03 Dec On Helping Others To Spiritually Awaken
There is an intense desire, once one has tasted something as sweet as spiritual awakening, to want to share it with people they love.
I had this phase too, especially when I was in La Union, and sometimes it was so strong that I got into a proselytizing stance that awakened in them a paranoid defense, because what I’m indirectly saying is, “Who you are, just as you are, isn’t enough; if you only knew what I know, or had what I had, you could be happier than you are, and I want that for you.”
But I’ve realized that all I did was to create a lot of ‘stuff’, and it takes a while because it’s really hard to keep our hands off the people we love: “I love you, I want you to enjoy what I enjoy,” and after a while I learned all of the karmic stuff that I created when I started judging somebody else as doing something that is less than what they could be doing, because I don’t know why they are the way they are.
After a while, I came to appreciate that what I can only offer another human being is to work on myself; to be a statement of what it is I have found in the way I live my life, and one of the things I have found or will find is the ability to appreciate what is, as it is, in equanimity and compassion and love that isn’t conditional; that is, I don’t love a person more because they are happier the way I think they should be.
What I find is that if I just am what I am, when people are ready they will ask, and now I really wait for people to ask. I don’t come on to people, I don’t like to teach where I’m not invited to teach. I only want to go with people who want to hear what I have to say.
What I cultivate in myself is the garden in which they can grow, and I offer my consciousness and the spaciousness to hear it.
I’m learning how to play that as close to the edge as I can now, but in general, I’m saying I don’t come on to other people (especially my students) about spiritual issues anymore, I keep my own council, but I’m available, and when they ask, I share and I create environments where they could, if they wanted, hear it by having the books around, the videos, the music, the opportunity.
As Meher Baba says, “What we’re selling is catchy, it goes from one heart to another.”
When I watch my favorite yogi artist, Wah Devi, singing, I can feel that she’s not doing it for her audience; it’s between her and the Divine, and then I feel it, I just trust what her purity is, and then it allows me to sort of tune in myself to what that’s about.
I strive to do the same in my classes.
#AquanimousYoga
#MakatiShangriLaExperience
?: @Mara Bautista
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