Lilies of the Field

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  • If All is in the Mind, Why Bother with the Body?

    If All is in the Mind, Why Bother with the Body?

    If all is in the Mind, as The Kybalion points out, then why bother lifting even a single finger of the body? 

    My personal preferences tend to gravitate around creative mental activity and not so much the physical. Schedules quickly become limiting and restricting. Routine tasks are an absolute bore, and I am never short of reasonable arguments against this or that physical exercise. 

    But really, why bother? Isn’t it more efficient to jump straight to where the issues lie? To work them out in the mind, where they naturally linger?

    Only, I am not making much progress with the mind, points out Spirit, ever vigilant and present. He humors me, you know, but is also happy to point out the flaws of my arguments. 

    If you don’t want to exercise, don’t do it, Spirit says, but don’t delude yourself. You are not going anywhere, not improving or growing, and definitely not getting out of this morass of illusions. Then, to elaborate on this point, He sends me a book by way of Amazon’s “recommended-for-you” algorithms. 

    “Asana is discipline; pranayama is discipline; kumbhaka, retention of breath, is self-control. Sit in padmasana, lotus posture, for fifteen minutes. That is self-discipline. Why do you fight with the mind first? You have no power to wrestle with the mind, yet you wrestle with it, thereby creating a pattern of animosity towards yourself. There are not two minds, there is one mind trying to split itself into two. One mind wants to break the discipline and the other mind wants to maintain the discipline.”

    Hatha Yoga Pradipika

    Ouch! I have been officially reprimanded! Point taken, reminders set, and plans made. Let’s see if I can stick for at least a week to a daily yoga practice while work, family, and life obligations call for attention. And to hold myself accountable, as any good life coach would do, I will follow up on this post in a week to report how good I have been. In the meantime, please send my way all your thoughts of cheer and perseverance that you can spare! 🙂

    Comments and questions are always welcome through the contact on my Travelers Guide to Healing Contact site.

    Did you arrive here looking for my essays on Jin Shin Jyutsu or Astrology? They are on the Travelers Guide to Healing site.

    Two are better than one! Book a coaching session with me to bounce off ideas, get insights, or find unconditional support while you are making all the big changes that you always wanted to.

  • The Lion Who Was Raised by Sheep

    The Lion Who Was Raised by Sheep

    In his essay The Real Nature of Man, Swami Vivekananda tells the story of a baby lion raised by a flock of sheep. The baby grew into a big lion but bleated like sheep, ran for safety like sheep, and grazed on grass like sheep. One day a wild lion came upon the flock and was shocked to discover the sheep. He tried to approach him, but the other lion ran away. After lying in an ambush for a while, the wild lion was able to grab the sheep lion, drag him to the nearby lake, and bring his face to the water. Look, he said, you are a lion, not a sheep. Stop with this unseemly sheepish behavior and act according to your nature. A realization came upon the sheep-raised lion. He was a lion! Not a sheep! Gone was the bleating. In came the roaring.

    The story doesn’t tell us what the newly-realized lion did afterward. We are left to imagine his happily ever after, where he roams in the wilderness, dominates over all creatures, and never runs away, cowering and trembling. But is this true? Or likely?

    Let me give you the sequel of this story. The sheep lion remembered who he truly was for a while, but eventually, he wandered back home to the only family he knew, the sheep. He had lived with them for a long time, and he was attached to them. He could do it, he justified to himself. Besides, now as a lion, he could defend and protect them. But little by little, he forgot about his experience by the lake. His long-standing habits were strong. It didn’t help that the sheep did not understand his true nature and didn’t even want his help, encouraging him back to bleating, fleeing, and grass-grazing. They pointed out, and rightly so, that that was their way of life.

    Occasionally, he would remember his true self to lapse back again into oblivion and old patterns. On the days he remembered, he berated himself for his forgetfulness and considered even running away from the family in search of the wild lion. But the habits were too old, the attachment to his old life – too strong. Many days, he called himself all sorts of foolish names for staying and forgetting.

    Foolish lion! Doesn’t you know that growth is helical – it goes up and down, up and down? You don’t recover in a snap from rounds and rounds of sheepish behavior. And you certainly do not need to run away from your family! Just keep working on yourself, and the time of remembrance between lapses will grow longer and longer, while the time of oblivion will last less and less. That is true growth!

    The day will come when you will be in your new awareness without falling back into the old life. And it will happen right where you are, not somewhere else, in the wild forests of the Himalayas. Be patient with yourself!

    Comments and questions are always welcome through the contact on my Travelers Guide to Healing Contact site.

    Did you arrive here looking for my essays on Jin Shin Jyutsu or Astrology? They are on the Travelers Guide to Healing site.

    Did you know you can book a coaching session with me? Whether you know what you want but are afraid to reach out for it or are unsure of what to do, I can help.

  • Anger, Mind, and Body

    Anger, Mind, and Body

    As a beginning student of Jin Shin Jyutsu, I heard a lot about holding our fingers. The ring finger helped with sadness, the thumb – with worry, and the index – with fear. The hardest for me was to accept that holding my middle finger would help me with anger. Apart from the suspicious simplicity of that advice, I had more reasons to resist it.

    When I felt angry, I didn’t want to stop being angry

    “What do you mean, hold your finger and calm down?” I’d ask helpful well-wishers. “It isn’t fair, it isn’t right, and it most certainly makes no sense,” I frequently railed against the offending issue. The thing about anger is that once it flares up, we feel justified to hold on to it. It is almost as if it were a badge of honor. Or, the best motivation to get on with our work – save the planet, feed the hungry, defend the downtrodden.

    It also didn’t help that I knew the cause of our anger is always in the mind. And using the body to affect the mind is like putting the cart in front of the horse. It was simply the wrong direction in which the Creation flows. After all, wasn’t our mind the most powerful tool we had? And wasn’t it all about the mind as the esoteric traditions all claim? Shouldn’t I focus on healing my mind first and then let the body follow?

    Exercise and breathing do not resolve anger but mitigate its effects

    I finally understood what all those techniques were aiming to do. They were not there to force changes in the mind. They were there to mitigate the effects on our bodies while the anger raged. Somewhere sometime in the past, a wise and compassionate soul must have given us the means to alleviate our self-inflicted suffering.

    Indeed, I can easily see the merit of this new view. Whenever I felt intense anger before, the churning in my stomach prevented me from eating any food. Now, I hold my middle finger and the body feels light and detached from the turmoil in the mind. In the words of Sadhguru, I am keeping my Karma from affecting me:

    When you are psychologically distraught, it is particularly important to hold your body consciously, because your karmic substance is trying to shape your body according to its distortions.This explains the enormous care brought into the practice of asanas and pranayama in yoga.

    Karma, A Yogi’s Guide to Crafting Your Destiny by Sadhguru, Harmony Books, 2021, p. 131

    There is not much sense in suppressing anger while it rages. Or, beat myself over feeling it. If words were enough, we would have already become enlightened by now, wouldn’t we? So, nowadays, I merely wait until anger abates. In the meantime, there are a few things that I do to keep anger from affecting my body.

    Preventing anger from affecting the body

    Holding Fingers

    Hold your middle finger – gently, without pressure or stress. Just wrap the fingers of one hand around the middle finger of the other hand. Hold for 5, 10, or more minutes. And if in doing that, you stopped yourself from waiving that finger at others, congratulate yourself. You are practically a peace worker now! 🙂

    1:2 Breathing

    Bring your attention to your breathing. Inhale to the count of four, exhale to the count of eight. If it is too much, shorten the length of the inhaling and exhaling intervals but keep the ratio of 1:2.

    Helping Others

    It’s incredible how quickly we abandon our concerns when someone else needs our help. Over and over, at the college where I teach physics, a distressed student would come for help. And as soon as I would help them, calmness and contentment would settle down. I forget the anger, the resentment, the fear, and anything else that bothered me just minutes before.

    Regardless of what you choose to do, don’t forget it’s just effects. Our mind will continue to get angry until we resolve the actual cause for anger. That, of course, requires sustained spiritual practice, varies from person to person, and calls for entirely separate post dedicated to it alone.

    Want to learn which finger helps what? Here is an old post on how to help with daily situations. I also maintain a separate site Travelersguidetohealing.info with in-depth JSJ information. For my two-part introductory sequence of the art of JSJ, click here.