Wise William & Aparigraha

I was supposed to write about my trip to Sri Lanka, but as always life took over and I never got that. In fact when I opened Samasthiti Nine, I realised, I hadn't even completed writing or posting the draft from January this year. So here goes, a post that sat in my drafts for the first half of this year. In fact William, my teacher at Pure went to to share loads of other good teachings other than the one I speak of in this post, maybe I'll get down to jotting those down here eventually. 

It's crazy how everything falls to side sometimes in life right. When I look back at 2015, i started the year off on a good note with the training and from there, everything seemed to go downhill. And every time it showed signs of picking up, it would get a little better before getting a lot worse. And towards the end of it when you think, this is it, I've survived it and i'm still strong, the year seemed to slap me in the face as a leaving present. 

In spite of all my yoga, all my meditation, all that I know about the human mind and consciousness and attachment, and ego, i found myself in utter pain and losing hope with each of Fate's strike. What was i doing wrong, I asked myself over and over again. 

In our of our classes, William, a brilliant teacher at Pure Yoga in Singapore, and someone I've spoken about before spoke about the art of not forcing it. He was talking in relation to a yoga asana but followed it up with "it's true for everything in life". Holding onto a dream with stubborn-ness i thought was a good thing. As much as I am a fan of 'letting go', I have my problems with the phrase and I've shared my apprehensions about it earlier as well. Why do I need to let stuff go. You know when you go through something tough and your friends say "Let it go?" , whenever my friends say that to me, i feel like they are belittling my problems. Of course, that is not their intention at all and I completely get that, but my point is 'let it go' is over used in today's world. Often, it's necessary to sit with your pain and encountering it instead of pushing it away with this whole let it go philosophy. And this is huge coming from me because I'm a master at pushing things away. So when William said 'let it go', I groaned internally and thought to myself, 'please William don't say it'. He went on and said it anyway. He spoke about it throughout the class but the core of his message was, know what is good for you, hold onto that and let the rest slip away. If that means you can do version I of an asana and not be able to proceed to the version II for a long time : maybe it's just a mater of time and practice OR maybe, its never going to happen because it can be that my body is structurally incapable of doing a full splits ever in my life. And that is okay.

Aparigraha, means non-possessiveness, and can be stretched to mean letting things go, not grasping it,no attachment broadly speaking. It's one of the Yamas that you'll struggle with in the modern world (not that the others come easy!). I often hold onto people, places and situations more than necessary. Definitely way after it stops doing me any good. One of the ways of understanding Aparigraha is that if you're grasping things unnecessarily, you're not making space for new good things to come to you, things that you might need at that point in time. And of course, the spiritual texts talk take it deeper when they say holding onto things manes you're losing sight of the True Self and hence you're driven further away from the Real Atman.

Acceptance and then letting it go or for that matter even patience, all of these things don't come easily to me. I suck at accepting, I'm crap at letting go and no bone in my body has ever heard of patience or knows what it means. The other day I was talking to a friend about destiny and fate. What is Destiny? And what is Fate? Do we believe in them? If yes, then why. If not, then why not? Does believing in them make you a lethargic person? in terms of your own individual Will? The belief that everything is pre-determined that you're only a mere puppet playing out a role or a sequence of events that has already been scripted for you? That there exists a supernatural power acts as the puppeteer for every tiny bit of your life? 

I don't know where I stand. That's what I said in that discussion we were having as well. I don't know where I stand. But If I were to ask myself honestly, i do believe in destiny and i do believe in fate. There was this quote that I liked from Serendipity : 

"If we are to live life in harmony with the universe we must all posses a powerful faith in what the ancients used to call "fatum", what we currently refer to as destiny."