when i wrote daily, i had this continuum, when something happened in real life, i would absolutely think it blogworthy and form thoughts with reference to the blog. Infact if you are an obsessed blogger, all you can think about is should i blog this or not. It was like in the days of pre-digital photography. Since you could only take a limited number of pictures, you always wondered if things were picture worthy or not and only took pictures if you thought the moment was right. Not shooting left, right and center. But we digress. So much was my obsession about should i take this pic or not, that i refused to take my camera on my backpacking trip to Singapore. Hence i do not have a single picture from my days of backpacking for a week in Singapore. All that is left are faded memories and 'I did that too', without any corroboration to the fact. Ofcourse, I am not here to convince anyone that indeed i visited Singapore, nor is it going to get me any crowing achievement, and even so, just in front of a few humans, not before the wise Lord, he doesn't care if i trekked Singapore in foot or not, he cares if my heart was pure, was it in the present, was it enveloped in love, did i stay in my dharma ? Those are the questions that he is concerned with.
Mayya veshya mano ye maam, nithyayukta upasathe I
Shradaya parayo petham, me yukthama mathaha II
The Lord said : Those who, fixing his mind on me, worship me, ever steadfast and endowed with supreme faith, these in my opinion are the best Yogis
When i was told the true meaning of Yogi, i was dumbfounded.
I had always thought a person who does yoga is a yogi
Then i was even dumbfounded when they said yoga is more than just physical excercises, but there are different forms of yoga like Bhakti, Karma, etc.
So ignorant was I.
Finally i am living my religion every day. i am trying to live the Gita everyday.
A Christian thumbs through the Bible.
Similary as a Hindu, all children should be given exposure to the Gita and then it is up to them to fly with or without it.
But if we as Hindu parents, do not introduce the Gita to them, who will ?
I came to know the Gita in my thirties, after having kids.
I come from a religious household.
They even made me byheart some parts of the Gita
But i had no idea what the Gita was. Nobody told me it was the sacred text of the Hindus.
That all the questions are answered in here, on how to live and to conduct life.
I am sure, most of us Hindu children do feel this way. We are ignorant partly because
it is in Sanskrit and we haven't kept up with the times.
We did keep up with the times in the sense, we do not practise Sanskrit anymore,
but we refused to bring along our texts with us.
And the meaning though deciphered, only a few knew.
How many Hindu families have the Gita text and open it for prayer and contemplation
How many Christian families have the Bible and open it for prayer and contemplation
How many Musilm families have the koran and open it for prayer and contemplation
How many ....
Yes, Hindus must be the minority in the above.
We did have the Gita in my house. I loved those pages as they were paper thin and almost silk like
and each page was gold bordered. it was my favourite book, but i absolutely did nothing with it.
Nobody did anything with it.
My dad was super religious.
He had his own set of books which he followed.
But we all get the point ?
People might say we do not have one book to follow like most religions.
We have a hundred texts. And i agree, all of them are as beautiful, and probably all tell us
to submit to the lotus feet of God.
Once we are in the higher reins of the Gita, they say God is just a crutch.
So that you surrender your ego, nothing is your doing but somebody else's doing and that somebody else - lets call him God.
We did not create ego, but somehow as man, we have that ego, i guess i am too sleepy to coherently put my thoughts right now. maybe later.
Anyway, coming back to the Yogi -
A yogi is one, who mind, intellect and body are all in alignment.
That is they do not contradict one another.
When the mind is enticing you to have icecream, the intellect is strictly forbidding you and the body acts according to the one or the other, mostly it listens to the mind, he is not a yogi
A yogi is one who can rein in his senses and all his intellect, mind and body act in unison.
i was awestruck when i heard the definition, not too long ago, just a few years ago, after i had my children and courtesy Balavihar, courtesy my children.
When i started this post today, i was truly a blank slate, i had nothing to write, infact i wondered what to write, but then i saw that i had not blogged for so many days, which is not the promise i made, i said, okay let me blog about that and lo, my mind wandered through hills and valleys, mountains and terrains, gorges and plateaus and words did tumble like the narrow Angels falls in Venezuela which my husband had wanted me to accompany but i did not, as i had no love for travelling those days, my love was in saving any little money we had and thinking that the workplace would close up, if not for me.
i was under a chinese boss who refused to give me a week's vacation and now i have americans who always tell me 'family first', 'throw the cellphone in the fish tank while on vacation'.
And now i believe in that. Vacation was a chore earlier with packing from diapers to bottles to now where it is all wonderful.
Anyway, time to say goodnight
take care
Seated in love
Tammy
