Yoga and the book I just finished reading

  Blessing stones at Anni and Tim's wedding.  Big Sur, California.  June 2005

I finished reading Eat. Pray. Love. by Elizabeth Gilbert.  I absolutely loved this book and have so much of it underlined, that it would be crazy to try to even share 1/4 of it with you.  But given that I am back in Yoga, I wanted to share some of what really stood out in this book with you.

"The Yogis, however, say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity.  We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality.  We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature.  We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character.  We don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace.  That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine.  Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus:  "You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not."

"Yoga is the effort to experience one's divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever.  Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from your endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise.  Only from that point of even-mindedness will the true nature of the world (and yourself) be revealed to you.  True Yogis, from their search of equipoise, see all this world as an equal manifestation of God's creative energy - men, women, children, turnips, bedbugs, coral: its all God in disguise.  But the Yogis believe a human life is a very special opportunity, because only in a human form and only with a human mind can God realization ever occur.  The turnips, the bedbugs, the coral - they never get a chance to find out who they really are.  But we do have that chance."

God dwells within you as you. AS you. 

If there is one holy truth of this Yoga, that line encapsulates it.  God dwells within you as you Yourself, exactly the way you are.  God isn't interested in watching you enact some performance of personality in order to comply with some crackpot notion you have about how a spiritual person looks or behaves.  We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, dramatic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality.  This is a classic example of what they call in the East "wrong - thinking".  Swamiji used to say that every day renunciants find something new to renounce, but it is usually depression, not peace, that they attain.  Constantly he was teaching that austerity and renunciation, - just for their own sake - are not what you need.  To know God, you need only to renounce one thing - your sense of division from God.  Otherwise, just stay as you were made, within your natural character."

"I keep remembering one of my Guru's teachings about happiness.  She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough.  But that's not how happiness works.  Happiness is the consequence of personal effort.  You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it.  You have to participates relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings.  And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.  If you don't, you will leak away your innate contentment.  It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.

I loved this book!  The authors journey back to herSelf was so relatable, and juicy to read!  I highly recommend it, and have a link to it on my right side bar.  Happy reading!