Emotions are the gateway to the soul

A client confided in me recently that she could not apply the meditation practice of being in the moment since she felt so angry when she tried it. She was under the common misconception that being present in the moment automatically brings with it an immediate sense of serenity. She felt that she was not doing it right or getting it. I find this to be partly due to the lack of general information regarding the topic and partly due to the new agey idea that meditation is about being in instant nirvana.

The first step in being in the moment is to check in with ourselves. It gives us an opportunity to gaze behind the curtain of our daily shtick: the powerhouse financial whiz, the aloof artist, the engaged political activist, the oozing serenity spiritual aspirant. It is quite easy to confuse the mask with the real, ever changing energy beneath it. As you are reading this, FEEL your feet on the ground. Be aware of other body parts. Check your shallow breathing and relax your stomach so you can drop your breathing down. Now become aware of your emotional state. It can take a while to do this since our busy lives lead to a state of numbness. It takes effort to actually be aware of how we are feeling.

Back to my client: we sat and talked about what was going on with her that was leading to her anger. As it turned out she had cleared out an intense amount of care taking and unhealthy relationship patterns with her family. Now, however, she was butting against the same issues with some close friends she had spent the weekend with. It is common for us to unconsciously keep in play or repeat certain deeply ingrained patterns that we are attempting to break free from. This is a way of pushing away the underlying anxiety when we are in a new terrain, no matter how healthy.

Emotions are sticky stuff and most of us dance around them by keeping busy from the second we wake up to the time that we lay down to rest. Some of that is done by multitasking the day away. We eat and read or listen to music or talk on the phone while walking. These actions get in the way of us actually connecting with how we are feeling. But the biggest conspirator is the constant thinking that we partake in all day long. That is the original drug, the first way that we used to dissociate ourselves from reality. Due to all this constant activity, we are actually strangers to ourselves and our inner landscape.

How are the emotions the gateway? They let us know what is going on, how we are on or off track, what needs to be done for us to tend to ourselves. We usually deal with emotions in one of two ways: repress them or act them out. Not to be aware of or just to be stuck in are the two ways; these exclude being aware of what is triggering that emotion. What being in the moment offers us is a third way: to just feel the emotions and through that action release them. To get to any place we have to begin with the awareness of where we are starting from.

So out of the New Age and into the Now Age.

The moment is our only guide

I had a woman ask me recently how she can make a decision when she doesn’t know what the immediate future will bring. As for many of us presently, there was an inner as well as outer sense of unrest in her life. It was demanding her growth through some challenging circumstances beyond her control. It can be taxing in a culture that fears change and breeds complacency to constantly listen to the inner voice and not to run on auto pilot.

A great example of this is our melting economy and how we are all being lulled back to sleep into an unsustainable cycle of consumption and debt as if everything is back to normal. We have to recognize that this inner as well as outer chaos is not something to be feared but rather something to befriend and be informed by. Chaos does bring with it a message and direction that will lead to a different way of being within and without. I find that at this time we need to have the patience, courage and wisdom to leave open the space and live with the unknown before the new reveals itself. We usually get one piece of information at a time when we are moving to a more authentic space. For example we might get that we need to change our job, home or relationship but no other information. Generally, we need to act on that one piece until the next piece is revealed. This is not some cruel joke or test by our psyche but rather the only way something new can be revealed. Otherwise we will be back where we were internally but with new surroundings. This is difficult for our egos since our tendency is to want to fill it with the old as soon as some neurotic behavior gets loose from its mooring and we feel uncomfortable in the newness or unknown. It takes courage and constant vigilance to live empty until the new reveals itself unto us, one piece at a time.

Let me explain what this can look like with a pedestrian example in my own life. Last week I was holding a meditation gathering at a temple where I have been holding it for about a decade now. A mass email was sent out several days prior for the Sunday evening event. I usually tend to get there an hour before to prepare the space and it was at this time that I realized I could not find the key to the place. The person whose space it is was traveling in India and I was not sure if he was back yet. Several unanswered phone call later I was still without a response or the key. In that moment, I had to surrender to the two pieces of information that I had: there was a gathering to be held with no way of reaching every one in time to tell them of the predicament and that there was no way to access the space. As I checked in, I got that I just need to go and sit by the door of the temple. I have learned not to limit the possibilities so I just sat in front of the door of the space and informed people as they were gathering that there was no key. There was fifteen minutes left before the start time and one of the attendees had managed to find a space for the group that can range from twenty five to eighty people several blocks away. Not an easy task on a Sunday evening in Manhattan within a fifteen minute time limit. And another was on the verge of finding another space when I got a call from the man with the key saying that he had indeed just gotten back from India. After a rush dash to and fro, the space was opened five minutes after the designated time.

So to break it down: I get that it was time to hold a meditation gathering and send out a mass email. That is the first piece of information. Then the day of and several hours before I find I have no key. That is the second piece of information and the place where I have to surrender into helplessness and work on not getting anxious about it since after all, I am helpless. I check in again and get that I need to show up at the temple’s door, but I have no solution or expectation. That is the third piece of information. Then the situation resolves itself. It could have just as well been that every one had to go home, then that would have been what was needed by the group psyche. The tricky part is to get the ego’s desire of what resolution needs to look like out of the way.

The important thing here is not to limit the outcome; not to see a worst or best case scenario. We do all we can with the information at hand, making room for our helplessness while keeping an eye out for underlying anxiety. Order, disorder, chaos which then leads to a new order. Our souls are beckoning. How are you answering?

How are you tending to your Self these days?

In these accelerated times, it seems that our souls are not putting up with our personalities and their constant shenanigans.
Until recently we would get messages by first gently being nudged followed by ever increasing rumblings whenever we were out of alignment. What I am seeing now is the spiritual SWAT team breaking our door down at the most slight transgression. Behaviors and acts that reveal our betrayal of ourselves are magnified so that we can tend to our wounds. No more hiding the stench of self forgetfulness under conducts that brought us kudos in the past, be they material or spiritual. If we care take as a way of not dealing with our self, then we are burning out and being forced to self care. If we are narcissists and manipulate others to take care of us, we are being handed our walking papers and being faced with addressing our own needs.

The gift of this time is that there is an abundance of intelligent energy surrounding us that is there to support our growth and
remembrance. It is crucial to ground one’s self at least once a day, even if it is for five minutes so as not to be swimming in the mass hysteria and fear served daily in the group consciousness. The fear and anxiety is the ego’s perfect trick to keep the status quo by putting some perfume on the festering wound instead of tending to it. There is a feast awaiting us any and every moment that we care to dip ourselves into the silence of self grounding. It is out of this well that we can best serve ourselves, our fellow travelers and the planet at large in this cross road of deep transition.

How are you tending to your Self these days?

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Nothing you do will change you, for you need no change. You may change your mind or your body, but it is always something external to you that has changed, not yourself. Why bother at all to change? Realize once for all that neither your body nor your mind, nor even your consciousness is yourself and stand alone in your true nature beyond consciousness and unconsciousness. No effort can take you there, only the clarity of understanding. Trace your misunderstandings and abandon them, that is all. There is nothing to seek and find, for there is nothing lost. Relax and watch the “I am”. Reality is just behind it. Keep quiet, keep silent; it will emerge, or, rather, it will take you in.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj was born in a village south of Mumbai (Bombay) in 1897 on Hanuman’s birthday. In honor of this Hindu monkey deity of strength and power, he was given the name of Maruti. His father was a servant whom with time purchased some land and became a farmer. Maruti lived and worked on this land until 1915 when upon the death of his father he followed his oldest brother to Mumbai to help support his siblings and mother. His early years there started as an office clerk but soon gave way to his opening of a tobacco shop. This enterprise soon became prosperous and led to him operating six such shops. In 1924 he married Sumatibai with whom he fathered three daughters and a son.

He was a deeply religious man and kept in the company of fellow truth seekers. One such man was a friend named Yashwantrao Bagkar who introduced him at age 34 to Sri Siddharameshwar Maharaj (1888-1936). This realized master, a contemporary of Sri Ramana Maharshi and a disciple of Bhausaheb Maharaj, was an adherent of the Advaitic (non-duality) school. His specific teaching for realization of Reality was Vihangam Marg, or the bird’s way. The basic premise of this path is that ignorance of one’s true nature comes from the constant repetition of the false through out life. This hypnosis can be reversed by constant practice of contemplation of truth as heard from the master. This constant mulling over, just like a bird flies from one branch to another, is a fast and short way of remembrance.

Maruti took Sri Siddharameshwar as his teacher and was given a mantra and some teachings. Despite the passing of his teacher soon after their meeting, Maruti devoted himself to serious and deep practice. He abandoned his family and business for a time after the death of his teacher and started wandering the Himalayas as a sadhu. He had a chance encounter with a fellow aspirant who talked him into the importance of going back to his life and practicing within that structure as opposed to being a wandering seeker. He took this to heart and returned to Mumbai to find none but one of his tobacco shops still thriving. This he found sufficient for his meager needs and built a tiny room on top of his apartment in the slums of Mumbai where he would spend all his spare time in contemplation.

In a short span of three years from the time of meeting his teacher he attained Realization at age 37. Of this time he said: “My guru told me you are not what you take yourself to be. Find out what you are. Watch the sense “I Am”. Find your real self. I obeyed him because I trusted him. I did as he told me. All my spare time I would spend looking at myself in silence and what a difference it made. It took me only three years to realize my true nature. My guru died soon after I met him but it made no difference.

Maruti took on the name Nisargadatta Maharaj at this time which translates into the one who dwells in the natural state beyond manifestation. At this time he started satsangs and dispensing spiritual instructions from his tenement apartment. With the publication in English of his book “I Am That” he became know to a generation of international visitors who streamed into his presence seeking enlightenment. Translated from Marathi tape recordings by Maurice Frydman, a devotee of Ramana Maharshi, “I Am That” is a gold mine of pointers for the spiritual aspirant, a beacon of remembrance in a tomb of worldly forgetfulness. Every page contains a nugget of truth that shakes one’s anesthetized sense of Self awake from its worldly slumber. Transcribed in a question and answer format, all seeker’s questions from the worldly to the esoteric are squarely answered.

Nisargadatta’s teachings are classic Advaita Vedanta since he constantly emphasizes that there is nothing to seek, that we already are the Self. “You can not find what you have not lost” and“you are not a person” summarize this viewpoint. It is a skewed attention that has us feeling disconnected from reality: “we miss the real by lack of attention and create the unreal by excess of imagination”. He does not quote scripture nor holy books. His literacy was modest at best and he never read the Vedas. And yet the explosive force, simplicity and clarity of his words are astounding.

He taught that we need to “cease being fascinated by the content of your consciousness” and that “whatever pleases you, holds you back”. On the state of the world in troubled times he commented: “callous selfishness is the root of evil” and “it is selfishness, due to self- identification with the body, that is the main problem and the cause of all other problems”. He taught that “the world is the abode of desires and fears; you can not find peace in it”. “For peace you must go beyond the world”. The solution to this problem is to be “passionately dispassionate” since “it is through desire that you have created the world with its pains and pleasures”.

This is to be done by looking at our mind dispassionately in order to calm it. “When the mind is quiet, you can go beyond it. Do not keep it busy all the time. Stop it - and just be. A quiet mind is all you need. All else will happen rightly, once your mind is quiet”.

It is from this place of quiet mind that one can grasp the “I Am”, the awareness beyond the mind and its limitations, the field in which all things happen. He states that “beyond the real experience is not the mind, but the Self, the light in which everything appears… the awareness in which everything happens”.

This “I Am” which is the state prior to and contains the body and mind is not the final state. The Absolute or pure Awareness and its attainment is the final state which transcends the “I Am” state. This indescribable “state” is the place from which the great masters like Nisargadatta Maharaj reach into the phenomenal dream world and nudge us awake.

On a final note let us turn our attention to an observation that he had for us westerners. “It is very often so with Americans and Europeans. After a stretch of sadhana they become teachers of Yoga, marry, write books - anything except keeping quiet and turning their energies within, to find the source of the inexhaustible power and learn the art of keeping it under control”.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj abandoned the physical body in 1981 at age 84.

Sri Ramana Maharshi

Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950) has been described as “the whitest spot in a white space” by Carl Jung and “the greatest sage of the twentieth century” by Ken Wilber. The Dalai Lama has said of him that “his spiritual greatness is guiding millions of people”. These descriptions are about a being whose identity as a boy named Venkataraman was permanently shattered when at age 16 he was overcome by and faced an immense fear of death. His full surrender into this experience brought on his remembrance of his true nature, beyond the illusion of the solidity of mind and its projected ego. This spontaneous enlightenment, rare by any standard, was even more so considering the age and lack of any prior spiritual practice of this teenage sage.

This awakening led to his abandonment of family and material possessions in Madurai within several months and pilgrimage to the holy mountain of Arunachala. Located in southern India and rising from the foothill town of Trivulanamai, this mountain is considered as the manifestation of Lord Shiva in the hindu tradition. His taking up residence here was due to the fact that from youth he had always associated the name Arunachala with the divine without ever knowing that it was an actual place. Upon the realization of its reality; a place which he credited with the powers that led to his Self realization; he took up residence there permanently until the demise of his physical body.

The name Bhagavan (Lord) Sri (Honorable) Ramana (shortened version of his birth name) Maharshi (great seer) was given to him by the great ascetic Vasishta Ganapathi Muni during his early years in Arunachala. During these years his life was conducted in total silence and absorption in the Absolute and hence a severe neglect of the physical body. This was followed by a period of silent teaching mostly through the emanation of spiritual energy and finally through verbal communication in a humble ashram that was built for him by his devotees. The ashram Sri Ramanasramam has been expanded and still exists today where tens of thousands of people from the world make the pilgrimage annually to benefit from the ever present energy as any attendee can attest.

Sri Ramana reiterated through out his teachings that being open to and immersed in his silent presence and its stilling effects on the mind was the most direct path to Awakening and that verbal instruction was for those who could not access that space. His Advaitic (non-dualistic) teaching can be summed up as the fact that consciousness or pure Being is all that exists, all else is non existent. And that Awakening involves only needing to remember this non-personal, ever present awareness he named the Self (as opposed to the ego or personal self) not discovering or attaining some new experience. It is the ego which is a false projection of the mind which obstructs the direct experience of this true nature. It is not a matter of seeking or acquiring something new but remembering the true nature of things. He likened the experience to looking all over for a misplaced piece of jewelry until realizing that it has been around our neck all along. We are that we seek and that “the Absolute Consciousness alone is our real nature”.

His technique in helping seekers remember they already are this Supreme Self or Atman was Vicahra (Self-Inquiry). This process involves seeking the source of the ego as the “I-thought” through asking the question “Who am I?”. He stated that “one destroys the ego by seeking its identity” and since “the ego has no real existence, it will automatically vanish, and Reality will shine by itself in all its glory”. This he called the “direct method”. It is interesting to note that he differentiated between dhyana (meditation) and vicahra by stating that the latter destroys the ego by revealing its lack of reality while the first, although initially useful, can only succeed in quieting the mind temporarily. The mind will always erupt and assert the ego as real.

Sri Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi was the personal incarnation of what we westerners consider a guru. A humble, kind and just man with no possessions but a loin cloth, a metal water jug and a walking stick. He revealed his true grasp of the inherent oneness of all phenomena by his even handed treatment of all sentient beings whether humans of all social ranks, animals or plants. His concern for the welfare of animals and plants around him are specially moving. He worked hand in hand with devotees in attending to the tens of thousands of seekers who poured in over the years for darshan, never asking nor accepting preferential treatment. He did not even have a separate living quarters. For most of his life he resided in the same hall where he received visitors and conducted his teaching.

He was diagnosed with malignant cancer in his arm one year prior to his death. He constantly reminded the devotees that if they had listened to his teachings there was no need for grieving. That nothing is lost by death except for the body, one was not born and hence can not die. When begged to stay alive and not leave this realm, he would reply:
“Where could I go? I am here”. Upon his death in the eve of April 14, 1950, an enormous star we seen by all present slowly passing over the peak of Arunachala.