In this text, the master describes six qualities that bring "Wild Success" to the yoga practitioner. In reviewing these qualities, I'm struck by how they are so applicable to creating success in any endeavor - and particularly in cultivating our personal integrative or developmental practice.
The first of these 6 qualities he lists is enthusiasm.
What does enthusiasm mean to our practice? Quite simply, it means that we are excited about it. If one is cultivating yoga, there is a certain excitement about being able to master a new pose. Experienced practitioners will recognize that this excitement only really comes when you have a regular (daily, or many times per week) practice, because it is only then that we can really see much progress.
Sometimes, this excitement can be harder to generate about a practice like meditation - particularly if you have hit a "dry spell". It often happens that you will start a practice of meditation and have a sort of "beginners luck" - you'll be sitting and happily blissing out in your newly found calm mind. Then you'll have a breakthrough. Literally, you break through to a new level of awareness - and when this happens, you get a glimpse of what's really down there under what we're conscious of. Or, it can happen that you receive some new instructions from your Teacher, and you are no longer satisfied with the level of awareness you have during your meditation practice. It is times like these that test your enthusiasm.
Really, many of us get caught up in an expectation around states and fantastic experiences related to our meditation. These can be many of the amazing and extraordinary things that we experience during a practice session - lights or sounds in the inner awareness, sensations of floating or falling, even visionary experience, or "psychic powers". On a subtler level, we often get caught up in thinking that our meditation is somehow supposed to work, in the short term, to make our lives "better", or make us calmer people.
Wait a minute! All of these things about meditation are great! What's wrong with being a calm and happy person with psychic powers and visionary experiences?
There is nothing wrong with these things, it's just that they are not, ultimately, what meditation practice is about. The reason these are not what meditation is about is that all of these things can go away. Long-term meditators can tell you that sometimes it's blissful, other times, it's just work. Sometimes your meditation really makes life easier, other times, you have realizations that make it very difficult to go about your normal business during the day.
The small benefits like extraordinary states are wonderful, and will actually happen with increasing frequency if you are practicing well, but they are not what the cultivation of meditation is about. We are really trying to reach a different stage all together. We are attempting to make the mind and body into a whole new form that isn't subject to the same old twists of fate that it was before. How this happens is a subject all of its own, but it will suffice to say here that thinking of this is a great way to generate enthusiasm.
If you are really going to practice, you have to love it. You have to find what it is about your practice that really inspires you to succeed. We are not talking here about just settling in and not aspiring in some pseudo-zen trance, we're talking about a yoga that calls you ever onward to greater and greater joys, until the ultimate joy of complete liberation.
Anyone who has ever manifested a lasting success and relationship with anything has been inspired about it. If you look at any master in the world who is truly inspiring, they all share one quality, the quality of passion about their practice.
If we want Wild Success in our own cultivation, we must learn to be Wildly enthusiastic about our practice. Only then can we really invest deeply enough in it to see the results we hope for.
Finally, it is important for us to ask ourselves if we believe deeply enough in our practice to generate enthusiasm about it. One aspect of enthusiasm is Faith. If we lack faith in our selves and what we do, our passion will be half hearted, or inconsistent. Find a practice that you can believe in. One that you know in your heart will take you all the way to the goals you dream of. Then simply devote yourself to it with great joy and watch the wild success flower all around you.
Action steps:
Ask yourself: How passionate am I about my practice?
Do I have faith that my practice can bring me the goals that I desire?
What level of commitment is required from this path in order to see results?
Who do I see in my world that are examples of this type of enthusiasm?
No comments:
Post a Comment