Faith
Over the last couple of days I’ve been having conversations with a couple of good friends (you’ve already been warned ok that i write about stuff…life:) it centered around suffering..one was sharing with me how much she had suffered in her childhood and even while growing up and another was sharing about what he was going through now; challenges on many fronts..and all fronts that cannot be walked away from, cannot be ignored.
But what struck me was the beautiful human beings that they were today. So insightful, so much wisdom, so evolved. But yes, they’ve all been through stuff. What came to me was that it is the trials and the tribulations, yes sometimes by fire, that hone us, evolve us into our greatest selves. That we have to have faith and we have to stay strong in the awareness that the path is for our greatest good..that it is everything that we have been through; the mistakes (oops! thats not a politicaly correct word anymore:) or the learning curves that we had to take that have brought us to this point that we are at now; sensitive, emotionally aware, understanding, courageous, intuitive and able to flow with life with greater clarity. When we are in a dark place it is sometimes hard to fathom why things worked out the way they did; be it a difficult rela with a parent, the end of a rela, the loss of a job etc but when we look back, we realise that, in Steve Job’s famous words, the dots connect! that each experience served a greater purpose. In my own life, while growing up, yoga was never in my trajectory of life..i had no idea what it was about, i never knew anyone who practiced it, i had in essence zero exposure to it.. but here I am writing this post:) a student of life.
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
Steve Jobs
Yoga to the rescue:) yes , i have to bring it in:) One of the main reasons we practice yoga is gain a release from suffering or “dukha”. and what affords us that release as Patanjali explains in Chapter 2.26 is “viveka” or that discriminating intelligence..and that this is a process that is attained gradually.. and all the learning that we gain from our life experiences; prods us on our way, unfolding our higher selves day-by-day, experience by experience..So while we are going through stuff we cannot give up..we must not lose heart..Keep the faith in the flow of the universe.
It brings me to a quote by the illustrious Nobel-prize winning Poet Rabindranath Tagore on faith.
“Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.”
May the force be with you.
Namaste