Ayurvedic Meditations For Love and Resilience

As I did my practice this morning, I was thinking about the activity of making offerings. It’s one of the activities of bhakti yoga, and interestingly enough, it’s one of the practices that helps us to cultivate resilience, which is clearly important for all of us in these times.

So, when I say, offerings, it might conjure up many different kinds of images. Offerings of service or support, offerings of material goods (Masks, perhaps?) – The first thing that comes into my mind when I think of offerings, is a candle. If we have a seated practice that includes an altar, we often have a candle front and center. We light the candle, and enjoy the glow.

Traditionally, we don’t light the candle for ourselves, at least not our ordinary selves. We light the candle as an offering to the gods, to the ancestors, perhaps to our higher self. We’re offering the light, and hopefully our love as well. We toss a piece of our love into the astral, purifying our heart with an act of unconditionality. The warmth softens the cold hardness we’ve accumulated over the course of the day, and as we love at the altar, it prepares us to be more able to love in the face of whatever madness the next day will bring. We’ve got a chance.

So you’re saying there’s a chance!

When we study ayurveda we’re taught about the cultivation of Prana, Tejas, and Ojas. Loosely translated in English, Life, Light, and Love. Our self care and meditative practices are hopefully designed to strengthen and balance these qualities. Simply meditating or journaling on each of these qualities can be rewarding and engrossing for a lifetime. We can juxtapoz them over other ideas, to see what insights emerge. In this case, we’re overlaying the idea of offering. The idea of ‘give it to get it’. The idea of ‘Be The Change’. Be the love you want.

So I offer to you, a simple practice. Like all good simple practices, it might bring up a little resistance, so notice that. But ultimately, it should cultivate a resilient feeling. Tweak it if you want, make it your own. Think about what would help you get resilient and go there.

Ayurvedic Meditations for life, light, and love

Seated, perhaps in front of a candle, an altar, breathing evenly with a nice spine.

Contemplate:
“I offer my life to the well being of myself, my family, my community, and all beings everywhere.”
Visualize:
Lifeforce that connects us all flowing in and out of us, becoming a channel for life and health of all beings.

Contemplate:
“I offer my light to the well being of myself, my family, my community, and all beings everywhere.”
Visualize:
Brilliant Light that shines from your heart and/or head. It illuminates everything in all direction without fading. Bringing light to any dark places.

Contemplate:
“I offer my love to the well being of myself, my family, my community, and all beings everywhere.”
Visualize:
A soft and compassionate energy, like a warm hug, embracing anyone and anything that arises in your mind. Any barriers to love dissolve.

To close the practice, feel those three energies mixing gently together in your low belly, bringing yourself back into a more ordinary state, bringing our energy and aura back in, closer to our physical bodies, and honoring practical boundaries that keep us safe.

So, give that a shot, and report back. Let me know how you like it. Le me know how youre cultivating resilience in your life these days.

Smiile! – Intelligence Increase

My 25 year old copy

High on the top of my list of things I’m grateful for is my exposure to amazing teachers and teachings. There is a world of fraud out there, unhelpful teachings, ego maniacal charlatans, and simply ridiculous nonsense. I’ll consider it grace that I’ve been continued to have really high quality teachings dropped in my lap, while being guided away from the shallow and just plain wrong. I was 18 when I had Robert Anton Wilson’s ‘Prometheus Rising’ pressed into my hand. I devoured it. I read his other books. They terrified me, and offended me, and I couldn’t stop reading them. They weren’t like the 1970s yoga books I had seen, and they weren’t like my dad’s books on magic and witchcraft, which were more like anthropology meets ghost stories. Wilson’s book practical tools for changing your consciousness, taking control of your nervous system. Intelligence Increase. Who knew? And while I never got to meet Wilson, I still consider him a major influence.

One of the lessons I’ve gleaned from RAW, that I’ve really taken to heart, is his definition of Intelligence. It’s helped me to increase mine, and to value it. I’ve taught it in teacher training. I want students to think about it. I want teachers to think about it.

“Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission.” – Robert Anton Wilson

Simple. Three simple steps. Input, Process, Output. Increase your ability to do those three things, and you increase your intelligence. The same process can be applied to all kinds of things. How do we give, integrate, and receive love, for example?

For years I thought this was an obscure idea, relegated to the underground and the counter culture.

The New Book

Fast Forward 20 years, I’m doing my lifelong learning thing, working with another brilliant teacher, Doug Silsbee. He’s teaching me to coach, how to use mindfulness practices to create clarity of vision, resilience of being, and results that matter. If we’ve talked in the few years, we’ve discussed it. If we haven’t, give me a shout and we can.

Turns out that Doug has been teaching this same idea. He labels them ‘sensing, being, and acting’. I’m not sure where he picked up the ideas, I’ll have to ask him the next time we talk. He just published a book on the topic. It’s called ‘Presence Based Leadership‘. I’m really digging on it. It offers a beautiful and coherent framework for bringing self awareness to the complex lives of complex people doing complex things. The tools are simple, at at the same time very effective, including things like:

Sensing

  • Observing the system around us
  • Recognizing our identitiy
  • Attending to our experience

Being

  • Regulating the inner state
  • Decouple state from context
  • Embodying what matters

Acting

  • Scale awareness
  • Extend leadership presence
  • Tune the instrument

The teachings of his new book has already worked its way into my coaching practice. If you’re curious about working with this, please feel free to reach out to me, I’d be happy to share a sample session with you.

And please, do yourself a favor and pick up these two books.

Presence Based Leadership

Prometheus Rising

Doug Silsbee, Sitaram Das, and Rodney Allen

Pin It on Pinterest