Spark 23
Gather Yourself, Be a Yogi!
We have enough within us – knowledge, skills, resources, care and love. If we gather what we have, we are yogis. If we fritter them away, we are (almost) rogis (sick)!
Yoga means a state of being united. The verbal root yuj in Sanskrit means ‘to unite, to join’. This yuj goes well with the English ‘yoke’. When we yoke our minutes and hours to the talent that we have, we spend our day wisely. When we yoke our good intentions to the energy we have, we achieve desirable goals. We thus rise when we are ‘connected within us’ and we fall when there is disconnection. Connection is yoga; disconnection is viyoga.
A lot of us, being away from yoga (the state of mind), suffer private failure, which then reflects in our public failure. Our time, in the privacy of our home, goes in conflict and contradictions; no wonder our time then with people at work also lacks clarity of purpose and steadiness of execution.
| tasmād yogi bhava, Arjuna ! |1
Therefore, Arjuna, be a Yogi!
Geetā 6.46
The advice here is not about some physical posture like the head stand! It is about inner collectedness.
In his beautiful little book, “Silence as Yoga,” Swami Paramananda writes2,
“It is not work so much that wears us out; sometimes lack of work may do it. It is not knowing how to direct ourselves; it is not knowing how to find that attitude of collectedness and poise. When we are equipped with these qualities, we always have greater power of penetration.”
How do we gather our energy? How do we collect ourselves?
The good news is that new energy is constantly supplied to us by Nature, outside and inside. No matter how tired we were the previous night, don’t we get up with a lot of fresh energy the next morning? (Maybe some of us, as we get older, need more hours of sleep and we do not get as much energy as we used to in our sunny days! Even then, the exhaustion of the previous night and the newness this morning are so different!)
Therefore it is a matter of wisely spending the ‘present’ hours of every day, which enables us to regain our ‘paradise lost’. The American poet Longfellow therefore rightly remarked3,
“Act, act in the living present, heart within and God overhead!”
On the highest plateau of Vedanta, it may be said that we are always Pure Awareness but an inexplicable error takes place leading to false identification with the body and the mind. To study, reflect upon and abide by the Self is the ultimate medicine (and the highest yoga). We then are not affected by low energy, poor self-esteem, fear or guilt.
Swami Chidananda
Solan, Himachal Pradesh
End Notes:
1 तस्माद् योगी भव, अर्जुन ! (गीता 6.46)
2 Silence as Yoga, Swami Paramananda, Sri Ramakrishna Math, Chennai, page 12.
3 A Psalm of Life by H W Longfellow, verse 6