through it all yet, but the basic existential question it asks is — faced with overwhelming trauma, pain, and sadness — why live? Who or what do you love enough to struggle through life for? As a Jewish doctor imprisoned at Auschwitz, Dr. Frankl had to answer this question himself…
And, ten years ago, in the depth of a profound depression — I had no good, clear answer to that question. But now I’ve got hundreds of answers to why to live… So I know I will come through this time stronger, but I’m feeling very existential nonetheless, and it’s not comfortable to feel these deep questions and deep forces of change churning in me… I’m feeling I need to re-answer that question even more clearly, with even more urgency.
I have begun to and will continue to… And in light of Lara’s passing, hope to have a single, adamantine answer that really honors her perfect, too-short life, and her enormous heart — and my own — and all of us …
Like most, I am strong, decent, kind man. Flawed, but good. And, like many, I have borne much in this life, but this – this, I can hardly bear. I am nauseous as I write.
Actual footage from an American Army chopper outside Baghdad. The ill-informed, light-hearted murder of innocents by men carrying out orders, doing their duty as directed in the course of daily business.
Grown American men in the grip of the fog of war, seeing those who they have no real information on — peaceful journalists, parents and children — as video game targets. Slaughtering them, pushing a button from the sky.
Even with all my imagination, I can’t find another God-honest way to see this.
America – wake up! Half of our discretionary tax dollars — 700,000 military — 2.3M civilians — $900 Billion/yr — 8% of our annual GDP — helped to perpetrate this.
That chopper took billions of our dollars and hundreds of lifetimes of our brightest scientists, engineers and technicians to build.
This is not just the men sitting in the cockpit pushing buttons. All of us, together, have done this. Their blood is ours to sop up.
America! Do we recall our promise? We are a covenant to the world. My parents, like so many , left all they knew in the hope of its fulfillment, and I work, as so many do each day, in that same hope.
AMERICA! We the People are financing this every day — the one-third of our paychecks in taxes – a quarter of that money goes to pay for this — on average, about 40 minutes of your work day, even this very day, is STILL paying. If you are blessed with employment.
It is our voice, our silence, our unwillingness to bear witness, and the hours and dollars we spend each day doing looking away – that has done this, just as much as the men pushing the buttons above Baghdad.
The men in the chopper are merely the symptom. We are the problem – our ruthless, murderous silence.
Those men were just doing their jobs, clicking their mouse, just as you click yours.
And they were doing it in January 2007, knowing full well — as we all did by that time — that there were no WMD’s in Iraq – our whole rationale for military action there.
And yet we all just kept clicking. What, in God’s name, what is wrong with us?
America, may we never again abandon your promise!
And, Mr. President Obama, you too made a personal promise us all to end this. Why are we still there?!
Please — no more! The time is not someday, not soon — but now — to make good on your word.
And most of all, oh dear God of Love, Sprit of Peace, Brotherhood of Man — please hear our cries!
Please, please let this be the real beginning of the real end to the illusive ill-defined war on terror.
May we see the terrorists are really just murderous criminal gangs.
May we understand we must no longer dignify them as warriors.
May we stop inflicting our fear and vengeance upon their innocent, decent neighbors.
May we stop ordering our own best men to commit heinous crimes in our name.
May we see that the War on Terror should never have been.
May we see, there just should have been, and could still now be — the largest, most concerted criminal dragnet in the history of humanity – for which we would have the world’s unqualified support.
May we see that if the enemy really is terror, then we can win it now — when we put down our fears, and live in the clear-eyed faith that terrorists are nothing but criminals.
And, unless we let them change us, they can pose no real threat to our way of life –the openness, integrity, generosity of a free people united and peaceful — only we can surrender that way, that promise.
And may we see, in the name of stopping them, that is just we have been doing — abandoning ourselves!
Oh Dear God — please relieve us of our blindness now — may we awaken!
It is time to just go get the terrorists and bring them out into the light, into the full blaze of justice before the world’s gaze.
Every peace-loving person on Earth wants for that, only that.
And, in our heart-of-hearts, we want to stop dignifying them and defiling ourselves with this erroneous war on terror.
So all of us — American, Afghan Iraqi, and all others – may live amongst one another as brothers, in peace.
It was suggested to me by a friend, Rajeev Goyal of www.PushforPeaceCorps.org, that I reach out to former Senator and Peace Corps Associate Director under JFK and LBJ — the Honorable Harris Wofford.
Before I did so, I wanted to read his book India Afire, which he co-authored with his now late wife Clare. It was published just three years after India’s independence in 1951, after a six-month trip they took together to India in 1950.
I had to interlibrary loan request it, and am at Lauinger Library on the Georgetown campus now, looking out at a full moon and the Washington monument and Kennedy Center in the distance, giving it a read.
On the title page is a quote:
Pray tell me, what am I to do with a fifth of the human race living on the verge of starvation?
— Gandhi
So it started off well; Gandhi is perhaps my single greatest hero and most frequent object of daily meditation. His beautiful memorial on Massachusetts Avenue is a near-daily stop on my way to or from work, where I stop to touch his feet and read the inscription “MY LIFE IS MY MESSAGE”, reminding myself to live likewise.
On the second page, the Woffords write:
India is afire with the same revolt affecting all Asia, but the course it is taking is still far from communism. After all, Gandhi consciously struck the first great Indian sparks. Having witnessed the results of Gandhi’s nonviolent struggle and studied his story, we rank him as the world’s greatest revolutionary.
I welled up with pride and joy upon reading this. Here is Wofford, a young American who will go on to be a great leader — a Senator, college President, moral leader of the Peace Corps — who ranks Gandhi higher even than George Washington or Thomas Jefferson.
We are in agreement on this. Not that the accomplishments of the American revolutionaries aren’t extraordinarily great.
An aside — just last Sunday, I had occasion to visit Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, which was the scene of the signing of the American Declaration of Independence and US Constitution, and to ponder the scene a while, to try to feel what it must have been to be in a world in which there was no living memory or knowledge of democratic nationhood–where consent of the governed and merit of the governors ruled, rather than bloodlines–and to strike out into the unknown to try it. It’s immense.
However great, Gandhiji had a universal human vision that went even beyond the Founding Fathers’ national one, though they were no strangers to the idea either. I’d go so far as to say, they were the first modern men to give voice to it. Yet even today in America, most of us struggle to really believe this:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The self-evident truth of a Creator endowing us with such rights may be easy for us to confer upon fellow Americans, but the deeper morality this calls us toward — a universal humanistic vision of defending these rights equally for all mankind, especially those who lack the basic conditions of life to defend it for themselves — is just now evolving. After nearly two and a half centuries of struggle for slaves, women, blacks, and immigrants in America, we have only in the past two generations begun awakening to the possibility that our nation can play a purposeful and intentional role in the enduring establishment of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness for all people everywhere.
Which brings me back to the Woffords — they were funded on this trip by the Foundation for World Government, an organization begun in 1937 in New York. They write:
Undoubtedly we were drawn to some aspects instead of others by our “one world” bias…. By the time we left for India, six years of our lives had largely revolved around the world government idea.
When I saw “one world” on the page in quotes, I again was deeply moved as one of my own passions is one-planet living. They are not at all the same in a sense, but they are of a kindred intent — peace on earth through unity.
One-planet living is about self-responsible economic choices such that one’s lifestyle does not make it impossible for others to live on the Earth, either now, or in the future. Today, if everyone on the planet lived as the average American consumer does, driving gas-guzzling automobiles, and living a consumerist lifestyle that generates so much trash at such large volumes, it would require nine planet earths to fuel this lifestyle for everyone. The off-planet harvesting of mineral resources depicted in James Cameron’s Avatar film is not a fantastic fiction; it will be a necessity if we keep up our present modes of consumption. But I just cannot imagine what we’d do to our own planet before we start harvesting others. One-planet living is about the hope that we can each set an example, at home, work, and in society, in how we practice meeting our own needs and those of our family — to share the earth fairly with the rest of life on this planet.
One-world government, as the Foundation for World Government conceived, was about seeking an end to international conflict through a fair, federalist union of nations. The Woffords wrote:
Within a week–a staggering week in which human misery hit us from every side–our world government glasses were knocked off, and for many months, lost. Overwhelmed by the immediate economic problems that meant life or death for millions, we were swept away from the world federation idea by the heart-wrenching poverty, ignorance, and disease surrounding us. World government seemed a thousand miles down a road littered with tragic immediate problems crying for solution. In the end we were hunting a prescription for a new kind of lens which would cure our former nearsightedness to such problems without obliterating the old insights. We wanted glasses that would keep the world’s misery in sharp focus and show as well the longer-range but inescapable road of world unity.
World unity or world peace seems a good bit less inevitable today. I’ve been testing out the notion with my friends — who are broadly a profoundly hopeful, broad-minded, forward-thinking bunch — this notion of the inevitability of world peace. I get one response: bewilderment. In America, we are profoundly conditioned to predicate our entire lives on its impossibility. So just act locally goes the argument.
I do not feel this way at all — while the intuition has been with me all my life, it only became a real, deeply-held conviction recently, in the past few months: world peace is inevitable, and it is very possible.
I am working on a fuller discussion of how and why that’s really so, but my basic case is premised as follows:
The world is a profoundly interconnected system, that tends toward various states of durable, but dynamic, equilibrium, which, with great reliability, tend to overtake unstable states.
There are tipping points in the development of these equilibria, in which the dynamic forces of conversion are in rapid realignment toward stability.
We have now enough examples of how such conditions have arisen in various local contexts to reasonably apply these lessons in the establishment of equilibria to the entire system to create rapid, effective interventions that change the course of equilibrium.
The fundamental underlying theme of all these interventions — ranging from political to scientific — is the loving application of our attention and knowledge to the solution of immediate problems in everyday living, while holding firm to the principle that we do no harm to the greater good in the process.
We will certainly not be right in every case, but with persistent effort over time, we will be far more right than we will be wrong.
So, in essence, my case for world peace is technical — grounded in making smarter everyday choices, as individuals and as social groups, states and nations — but also aspirational — grounded in the faith that life and love will win out in the end, and that our only real choice is whether we want that end — world peace — to come sooner or later.
The Woffords wrote a great treasure of a book; I just read the chapter on their visit to Andhra Pradesh, then simply called by its capital city’s name — Hyderabad, my birthplace. At the time of their visit, it was the center of the Communist movement in India. They visited a Gandhian who had returned to a small village to teach and help uplift it through Gandhi’s vision. I’d never before had as direct narrative contact with what that vision was.
Ranga Naikulu, who had left Gandhi’s ashram Sevagram three years prior, to set up camp in a village outside of the city of Warangal, in what had then become a Communist stronghold:
At first everyone was suspicious and kept their children away from the “new teacher.” They feared that the Nizam Government would punish them if they cooperated with anyone associated with Gandhi. With no room made available and no students, Ranga opened his school under a tree by the edge of the village, after persuading a few poor children from nearby villages to sit with him. The villagers watched cautiously, and then slowly began sending their children to him…. By now Ranga taught fifty-seven village children, most of those from two to fifteen in the little hamlet of 345. Those whose families insisted that they work in the daytime he taught at night, along with some of the willing adults… He had already prevented many child marriages and eased others by getting them to school even after they were wed.
His success, moderate as it was, stemmed from his emphasis on village living instead of literacy. He began with lessons in baths and cooking and health. He dispensed antimalarial drugs and information. Now this village had no malaria, whereas those nearby had a rate of probably 25 percent. Ranga and his students were constructing a drainage system: while we walked through the ankle-deep mud, his students were trying to fill in the bogs and level off the road. Through the school he hoped to awaken public service and village planning. He had many ideas for the future: movable trench latrines, dairy and grain co-operatives, elective village councils, and the introduction of cottage industries. Already he was spreading the use of the charkha, through his regular school periods of hand-spinning. And some peasants were now using cow dung as fertilizer for the first time. He had started paper and glucose-making and beekeeping, but the raiders had destroyed his equipment. Soon, however, they would start again now that the new school buildings were finished.
This sounds remarkably like the life of a number of Peace Corps volunteers I have known, the world over. It had never occurred to me before there could in fact be a very direct link between the Gandhian program and the Peace Corps program — but it seems obvious now, considering the Woffords and others subsequent involvement with the Peace Corps, and the Agency’s emphasis on respecting local culture and tradition, and upliftment through providing trained men and women. I wonder where they got the idea? This is something I’d like to ask Senator Wofford about.
I will report back on what he says.
There are many more wonderful things I could share about this book, but I’ll stop here for now; it’s been a beautiful session of meditation, connecting to the cause of peace in the sweep of history, in my birthplace and in my homeland, and to the Gandhian and American visions for it world over.
This earlier post on media bias led me to think, perhaps it’s best to abandon objectivity altogether, and instead be totally, even painfully, subjective — but with self-awareness. Also, it reminded me that this blog is itself is a media outlet of sorts, and so I should be clear for myself and for you, the reader — what’s my bias?
The graphic is from an Australian Computer Science education conference — referring to experimental bias that creeps into the work of computer scientists — but it’s useful generally as a way to visualize the cyclic, self-reinforcing nature of bias….
My bias? Well, as much as none of this ‘should’ matter according to the objectivist view — the reality is that I was born into a Hindu Brahmin family, of the Telugu 6000 Niyogi subsect from Andhra, who were originally, of all things, known as good public administrators. My family is descended from the sage Mowdgalya, a lineage of rishis said to have authored the Atharvaveda Upanishad. Today, in addition to the philosophical foundation of the Vedas, and extensive influence from Buddha’s teachings, we practice in Ramanuja’s strain of Vaishnavism, with deep connections to the Tirupati Balaji temple and its tradition of Vishnu tantra.
I was born in Hyderabad, India, but raised in Woodbridge, New Jersey, and McLean, Virginia. I went to public schools, but was always in gifted and talented programs, honors classes and magnet schools, including the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia. My father was a strong Democrat when it came to American politics, and a Congress Party of India supporter, with strong Marxist/socialist philosophic leanings. My mother was one of India’s first women electronics engineers, and bought me my first computer at age 9, and she’s been in government service all her life, both in India and the US. Of all public thinkers and leaders, perhaps the most formative was Gandhi, whose autobiography I read at age 17 while traveling in India and doing research on HIV/AIDS epidemiology — and that’s changed me forever.
These facts are the core of the deep spiritual, scientific, political, and social convictions that are with me today. Of course, I am very much my own man, but it’s surprising, for as much of a rebel as I’ve been in my life, how little I’ve really strayed from that basic foundation of belief. All those influences were really baked into my source code, so to speak. Today, I have the engineer’s conviction that the world’s problems are solvable; the scientific conviction that they’re understandable; the spiritualists’ conviction that they — the whole world over, each and every single person — matters; and the political conviction that, with the right leadership, it’s all possible — real transformation …
I also have the experience in adult life of, many, many times, getting stuck — wanting, needing, believing I needed to be doing something different, but not finding the ability to, long after it no longer really ‘made sense’. It’s the human condition in a sense, not just to err, but to keep erring because a known error can be less fearsome than an unknown one. But it’s probably the main lens through which I see myself and my life and human life in general: flowing versus stuck. Growth or stasis. And having spent my entire adult life addressing this divide in myself through the very scientific, technical, spiritual and social predispositions I described above it’s brought me around to the same belief: real transformation is possible.
It’s not just possible — it’s necessary — to transcend our lesser selves and the ‘laws of biological behavioral gravity’, as my great-uncle Dr. N.C. Surya termed it . It’s only by knowing what weights we bear, what our karma has shaped us into, that we can transcend. ‘With skill, determination and scientific sincerity, we can fly. No mystery is involved in airplane flight, he wrote. Similarly, the flight of a human being into their better selves.
So that’s it, my biggest, most basic bias — by training and experience — I believe we can utterly surprise ourselves. In fact, it’s the one thing we can really count on.
I had an interesting conversation with a friend and freelance reporter for NPR last night. She will rename nameless here — interesting when a blogger has to protect the anonymity of a journalist source, isn’t it?
In any case, she told me she felt like to rise there she had to think and act like a 40-year-old white liberal male. Her view was enlightening, because I’ve considered myself an NPR listener and supporter. Her interest and connection to international issues had to be subdued because simply put, America was more important, by a lot. This really got me thinking about their reportage because I’ve listened to NPR on and off for many years. While it’s a markedly better mental diet than say CNN, Fox or other so-called ‘major’ American media outlets – it really is not very balanced globally. I’d like to look at this issue of media coverage, and explore whether it’s more informed by humanism versus Americanism further.
The Wikipedia entry on media bias in the US has a lot of great references as a start. It also makes the interesting point that professional journalism didn’t really exist before the early 1900s. Before that correspondents were often those who corresponded with the publisher, and newspapers were always understood to represent the interests of the publisher.
Professional journalism, it seems, suffers from the same illusion of objectivity as much of the rest of academia. This is a deep interest of mine when it comes to how science is practiced, and is the central life’s work of my friend and colleague of Professor Patrick Heelan, SJ, at Georgetown. The hermeneutics of science is something few scientists are taught to consider at all. They are trained into the seductive notion that there is an absolute scientific truth which they are revealing. Journalists, writers of all kinds, are not so different….
I don’t strive for that sort of objectivity, but for balance within myself, within the range of my own voice — I ask, am I speaking with compassion, appropriateness, integrity, and clarity? But what defines what that is for me? What’s my bias?
If there’s any part of my body in need of healing, whether from a fall or other injury, from being ill, or tension caused by stress, sadness or resentment — there’s a simple healing visualization meditation using the breath that I’ve found always helps me feel better.
·In a quiet, private place, sit in a comfortable seated posture that you can hold for a long period with your core supporting you (not against a backrest), or, if you’ll be more comfortable, lie down in savasana. Close your eyes throughout the meditation, and bring the focus of your mind’s eye to your body.
·Breathe deeply and steadily in through your nostrils into your tummy, then into your chest and heart space then up to your shoulders and neck — and slowly and intentionally release down in reverse order from the neck through the bottom of the tummy. Inhale only through the nose, but you can exhale through both the nose and mouth, allowing whatever is most easeful for each breath.
·Make the length of your breath on a 1 to 2 ratio. So if you do a 4-count inhale, do an 8-count exhale. Find a comfortable, sustainable pace, and don’t focus too much on the exact timing – it’s just a rough guide – but don’t forget to remind yourself either when needed. Your body will inform you with each breath what it most needs.
·Once you’ve found a steady pace at about this 1:2 ratio, continue breathing long, deep breaths in this manner, and, as you inhale, visualize sending the breath all the way to the place in your body that needs healing and allowing that part of your body to fill up with healing energy, as your torso fills with breath. As you exhale, visualize the body gently releasing some of the pain, resistance, anxiety, sadness, or toxins from that part of your body, and the out-breath carrying it away, out of you.
·At any point, it may happen that the part of the body you are focusing upon suddenly feels much more easeful or less painful, and seems to have had ‘enough’ healing for now, and some other part of the body will register the need for healing energy. When it happens, honor it, give thanks to that part of your body for healing itself – and with your next breath, you can shift your visualization of healing energy to the next point in your body asking for it.
·This works on any part of the body, not just over the parts over which you have conscious control — even your brain, your heart, the insides of your bones, your eyes, anywhere — you don’t need to be able to consciously control the function of a part of your body in order to send healing energy there.
·Continue for at least a few minutes, as long as you wish, up to a few hours even.
If at first you can’t feel your healing energy focusing itself where you’re visualizing, don’t worry – it’s in you. This will become more apparent the more you relax into it. Often, I know it’s beginning to work because I feel a mild tingling in that region of my body I’m focused on – quite literally, my cardiovascular system is relaxing in that area, allowing more blood to flow in, and with it, more healing happens – more nutrients, oxygen, and white-blood cells go to that part of me — and more red blood cells to carry away by-products and toxins. With some practice, you will be able to focus your healing energy wherever it is most needed with ease, and the sensations will be unmistakable.
If you’re comfortable with this simple practice, you can experiment — as you breathe out, while keeping focused in the flow of healing energy through the body with the breath, you can experiment with different out-breaths and sounds — nose-only, mouth-only, sighing, cooing — whatever is most easeful, whatever provides the most release. One that really helps me is to sigh like I’ve just finished a big job.
For those with old emotional wounds – often currently expressing themselves through depression, anxiety, compulsivity, or trouble focusing or sleeping — coupling this exercise with yogic postures can help accelerate the healing process tremendously. Deep emotional releases may occur, as there are often many tensions held in the body from un-processed events over the years. For example, bodywork healers have long known there is often tension stored in the deep musculature of the hips to do with old injuries to one’s emotional security.
One such experience I have had is of emotional memories coming up of the loss of my grandfather, who was I’m told was my ‘best buddy’ as a small child, until I was two years old, when my family emigrated to America. He died shortly thereafter. I have no visual, cognitive, olfactory or other memory of my grandfather, but I did have emotional memories of my loss of him held deep within my body, that came up through the combination of this deep releasing breath and pigeon pose on my left side. I found myself quietly crying tears I had needed to for nearly thirty years, re-connecting with the spirit of a man I had long thought I’d lost, and feeling my load in life is a good bit lighter ever since.
As soon as you’re just a bit comfortable with this practice and can quickly focus your healing energy — you can try to do it any time of day while doing anything – simply taking a deep breath and directing the healing energy to whatever part of your body may be tight or troubled. For me, it works especially well to direct the healing energy to the front of the brain when I’m a bit mentally astir about something, and the tummy when I’m anxious. I’ve done it often at my desk at work, in the line at the store, walking down the street, even in the middle of a challenging conversation. When I can do it, it always helps me — let me know if it helps you too!
I wanted to conclude the year with a meditation on what proved to be an interesting year for me. I got engaged and unengaged. The latter being the hardest thing I’d ever gone through, and I’ve been through my share of tough things. I also began teaching yoga, and working at the Peace Corps. I’m grateful to have made it through, and to have re-connected through each of these experiences with my own sense of purpose and meaning, to re-affirm that pain shared is pain lessened. And that lessons shared are lessons learned.
1. No single relationship can completely fulfill me. My fulfillment plays out through my relationships with myself, with the entire community of people in my life, and with my God — all of whom will be with me until my last breath. I, my God, and the people in my community may change but my relationships with each will persist to my last breath. I can only act with the experience and hope I have gained on my path toward my fulfillment. However, its realization is out of my hands. When it comes, it comes, and when it goes, it goes. Pressing forward on the journey is all I can ever do.
2. However, pressing toward trying to fulfill myself through any one thing — whether a person, an idea or ideology, a substance or behavior — is powerful, subtle and insistent force in me and in many people. I have long known this about myself, and been vigilant of it daily, and yet that cycle arose again. A strong, clear, convicted sense of self and of the importance of balancing all the relationships in my life toward my fulfillment is the antidote. I have to take this antidote in every situation in which I feel that pull toward a ‘fixed idea’ that will ‘fix’ me or everything.
3. Friends are deeply important to my survival and happiness. They are the people to whom I owe nothing, and who owe me nothing, but we, of our own free choice, give gratefully of ourselves to each other. The time, empathy, honesty, affirmation, and strength I get and that I am able to give is the very stuff of life. May I also ever be a friend to myself.
4. ‘We work that we may know the seasons.’ So writes Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet. Work, being of service to others, is my anchor, to the Earth and to the Sun, and to humanity. Whatever storm may come, I am always held by the very fact of work, of service to others. This remembrance of the needs of others restores my perspective, puts whatever wounds or challenges I face, into their right context, as but one small bit of a much grander flow.
5. In every crisis lies the opportunity for transformation into the being for whom it is not a crisis, but a matter of course. If I can allow healing of whatever karma it is that causes me to view the situation as a crisis, it ceases to be one.
6. I may want a life partner, but do not need one. I can be open to the possibility, but I must be aware that in seeking it out, it is possible, in a deep but subtle way, to close myself off to the beautiful fullness of the present moment. Let me ever remember to be here now, and allow that to make possible futures increasingly obvious.
7. I love teaching. I am a teacher. I love learning. I am a learner. For myself. But I am only ever, at best, a guide to others, a guide to remembrance of their own inner teacher and student. Above all else, guides exemplify. Formal instruction or direction, only if invited and only if necessary, can be but one tool of such remembrance. However, it must be used sparingly, as there is a great danger in it of putting the student’s own inner teacher and learner to sleep — putting the application or improvement of a faculty or skill at odds with the greater development or realization of the Self.
9. Highly skilled and gifted people can be quite foolish or confused, as much as anyone can. Oftentimes moreso, because they may mistake their skill or gift for wisdom and clarity, and others who do the same may often encourage them in this mistake. So be discerning in choosing one’s guides, teachers, and examples. Above all else, look for people with the humility to be aware of, and in contact with, their own fallibility.
10. Elegant as it may seem, lists do not have to be ten items long. But while we’re at it, I suppose I also learned that I can keep writing even after a longish absence, that consistency and persistence are not the same, that both are good, and even one is far better than none.
I end with a note of reverence and gratitude to my late father. These are his feet.
It was a year of grace for me. I was blessed in so many ways:
1. I met Amma. 2. I asked her for a mantra, and she gave one. 3. I met many beautiful, self-realizing souls. 4. I invited many into my life, and they came and have stayed. 5. Space and the means for foundational change opened. 6. I found a new peace and confidence. 7. All my material needs were met. 8. Everyone close to me who I love has been in good health. 9. America seems to have made a turn for the better. 10. I am looking forward to 2009 and the years beyond with great, but reasonable, hopes.
