Texas school shooting: A Bhagavad-gita perspective - Chaitanya Charan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pysdrdzUImI
Struck with Wonder and Gratitude!
All the best,
Ultimate Life Hacks from the Bhagavad Gita
All the best,Deep Listening
~by Rukmini Walker
click here to listen to the audio version of this blog spoken by Rukmini
[audio m4a="http://www.urbandevi.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/9711-Skyhill-Way-4.m4a"][/audio][perfectpullquote align="full" cite="" link="" color="" class="" size=""] Listen twice. Listen to what’s been said. Then listen again to what has not been said. -- Sacinandana Swami [/perfectpullquote]In the Springtime, it seems as though all life has come alive again, after the long sleep of Winter. The birds are chirping, and the fragrance of the awakening earth is everywhere. “I am the original fragrance of the earth…”, (Lord Krsna says in Bhagavad Gita 7.9)Here in the Washington DC area, new colors appear each day in Spring, as yellow forsythia, white flowering pears and cherry trees of different hues of pink and red once again explode in their annual cycle of beauty. Again, in Bhagavad Gita, Krsna says “…of seasons I am the flower-bearing Spring.” (Bhagavad Gita 10.35) His presence can be seen in the best of all things, in the best of all seasons.In his translation of the love poems of Mirabai, the scholar Andrew Schelling observes that the cry of the heart, “Where is my beloved?” is the wildest, most innate question of every living being.The birds, the animals, we humans- we look for food each day, we look for shelter, we fear, but ultimately, we look for love. It’s said that we will hear Krsna in His holy name before we see Him. In His name, in the words of those who know and love Him, and in the dictation our hearts, guiding us to take each next step toward Him. There are three kinds of deep listening- listening to our Source, listening to sadhus, and listening to our own inner selves, our own inner voice.I am not very adept at listening. But I am trying to enter into a practice of deep listening. Trying to listen deeply to others in my life, to my own inner voice, and to Krsna in His holy name. Can I become present to each syllable of Krsna’s holy name? That, “I welcome You. I am here to receive You. I chant Your name for Your pleasure.”What are the greatest gifts we can give a beloved person? Our attention, our affection, our appreciation, our affirmation, and our allowing them to be fully present in their own true selves.Deep listening is a rumbling of thunder, a cry of the heart, “Where is my beloved?”All the best,Rukmini Walker
Journeying Beyond the Festival
an interview with Rukmini devi dasi
This year, ISKCON Toronto turned its biggest festival of the year in to a virtual one -- Festival of India. Celebrations took place over twelve days. Rukmini Walker gave the last spiritual seminar of the festival on the last day called, Journeying Beyond the Festival. She shared reflections about the mood of Ratha Yatra and the importance of "pulling the Lord back to Vrindavan by the ropes of our love."
To watch this inspiring seminar, please click here or on the image below:
Lecture: The Lord's Descent in this World
Please find below a lecture I recently gave on The Lord's descent in this world, drawing from the Srimad Bhagavatam (SB 2.7.11). This lecture was given at the ISKCON Punjabi Bagh Temple in New Delhi, India on February 6, 2020.
Please click here to listen to the lecture
All the best,
Rukmini Walker
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dU7bPz0PGw&feature=youtu.be[/embed]
What is Humility?
~Presented by Rukmini Walker
This is a part of a series of lectures I gave on the six values of the Bhagavad Gita from the Bhakti perspective at the Sivananda Yoga Ashram in the Bahamas this November. In the talk we explore the context of the Bhagavad Gita and Krishna as the source and foundation of everything.Please click below to listen to the talk.[audio mp3="http://www.urbandevi.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/What-is-Humility__cut.mp3"][/audio]
- Humility is to come down where we ought to be.
- With an investment in humility we will reap joy.
- Humility is the avenue to the true freedom of the human spirit and can transform weakness into strength.
- Humility is not thinking less of myself, but thinking of myself less and thinking of others more.
Meeting Our Emotions
by: Rambhoru Dasi
Sometimes, in the interests of spiritual development, practitioners avoid, suppress, or disconnect from their feelings viewing them as taboo. They may even be self-critical or judgmental of themselves or others for having “negative” emotions. The trouble with these attitudes is that they prevent us from perceiving the valuable information our emotions carry with them.
Our emotions help us know whether we can trust our environment or other people. They help us discern our personal nature, inclinations and preferences. They can rouse us into action, inspire us to pause to reflect or get us to notice a potential problem and resolve it before it manifests.
Emotional cognizance or awareness means to be able to identify what we are feeling in any given moment. For example, when we start a sentence with “I feel….” and there’s no feeling word in the sentence, pause and become curious. What is the feeling word that captures the essence of your experience? Then ask, “What does my feeling mean? Is it inviting me to change my behavior or attitude in some way?”
One of the qualities of the Supreme Lord is that He is All-cognizant. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word “cognizance” as “knowledge, awareness or noticing”.
Srila Prabhupada explains, “We are also cognizant (aware), and God is also cognizant (aware)... He is also a person. I am also a person.” (purport, Bhagavad-gita, 3.17). As individual persons we each have our unique natures and preferences.
Being truly aware of ourselves requires us to be able to grasp the information our emotions bring and to skillfully respond to that information in ways that transform our attitude and behavior to align with our essential spiritual nature; sat (eternal), chit (knowledge or awareness) and ananda (bliss or joy). When we keep in view our goal of loving the Lord unconditionally we can utilize the information provided by our emotions to guide our transformation.
Self-Realization literally means the “fulfillment of oneself by the possibilities of one’s character or personality” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). To that end, “The mind should be fixed in self. We are self, and Kṛṣṇa is also Self.” (Bhagavad-gita 6.25-29 purport). The closer we align with our essential spiritual nature, the more we will experience ourselves as whole and undivided.
That’s called integrity!
Lecture: Srimad Bhagavatam (SB 9.16.25-28) ~ Sri Dham Mayapur, India
Please find below a lecture I gave on the Srimad Bhagavatam (SB 9.16.25-28) in the Sri Dham Mayapur in India this past week. Please click here to view the lecture or on the arrow in the picture below.
All the best, Rukmini Walker
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uFg9ZC1oG0[/embed]
Finding Our Souls in a Sea of Identities
Finding Our Souls in a Sea of Identities
Krishna Kanta Dasi
In the Bhakti paradigm, at our deepest level, we are each individual units of consciousness (atmans) trying on different identities, lifetime after lifetime. The minute we are born, we are given specific identities involving race, nationality, gender and family. As we age, individuate from our parents, and cultivate our own set of beliefs, we begin to shed old identity-constructs, and/or add on to them. This sense of self, or ahamkara, changes and becomes more sophisticated as we develop.In Sanskrit ahamkara means “I am acting” according to so many temporary roles. Rich and colorful factors related to our upbringings, biology, environments and cultures all come into play when shaping the individual roles we play, the persons we see ourselves as. Because we each “contain multitudes”—as poet Walt Whitman once put it—it is always fascinating to hear others describe themselves.“Who are you?” is a loaded question indeed, sometimes requiring a complex reply! After all, we are so many things to so many people. For example, in this world I am a daughter, sister, mother, wife and neighbor. I am also a student, teacher, doll-maker, vegan, homeowner, naturalist and an artist. I am also multi-ethnic, bilingual, and a resident of U.S.A. I can continue defining myself ad nauseam—as most of us can—for we wear our identities in layers. Some layers are worn very deliberately, while others are a product of our circumstances and conditioning. Some run shallow, like waves, and others seems as deep as the sea. Eventually, as we develop our sense-of-self, parts of our identity will emerge that we may feel very committed to—perhaps like being a vegan—and others that we may be more flexible about—like our specific beliefs about the afterlife.[perfectpullquote align="full" cite="" link="" color="" class="" size=""]Those who have embarked upon a spiritual journey are often characterized as feeling unsatisfied with superficial identity constructs.[/perfectpullquote]We may feel that none of the ways in which we present ourselves on the outside, match the person we feel ourselves to be on the inside. Naturally, we are drawn to exploring new definitions for ourselves. Such identity explorations may stretch even beyond culture and religion, all the way into race, gender and species. Some individuals even like to think of themselves as being from other planets! This is a perfectly natural phenomenon experienced by embodied atmans all around the world and throughout time.We are all searching for an unshakable identity that does not depend on fluctuating externals. If everything we identify with in this world were taken from us—our family, our career, our community, etc—would we feel as if we have also lost our selves?
This is what happened to Arjuna at the start of the Bhagavad Gita. Everything he previously identified himself with—his relatives, his warrior status, the kingdom—began to crumble before him. He then felt completely lost. Many of us can relate to the experience of an existential crisis. Although our core self, or atman, remains in tact, we nevertheless feel lost due to our shaky connection with it, and our human habit to revolve our sense-of-self around fleeting aspects of existence.From the Bhakti perspective, we began collecting impermanent identities before we were even born! Our souls have been cycling around in the circle of samsara for ions, reincarnating into different races, nationalities, genders and species. Our consciousness is like a container that holds all of these combined experiences, influencing the ways in which we define ourselves today. While it is easy to make intellectual assertions like “I am atman. I am a spark of God’s splendor”, behaving in a manner that reflects this ancient truth can take lifetimes of practice.[perfectpullquote align="full" cite="" link="" color="" class="" size=""]Bhakti Yoga is the practice through which we cultivate a sturdy connection with our core self, our atman. The atman is made up of sat (eternal being), chit (pure awareness) and ananda (deepest joy): the same inextinguishable ingredients that make up Divinity only in smaller quantities.[/perfectpullquote]Our experience of this core self increases as our connection with the Supreme Divine, Krishna, also increases. The deeper we enter into our relationship with Krishna, the more we begin to reciprocate the love he has for us. We practice doing this here, in this world, within the many roles we play in our daily lives. Denying these roles in the name of identifying only as sat-chit-ananda, ultimately makes us insensitive to the world we are—undeniably—still a part of.All the ways in which we define ourselves in this world—as temporary as they may be—have the potential to enter into our practice of Bhakti, and act as signposts to our deepest self. In Bhakti Yoga, we do not reject the world around us, prematurely renouncing it and the ways in which we define ourselves within it. Instead—as Krishna suggested to Arjuna—we give ourselves wholeheartedly to those external roles, while internally focused on the ways in which they will help illuminate our permanent role, our inextinguishable identity: our eternal role as beloveds of Krishna, devoted to reciprocating his divine love for us.When we focus on the love God has for us, and the love he would like to see flowing between us—while simultaneously honoring the fleeting roles given to us in our lives—we are cultivating a balanced Bhakti Yoga practice: one that is in harmony with life around us.As Krishna cautioned Arjuna, early in the Gita: “What will repression accomplish?” Hastily denying our own humanity, will not jumpstart our connection with Divinity.
In fact, it may very well do just the opposite. The only way to liberate ourselves from the human experience is to go through it, while remaining conscious of God’s love for us. Arjuna did not run off the battlefield in the Gita. Instead, he participated in it, with his mind focused on Krishna, his heart set on love.Loving exchanges that awaken our love for Krishna are at the heart of the Bhakti tradition. When our sense-of-self—our identities—revolve around facilitating and participating in such loving exchanges, our practice will thrive. This does not happen in isolation. It happens when we interact with other people. One of the ways in which we can be most helpful to others while sharing Bhakti Yoga is to be sensitive to them: to really hear them, see them, and respond to whom they identify as the most. This fosters deep, heart-to-heart dialogue: the kind Krishna shared with Arjuna.Acknowledging our “multitudes”—the many roles we play as humans—in the context of a Bhakti Yoga practice, nourishes dynamic relationships with our atmans. The two are quite interrelated, perhaps more intimately than we think. It is counterproductive to see them as disconnected from each other. For this reason, when we share Bhakti with others in ways that harmonize with the situations souls find themselves in today—as Krishna did with Arjuna in the Gita—we honor their individual soul’s journey. In doing so, we honor them, thus increasing their receptivity to Bhakti. This type of sensitivity to others is critical to cultivating love in our hearts: both for our fellow humans, as well as for Divinity.