yat karosÌ£i yad aÅ›nÄsi yaj juhosÌ£i dadÄsi yat yat tapasyasi kaunteya tat kurusÌ£va mad-arpanÌ£am -Bhagavad-gÄ«tÄ 9.27
Whatever you do, whatever you eat, whatever you offer or give away, and whatever austerities you perform — do that, O son of Kuntī, as an offering to Me.
Being human can be a bitch. It means that no matter how wide or open our hearts, we are susceptible to the flood of emotions, the unpredictability of life, the mental tug of war that reminds us we are alive.
The past week or two have been challenging for me in the hospital because the floodgates of emotion were unexpectedly filled and opened, and the trajectory that the doctors envisioned for me was inaccurate. Just like all humans, doctors do the best they can based on the information they are given and past experiences, but the body and its internal chemical lab creates complex actions and reactions that, at the end of the day, nobody can account for, even the world’s most renowned and brilliant doctors.
While the doctors were challenged with the factual numbers of my blood trying to decide what was going wrong and why, I was challenged with the abstract questions of “Why can’t I just feel grateful and happy?” “Why can’t I get back to letting go of sadness and frustration?” “Why can’t I get back to Love?” The answer didn’t come immediately, and I had to sit with my sadness, my discomfort, my frustration, until something shifted. This is not unusual, in fact, I’ll bet if you ask ten people how they get rid of feeling any of these emotions their answer would is some way be related to time, and finding an outlet to vent those emotions. Some may say something about learning to stay; a few might even use the word ‘surrender’.
The above quote is from the ancient and renowned text called the Bhagavad Gita meaning the “Song of God.” In the text, God is in the form of Krishna, a Hindu God whom among other Awesome things is Love itself. He is talking to Arjuna, who is a warrior prince about to fight in a battle. Arjuna represents you and I; a human being who has let life take him at least somewhat unconsciously to a place where he ends up on a battlefield with people whom he knows and loves on both sides of the impending war. In a moment of clarity he wakes up and realizes he doesn’t want to fight. What will he do?
Luckily, Krishna is his charioteer and tells him he must participate in the battle. If he does, and if he is able to place all his trust in Krishna, Krishna will show him another way to live, another way to be in the world.
You and I are Arjuna, and our battlefield is the daily life we are confounded with. According to yoga philosophy, our thoughts, words and actions of this life and past lives determine the battlefield and who we confront in the war. When we come to a point that we are aware of what we think and how we behave in response to those thoughts, it also becomes easier to remember how to change our intentions and actions. This can act as a trigger to remember Krishna, or God, because at some stage in awareness building, we start to understand the only way off the battlefield is to surrender. Surrender to Something, to Someone; surrender to God. To offer our intentions and actions to God is to experience God because in the yoga philosophy, God is Love. It goes further to explain that we each have the same, limitless potential for God within us, and in fact, we are God. We are Love.
Throughout these weeks when my mind and emotion have gotten the best of me, I’ve thought a lot about God. I’ve thought about how lucky I am; I’ve also thought a lot about those who have it far worse than I do, and the wonderful aura of Love around me in the form of friends and family. As life would have it, the shift back to feeling God and Love is sometimes not as simple as it seems. When the mind gets a firm hold on emotion, surrender means learning to stay. Staying with the sadness or whatever emotions come up is like forfeiting the game of tug of war with the mind (the mind always wins). There is no opposition of force with which to initiate the game, and the ropes go slack by disengaging, by surrendering. Eventually, the ropes fall away and there is no longer a battle to fight, there is no longer a battlefield. At this moment it’s back to Krishna; back to Love.