05/06/2022
✍️New Blog Post 🎧Podcast 📹YouTube
There are different definitions of meditation. One of the definitions, the classical way, is the definition according to Patanjali. According to Patanjali, meditation is at the seventh rung. That means seventh step of the eight steps ladder of yoga, a Raja Yoga system. That means you have to prepare yourself, in order for you to be able to be still. Yamas and niyamas are the two first rungs in Taja Yoga, guiding you to have proper behavior that will not bring about any kind of reaction, that will bring about peace.
Anything that happens is due to our karma from the past. And if we are going to react to our karma, then it strengthens the wrong thought tendency. And it would put us deeper into the state of unhappiness, restlessness, worry. That’s why the yoga scheme is how to free us from our past tendencies. And Patanjali gives us a few points, a few guidelines on how to do this, we call yamas and niyamas.
The first guideline is ahimsa. Ahimsa means nonviolence or in other words, no frustration, anger. You can be proactive and manage your mind, working around your desire and your expectation so that you don’t get angry because anger comes from expectation and unfulfillment. If you are flexible enough to work around your expectation, then you will be able to be a peaceful person and you will be avoiding anger and violence. Really, it’s all about you and the mind. It’s not about whatever happens and whatever people’s behavior, it’s about you. What do you expect, how you interpret that situation? You can change, you can switch to ahimsa, but you have to learn how to manage your desire, your ego, your expectation and you have to enhance your eyes a lot. You can also learn how to be compassionate, to understand somebody from where they are, to understand the situation that can be quite complex sometimes. And you have to come up with the most sattvic kind of response. And you have to work against your ego because your ego has its tendencies and you want to reproduce its tendencies which make you feel strong.
Learn to communicate better: I think people are sometimes very short. It means they don’t communicate very well. Why don’t you communicate very well? Because you think that people should know? Or you thought:” they should think of things the way I see it.” But people don’t. They have a completely different mindset. What do you expect from them can be like talking Chinese, they have no understanding of that. And then you assume that they have to understand that, and you just say a few words because that’s your assumption and you expect them to understand and you get upset if they don’t understand or you make a face.
I myself, I don’t type very quickly, I type very slowly. I just have two fingers, I don’t know how to type. I cannot see very well also. I’m almost blind because, I do not wear my glasses and I use my little cell phone as my computer, so it took me a long time to type anything to communicate with people and I received tons of email and I am being attacked by emails of people, so it took me a long time to answer emails, you know. Sometimes I have to type in Vietnamese and different keyboard and accent and all these things. But I make a point. I’m not talking about me here, I’m talking about the concrete thing how you can do Meditation in daily life. It is a form of Raja Yoga meditation because you have to be very focused, to be very careful when you answer an email and answer a request. You need to be communicating, that means you have to talk about the circumstances before that email and explain to people the after and then you have to use the right kind of feeling that you can add to the communication. And you have to understand the person, where they come from and who are you at this time present. And then you try to make that communication unique at that time.
It’s like serving a full meal, a three course meal, when you answer an email. There is the beginning, the appetizer, then the main course, and then the dessert at the end. It took me a lot of time. Imagine I didn’t speak English, I didn’t type very well. If you ask me, what did I learn in my spiritual path? How did I learn? I would say this – because I was a secretary for many years: “one letter at a time.” That’s how I learned. I imagined the person, I meditated about the person that I wrote letter to. Also, to note that I did not even sign the letters. I wrote for the swami, and someone else was signing the letters, not me. So, I had to imagine that I wrote a letter for Swamiji, or the other senior Swami, then, I tuned my mind to higher vibration, higher wavelengths of thought, and address the person. This was my way of meditation in action, called Karma Yoga of writing letters. It was not just only business correspondence, it was a spiritual communication, it was my meditation. This is the truth. That’s how I grow in awareness. I must have written so many letters.
https://sivanandayogafarm.org/blog/how-to-meditate-in-daily-life/
There are different definitions of meditation. One of the definitions, the classical way, is the definition according to Patanjali. According to Patanjali, meditation is at the seventh rung. That means seventh step of the eight steps ladder of yoga, a Raja Yoga system. That means you have to prepare...