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Teaching of the Month: Contentment – Making Peace with the Present

by Swami Ramananda

Contentment is a deceptively simple concept that offers tremendous benefit if we fully embrace its practice.

Sensory pleasures give rise to countless desires, none of which bring lasting satisfaction. Instead, they all reinforce the prevailing messages of our culture telling us that something pleasurable is a means to happiness.  Thus, the present moment is continually warped by anticipation over the next thing to do or get, and is never enough as it is.

Contentment, referred to as Santosha in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, is not so easy to master because the habit of wanting and achieving is so deeply ingrained in us.  It does not mean that we give up having goals and striving for them, or give up enjoying sensory experiences.

Contentment does mean that we are at peace with what we have now and with ourselves as we are, even as we strive to learn and grow.  It does mean that we can enjoy the process of pursuing our goals, giving ourselves fully to them, without fear of failure.

I really like this idea but I struggle to practice it when my to-do list gets too big for my comfort, or when some challenging issue remains unresolved.  At such times, I can’t seem to help feeling that I’ll be happier after I finish a project or after this issue is resolved.  I find myself pushing my limits, working longer hours, ignoring my resolves for getting exercise and enough sleep, and or doing everything with a simmering stew of anxiety on the back-burner of my mind.

It has really helped me to make a conscious effort to practice contentment.  One way is to start my day, after my morning meditation, affirming that my essential nature is joy, and this joy is independent of anything that happens.  It feels really good to assert this truth and really try to feel it, reminding my mind that nothing can make me happy or sad.

I encourage everyone to use this month to experiment with contentment by pausing and reflecting, “Can I be at peace with this moment as it is?”  “Do I really have to have ____________ before I can be happy?”

This will certainly be challenging in some situations, but when we do succeed to feel for ourselves moments of a natural inner contentment, we’ll be inspired to keep practicing.  The more we learn to stay in touch with this innate peace, the more our lives will become a joyful balancing act, riding the waves of change.

You can join Swami Ramananda, Diana Meltsner and Eric Gustafson Cultivating Compassion and Forgiveness, 7-day Meditation & Raja Yoga, ONLINE, Mon.- Sun., October 14-20, 7:15 am – 8:00 am PDT

Or Deepen your in your own practice and guide your students to go deeper in theirs by joining Swami Ramananda, Diana Meltsner, and guest teacher Rich Panico M.D., for Meditation Teacher Training – ONLINE, NOV 14–DEC 19, 2024 & JAN 7–FEB 4, 2025

Swami Ramananda C-IAYT, E-RYT 500, is the Executive Director of the Integral Yoga Institute in San Francisco and a greatly respected senior teacher in the Integral Yoga tradition, who has been practicing Yoga for over 45 years. Ramananda offers practical methods of integrating the timeless teachings and practices of Yoga into daily life, and transforming the painful aspects of human experience into steps toward realizing one’s full potential.

He leads all levels of Yoga teacher trainings and programs around the globe. Ramananda co-developed the Stress Management Teacher Training program and has trained many teachers to bring Yoga into corporate, hospital and medical settings. He a founding board member of Yoga Alliance and is a co-founder of The Spiritual Action Initiative which brings together individuals committed to working for social justice for all beings and for the care and healing of our natural world. His warmth, wisdom and sense of humor have endeared him to many.

2024-10-02T09:15:12-07:00October 1st, 2024|Tags: , , , |

Sankalpa : Intention

“Wise to resolve, and patient to perform.” Homer

“Your success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.” –Helen Keller

“Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.” –Matthew Arnold

“No matter what situation we find ourselves in, we can always set our compass to our highest intentions in the present moment.”
–Jack Kornfield
 

Sankalpa – A Deeply Held Intention Aligned with One’s True Purpose

“Rod Stryker, founder of ParaYoga, explains that the chief architect of life is the mind. To create the life we are meant to live, we must draw the mind again and again to our dharma, our deepest intentions, and the qualities of the Divine within.

A sankalpa is a statement that does this for us. Stryker explains that kalpa means vow, or “the rule to be followed above all other rules.” San, he says, refers to a connection with the highest truth. Sankalpa, then, is a vow and commitment we make to support our highest truth. “By definition, a sankalpa should honor the deeper meaning of our life. A sankalpa speaks to the larger arc of our lives, our dharma—our overriding purpose for being here.” The sankalpa becomes a statement you can call upon to remind you of your true nature and guide your choices.”

Excerpted from an article “How to Create a Sankalpa”  by Kelly McGonigal

2024-09-16T18:04:48-07:00September 16th, 2024|

Living with Intention

by Swami Ramananda

We’ve all probably experienced times when we felt bounced around by too many stressors and we struggled just to keep our balance.  In stressful times, we may be happy just to make it through the day, have something nice to eat and a little entertainment to relax with.  But the predominant messages of our culture can influence us to see this as a way of life – one in which making a living and having some pleasurable experiences constitute success and happiness.

If we don’t have some clear sense of what we really want to do with this life, it’s easy enough to fill our time with all the sense-stimulating experiences our modern world offers.  This is why we chose to practice living with intention :  to clarify the overall purpose we hold for this lifetime and the way we want to carry ourselves through each day.

We may have many goals during our lives like earning a degree or buying property, but naming an overall intention influences both the formation of our goals and how we pursue them. This intention also becomes a useful tool for evaluating the many smaller choices we must make on a daily basis.

I like to ask myself the question, “Is the way I am using my time and energy in harmony with what I really value?” The clearer I become about what is most important to me, the easier it is to say no to the many activities that may be interesting but not meaningful.

I recommend reflecting on deep questions like these, jotting down ideas about what you most want for this life, and forming a simple statement that rings true for you.  Then keep that written statement where you’ll see it regularly to remember the big picture along with the daily duties.

In addition to an overall purpose, we can benefit from adopting an intention to practice some teaching for a period of time.  While I may hold an intention to awaken fully to the Light within, I can also practice cultivating compassion, generosity, contentment or non-violent communication, intentions that support my overall vision.

Having such an intention in our hearts breathes spiritual life into the day.  Remembering again and again a higher purpose frees us from being captive to the consumer-oriented messages of our culture.  I pray that by practicing this way, we all grow more aware of the source of deep peace and love that is ever-present within.

You can join  Swami Ramananda for these upcoming meditation programs:

Swami Ramananda C-IAYT, E-RYT 500, is the Executive Director of the Integral Yoga Institute in San Francisco and a greatly respected senior teacher in the Integral Yoga tradition, who has been practicing Yoga for over 45 years. Ramananda offers practical methods of integrating the timeless teachings and practices of Yoga into daily life, and transforming the painful aspects of human experience into steps toward realizing one’s full potential.

He leads all levels of Yoga teacher trainings and programs around the globe. Ramananda co-developed the Stress Management Teacher Training program and has trained many teachers to bring Yoga into corporate, hospital and medical settings. He a founding board member of Yoga Alliance and is a co-founder of The Spiritual Action Initiative which brings together individuals committed to working for social justice for all beings and for the care and healing of our natural world. His warmth, wisdom and sense of humor have endeared him to many.

2024-09-09T16:42:08-07:00September 9th, 2024|

Humility

by Prajna Lorin Piper

A few years ago, I read an article titled ‘Humilty, The Virtue No One Wants.’ It was a good title, I thought, because humility is maybe just a little too close to the word humiliation for comfort, a bit like shame, the sort of thing we think we’d like to get away from. I was looking for teachings on humility because at the time, I was reading a lot of St. Teresa de Avila and she considered humility, along with love, the quality most essential for spiritual growth. 
 
St. Teresa is difficult to read, and part of that is because she spends pages and pages, over and over again, professing her humility, apologizing for being such a stupid woman, so much less than her superiors. From 21st century standards, this is so over the top that I thought it might have been her way of surviving the 16th century Spanish inquisition and the male dominated church of that time. And that could be partially true. But I also could see that she was absolutely sincere – humility was the ground of her practice. At the same time she was very sure of her relation to god, and to her journey; she was confident.
The Webster dictionary defines humility as freedom from pride or arrogance. There’s certainly nothing shameful there. We can see this kind of true humility kick in when we finally give up any pretense of running the show. Humility includes the ability to be honest with ourselves about the inconvenient, painful fact that anything can happen at any time.  Maybe we think that, if we were really doing our practice right, nothing unpleasant or unwholesome would ever pop up or bother us, but that’s not the case. The pleasant, the unpleasant and the neutral can all show up, and if we let them they’ll also roll away. We see that when we sit down to meditate.
Another thing that brings up humility is the fact that the more present we become for our lives, the more willing we are to look at what arises, the more impurity  we’re going to see. Spiritual practice is a purification process that calls for a lot of humilty. The more we purify, the bigger and closer to the bone the impurities will seem. We become more sensitive to them and it can pain us more to see them. So in this process it’s important to not get lost in identifying with our impurities, our thoughts, our fears, our ‘spiritual progress.’ Those things are not who we really are – I say that to myself sometimes, ‘not who I really am’ – they’re just thoughts or feelings, ideas or constructs or moods or sensations.
There’s a teaching story about two little flies that lived in the barn with the farm animals, that were the best of friends, that flew around together every day. One morning one of the flies woke up and couldn’t find his friend. He looked all over the barn, high and low, and finally he gave up. But when the oxen came in from the fields that evening,  there was his friend, riding on one of the horns of an ox. “Where have you been all day?” the one little fly asked, and his friend puffed up his chest and said, importantly,  “We’ve been plowing.’ And the teaching is that we all think it’s us doing things, we’re all so busy and full of our importance, but really, we’re just riding on the horns of the great beast. Life carries us until it puts us down.
 Understanding this brings us the kind of humility that Saint Theresa had, the kind of humility that supports confidence in our practice.
When this happens we can stop referring to the constructed idea of ourselves and the personal gain or loss of that construction and start listening to the awareness that’s inside us that is unstoppable, unlimitable. We can align with that and learn to listen to it, in daily life and in meditation. And of course, a big part of the training ground for that is meditation.
Prajna lives and practices at Integral Yoga Institute San Francisco.
2024-08-19T19:41:40-07:00August 19th, 2024|
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