Living Namaste

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Seek Namaste

Live Namaste.

The word “namaste” is getting around.  Nearly everyone I know has heard someone say “namaste,” if they haven’t said it themselves.  A large portion of those speakers of “namaste” know its meaning, but then most of my associates have done some form of yoga, or they know enough of me to have heard me say it and explain it.  Whenever I teach a new class, I ask my students if the have heard this word before, and again, most have at least heard it, often they have uttered it.  But the meaning is not so ubiquitous.

Most people who have heard of namaste understand that it is a greeting.  It is something that is spoken at an initial meeting, and often said as a closing or goodbye, especially common in yoga classes.  Because “namaste,” the word, is often combined with the hand mudra, (also called “namaste”, alternatively, “namaskar” or “anjali mudra”), a prayerful sense of reverence is conveyed through the hands, which are pressed together, fingertips to heel-of-hands, and held over the heart center.  Simultaneously, the head is bowed.  So, we know this is a greeting of respect and reverence, without any verbal translation.

In fact, the translation is quite literal: “Nama” means bow, “as“ means I or me, and “te” means you.  This is from the Sanskrit language, an ancient language from of India; and it is closely tied to yoga.  Because of yoga’s body-mind-spirit philosophy, the words used in this art are chosen for their vibrational qualities, and implicitly carry divine meaning.  In addition, evolving along side yoga are spiritual beliefs, which express the concept that everything is interconnected, infused with divinity.  Therefore, everything, and everyone is already divine.

When we bow to each other in Namaste, we are offering the sweetest kind of acknowledgement.  We allow that, flawed though we are, we are divine.  We belong to the Divine, and it belongs to us.  Bowing in Namaste is a suspension of judgment, of disbelief; and it is instead, an acknowledgement that you are as good as I am able –willing- to see you.  And I acknowledge that it is the same for you.  When we meet, I am only as good as you are willing to see me.  I hope to receive the benefit of your divine gaze, your sin-covering eye.

When you LIVE Namaste, you live in acknowledgement of our –your- Perfect Imperfection.  You acknowledge that the world is a challenging place for all of us, and that challenges arise unexpectedly.  We are not always prepared.  And we must do the best we can, in any given moment.  Sometimes, that moment is a triumph.  We did our best, and it was a triumph.  Just as often, we find that moment is a disappointment, a loss, or a tragedy.  And we did our best, because that was all –everything-we could do.  This is the beginning of compassion.

Compassion is gentleness.  With compassion, there is space made in which, and through which, we can expand our experience of a moment.  We can see that everything is a choice, and you can only make your best choice.  Unfortunately, we can never truly know how our choices will turn out.  No one can.

When you can be gentle on yourself, and always do your best, you can feel your integrity.  When you need to, gentleness will make room for you to forgive yourself.  When you have forgiven yourself, you can begin again, new; and do your best tomorrow.   This is how you allow yourself to be different, to change, to become.

This changing and beginning again can be risky.  Others around us can be upset by change, and they might become confused when we change.  We may perceive they are angry with us, or don’t love us in our new form.  With Namaste, you will forgive them.  You will remember how hard it is when others have changed in front of you, and you have had to recreate the way that you relate with them.  In truth, their changing demands it.

This is incredibly powerful.  You can change others by changing yourself.  This is why Dalai Lama says “be the change you wish to see in the world.”  YOU are contagious.  There is science behind this.

Back in the 1960s a scientist named Paul Eckman began studying this idea.  You can see his work here: www.PaulEckman.com and you can read about him in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.  Essentially, he has proved that facial expressions and their associated emotions, are contagious.  Further, it has been established that faking a smile can actually change your mood (studied through brain scans, etc).  Fake it till you make it?  You bet-and imagine what you can do if you begin by smiling.

So, change.  And be prepared for others to resist you.  But persist.  You will let them know you understand that you must be true to yourself, above all else.

When you are able to do this, you will learn to trust yourself.

When you trust yourself, your intuition is turned on.  And, conversely, when your intuition is engaged, you can trust yourself.

An experiment:

Bow “Namaste” once each day for the next seven days, and bow Namaste either silently or aloud, with or without the mudra (hand gesture).   I’ll up the ante further:  bow to someone who is troubling you.  Bow to someone you don’t particularly like.  As you do so, say to yourself “I am Divine.  You are Divine.  I bow to that which is Divine.”  After seven days, up the ante, and do this exercise twice per day for seven days.  Journal.  Keep playing this game as long as you want to or can.  There is no magick number: but notice what you feel as time passes.  Be aware of your awareness.  I will not lead you any further down this rabbit hole, because that would be leading the witness.  Mixed metaphor intended.

For whoever takes the experiment seriously, I hope that you will share some of your experience here by leaving some comment on the page.  And please feel free to share or retweet.

NAMASTE !

(pron. Nah-MAHS-teh )

© Sara B Sprague 5/2010

Holistic Commitment: About Love

Before we begin to explore these new vows, let’s spend some time on Love, and Loving:

Interestingly, some of the traditional wedding vows do not talk of love, except extraneously.  One wonders why not?  Perhaps because marriages were typically arranged or consented to by parents, and love was something that grew between you, not a prerequisite for the commitment.   Marriage was an instrument of survival, or progenation, first and foremost.  Love was a perk, if you got it.  People couldn’t afford to make loving their top priority, especially women, because they were not allowed to own property or keep their own wealth.  You ALWAYS married for the money. Okay, not always, but more often than not.

But what of love?  The culture in which those old, traditional vows persisted was one that had a tremendous respect for love and loving.  It was expected that you would attempt to cultivate it whenever possible.  I am reminded of the scene in Fiddler on the Roof, when Tevye and Golde, after decades of marriage, ask each other, “do you love me?”  Curious!  Of course, they realise that they do and have for a long, long time.  And of course, they love their daughters.  But it didn’t start out that way!  Now, however, in an era of mass transport and instant communications, a eon of liberation of women and equal rights, love is easier to find and a reasonable motivation for relating to each other.

Merriam-Webster defines love in the following entries:

1 : to hold dear : cherish

2 a : to feel a lover’s passion, devotion, or tenderness for b (1) : caress (2) : to fondle amorously (3) : to copulate with

3 : to like or desire actively : take pleasure in <loved to play the violin>

4 : to thrive in <the rose loves sunlight>

intransitive verb : to feel affection or experience desire

Taking the etimological information into account, I will define love as an enduring affection, the act of holding dear; to cherish.

As you will see in my next post, I separated the “vow of love,” from the rest of the vows quite on purpose, just as I chose it as the first vow for a reason.  This is the only part of the vow that is unconditional, unchanging, not meant to be couched in terms of negotiation.  Every vow after this is conditional, and makes each adherent personally responsible for their actions.  If you do not value love as prime in commitment, then it will be necessary to write a different set of vows, or perhaps to edit this one out.  Then, look and see if the other vows will still hold up without the “love” vow.  They might!  Personally, I think love is the glue.

Sometimes, people freak out when the are asked to commit to loving someone forever.  And why wouldn’t you?  What happens if you fall out of loving?  I think this part is a leap of faith.  It is rare that people just cease to love someone that they have loved once.  They may bury their feelings, or mutate the loving, covering it with malice, anger, distaste.  But love, when true, is universal.  I have to admit, I feel some kind of resonate kindness, goodwill, softness toward every person I have ever loved, without exception.  Impossible?  I say the real opposite of love is neutrality.  The real lack of love resides in apathy.  If you care, you love, whether directly or indirectly.  Some will disagree with this, and that is certainly well within their rights!

If however, you’re following me, I must here state my gratitude, and invite you to read on.

Love is thought of as a feeling within us, as an action, and as a thing shared between two or more people.  Do we expect love to just exist between us always?  How do we cultivate that love, and know when the reward is equal to or greater than the work we do for love? When we fall in love, we often wonder how long it will last, stay alive, and be mutual.  It feels so effortless.

We say, “fall in love,” because falling feels like something that just happens.  But you can only fall as a result of something that came before.  Three scenarios come to mind: jumping to fall, being pushed into a fall, or tripping and falling.  I say when we “fall in love” it’s because we jumped/stepped purposefully into something.  Looking right at it.  That takes effort, and attention-not ease.  Or say, “I fell for you,” which is to say, I chose to look at you and then I fell in love with you. The point is, to fall in love is a choice, an efforting that we are deciding to begin.

(As for being “pushed into falling” in love:  not possible.  Something else is going on there entirely if you are blaming falling in love on someone pushing you.  Not gonna happen.  Now, as for “tripping and falling” in love, tripping is the act of losing your footing as a result of not being mindful about your environment.  You are choosing to not be mindful.  Still a choice, you still know what the risk is, gazing at that attractive face for too long without paying attention to life happening around you.  You play, you pay.  Oh, and where you land, either authentically in love or just playing around with the idea-the outcome is at least 50% your responsibility).

During that efforting, we primp ourselves a little more, are looking in a mirror to see what is between our teeth a little more often, we work hard to sound thoughtful, be caring, to show concern for this object of our efforting.  And why do we do that?  Because there is something about that person that we want in our lives.  And why do we want them in our lives?  This is a very, very important question! So important, that it deserves a thoughtful, honest answer.  And to find that answer you must look at yourself closely, noticing where your feelings are coming from, what motivates them, what is the basis of the commitments we have made in the past?  Remember, from the previous post, that looking backward is an important element of commitment.  Perhaps this is what is meant by that idea of looking backward: know your self.  Know what you like, and why.  Know when your “why” does not justify what you have to do to keep your “likes,” and begin to asses whether that thing you like (sugar, beer, your passive-agressive friend, swearing, wool socks), and decide if they are really worth having.  These are your values.  When you do not know your own values, you will use someone else’s as a compass for your life. And without a doubt, I promise you, you will be unhappy living a life built on anyone’s values but your own.

When you know this, you will begin to seek others with your similar values, and it will be effortless.  You will attract that which you like, and you will pass by that which you don’t like.  You will take care of yourself.  And you will attract a person who also takes care of him/her self.  They will become your community.  Your community is made up of people who share similar values and lifestyle choices.  They will be your tribe.  When you have come to value your first external commitment, your lover, as you value your self and that is reciprocated, this is Loving.  And when you value something, you make effort to cultivate and honor it.  To commit to it.  Everyone has some object that they take great pride in: a painting, the sanctuary of their home, a car they meticulously restored.  Each of these things, once created, deserves to be stewarded by us once they are brought into our lives through effort.  So we will periodically and when needed, attend to the valued object by cleaning it, protecting it, honoring it.  Should we not treat our beloved in the same way?

Love, then, is work.  Work worth doing.  When we love in this way, we are powerful, enabled, confident, vulnerable and safe.  It’s so natural to us, we become frightened when we find we are working for something that was once so easy.  We crave that ease in our lives, in this world where we have to work so hard for everything.  But if we made loving each other our top priority, after eating and having adequate shelter, sleep and clothing, we would have so much more energy to spare, the effort of loving would almost always feel like work worth doing.

Sit back for a moment, and spend a few moments imagining a town where people mostly behave this way.  Close your eyes.  Expand your view:   imagine a large city where people mostly behave this way, a state, or even a nation.  Is it not beautiful?

It starts with you.

Enjoy the view.

Next post:  The First Vow:  Love

©Sara B Sprague January 2011

Holistic Commitment: A New Vow

Holistic Commitment

I think often about commitment. The word jumps out at us and makes us, at various moments and extremes, excited, or fearful, or even ambivalent. We want it, or we run from it, or we don’t really care much if we have it or give it. Our ability to commit, or our need to commit, depends upon how we define and value commitment.

The origin of the word “commitment,” is Latin. Committere: to connect, to entrust; from the prefix com- (with, together, thoroughly), and mittere, to send. There is no mention of permanence, or of stasis, ideas we frequently attach to commitments. Acknowledging we are holistic beings in an holistic world, we must accept that things are always changing; we will change with them–like it or not, and whether we are aware or not. And so, to commit as evolving, changing beings in a perpetually changing world, we are well-advised to commit with respect for change.

Re-languaging the meaning of commit: To send (something) to someone or to several someones, with reciprocity. In committing, one must do so thoroughly, in partnership; one sends, between him/herself and another (which, I respectfully submit, can be oneself), a full trust in the other’s ability to honor their agreement, including a respect for change. As is often the case with languaging and relanguaging, we must go further into the rabbit hole to enjoy the tranquility of clarity. What then, does it mean to have respect for change?

Respect is also from the Latin, and literally translates to mean to look backwards. This is where things become open to interpretation; with interpretive variables, we are confronted to acknowledge diversity of experience. In this case, we honor the subjectivity of the word “respect.” You must decide what that means for you. Is it simply reverence for the past, and if so, how do we revere the past? Is it full of “what not to do” or “it’s always been done this way, why change now?” Or is it meant to remind us from whence we came, and to be observant of what has gone before?  Observant, in the Merriam Webster definition, is an adjective that means to pay careful or strict attention. Going down the rabbit hole even further, attention is defined as the act or practice of applying the mind to something. Ah, now we’re getting somewhere.

Relanguaging further:  A commitment is the act of sending between two people, a trust of reciprocity and applying the mind to a view of the past that is meant to inform the parties in the commitment, as they acknowledge the inevitability of change.  We can logically accept that, in light of inescapable change, our commitments must be maleable. Whenever possible, the adherents to the commitment will agree to renegotiate their commitments, following the dictates of “with, together, thoroughly.”  In this way, people who commit to themselves or to others can expect change, and incorporate its sure function into our commitments.

The Vows Project

All of that is an introduction into a project on which I have been working.  I have been writing in response to my own frustration with what I sense and see as rampant, epidemic codependence. In light of the severly dysfunctional and misunderstood relationships that exist in abundance in our society, and my reluctance to make traditional, often trite and overly-ritualized commitments, I decided to compose a new set of commitment vows.  These vows were originally designed for life-partner situations, couples, marriages or whatever label you wish to use.  In continuing to work with them, reread them and share them with others, I believe there is a broader application for the vows.  They can be used in families, organizations, partnerships, etc., when “customized” for those situations.  The basic principles apply to all kinds of relationships, and I truly believe, lay the groundwork for a new, functional and evolving paradigm for human interactions on all levels.

Traditional vows tend to create an aura of hostage-holding:  if you behave a certain way, I will reward you for your compliance.  Often they leave little room for change.  Worthy of examination is the age of these vows; then follows a close, scrutinizing look at whether or not they are realistc, purposeful and concur with our individual values systems in this current age.  For example, consider “til death us do part.”  This was easy to commit to when you only lived to be 45 years old!  The longest you’d have to stay with your partner was probably around 25 years.  Nowadays, and for a long time since the advent of vaccines and antibiotics, folks are living long enough to potentially be married for 60 or more years!  That’s a damn long time.  Think about how much you would change (or would like to have the potential to change) in 60 years!  Personally, I think it’s asking a lot of a partner to commit to a tightly held set of vows for 60 years.  We know so much about human development now (like the fact that it never really stops), it seems ludicrous to expect two people, in constant change, to remain compatible enough to live in the same dwelling, in the same patterns of relating, for sixty or so years.  No wonder the divorce rate is sky high.  It’s terrifying.  Admit it.

I don’t know who the heck I’ll be in ten years.  I had no idea when I was twenty, that I would be this person with these viewpoints, this career, these children.  Sure, my “essence” is authentic and I’m still the same “me,” but my priorities, desires, preferences and tastes have shifted and changed as I have moved through many different experiences.  This has changed the way people relate to me, and the way I relate to others.  I seem to have an uncanny ability to maintain friendships over decades, and most of them endure.  A few, however, have stood the test of time and nothing else.  We changed.  We didn’t have anything to talk about anymore, and so we drifted apart, even though we’d been friends for twenty years.  Other relationships have remained dynamic (adj., marked by usually continuous and productive change) and we have altered our way of relating to each other.  This has been succesful because there is some mutual desire to stay in relationship to each other, and in order to acheive that, we renegotiate (sometimes without words, but alchemically) our commitment.

In deeply personal, intimate relationships, these are negotiations to which we should attened with a more observant and mindful process.  In intimacy, we come into each other’s most vulnerable fields and spaces with frequency.  In intimacy, there are two great potentials always being expressed or managed:  delight and loss.  Because of that, a deeper sensitivity needs to be applied to the commitment and to its renegotiations.  I believe that The Vows Project provides a framework for these relationships, allowing the committed individuals room for their own growth-not at the expense of the intimacy, but rather in devotion to its increase.

I invite you to meditate on these thoughts for a few days.  Marinate.  Let it sink into your mind, your cells, your daily existence.  Revisit this page and see how the meaning changes for you, or becomes clearer.  And feel free to comment.  In about a week, I will begin publishing The Vows project as a serial blog.  I hope you will remain curious about these ideas.

©Sara B Sprague January 2011

Getting Clear

Sometimes, we are faced with an overwhelming list of things to be done. I’m not talking about laundry, shopping, and getting your oil changed. I’m talking about what we’re avoiding when we’re shopping, doing laundry and scheduling the oil change. Every day, we face little existential crises, and we don’t give ourselves much time to address them.

Losing weight, getting fit, eating better, consuming less, whatever it is you prioritize…

So, I’m curious…when have you felt that need to get clear bearing down on you, and when have you felt like you got a handle on it? What did you do? Most of the time, when we find ourselves overwhelmed and thinking we just CAN’T do it all…fix, change, remove, quit or start something, we get paralyzed. And, eventually, we get unstuck.

What gets you unstuck? What is your competency for managing change, for confronting challenges, for getting unstuck?

Do you make a list? Go for a walk? Run away from it all?

When you change, for whom are you changing? More interestingly, when you choose NOT to change, whom does your choice benefit?

Comments are encouraged, and welcome. How else will I get unstuck?

A Good Break

TED talks. Click on the text to view.

Worth 20 mintues of your time. Warm up your lunch, grab some tea. Enjoy!

Salutations!

Welcome to Mindful Life Practice, the blog pages for Mindfullifehealing.com

Here, you will find posts and musing relevant to living a mindful life, finding balance, losing balance and finding it again, joy, contentment and meditation.  You will also be able to find my events listed here on my calendar, see what I have been up to lately, and find some helpful links and resources.  For the sake of anonymity of yourself and others, when posting, please leave only first names and perhaps last initials for yourself and those to whom you may refer.  Your comments will be approved before being posted

I’m still finding my way around here, but as I learn more, I will have more to offer, so stay tuned.

Thanks for visiting!

Namaste & Shanti