PUSHTI: December 2024, LIGHT IT UP

viśokā vā jyotiṣmatī PYS 1.36
By meditation on the effulgent internal light, which is beyond all sorrow, one becomes grounded in the luminous reality of one’s own being.

asato ma sad-gamaya
tamaso ma jyotir gamaya
mrityor ma amritam gamaya
Lead me from the unreal to the real, from darkness to light, from death to immortality.
– From Brhadaranyaka Upanishad

If you go to Hobby Lobby for holiday decorations, everything is 50% off, except the lights (and tape). The price of admission to see the Festival of Lights at James Island County Park was so expensive I had to employ all my yogic skill just to let it go. To no avail, my agitation was immense. Hanukkah is also referred to as the Festival of Lights. The point is we love the lights. How many of us with kids, as kids, ended up taking the long way home (and often) – driving endlessly through neighborhoods rarely ever traveled, except this time of year – to gaze at people’s house decorations. Glowing, fading, blinking, colored, LED Christmas trees synchronized to a soundtrack of Trans-Siberian Orchestra on an endless loop. There is no end to the ever-evolving design and creativity. And we are willing to pay for it. According to Google, our holiday decoration spending has increased 45% over the last decade and we, the U.S., spend a little less than 10 billion per year to light up our holidays. With daylight saving time increasingly fooling us to feel like it’s midnight at 6pm, our holiday lights serve to help us keep the party going, when really we may just want to go to bed.

I wager to say that our increasing consumerism of external lights is in direct proportion to how bereft we are of our internal luminescence. Looking for light in all the wrong places. We are a culture that lacks stillness. We have become so accustomed to having our dopamine receptors stimulated by our phones, screens, noise, and the rapid-fire bombardment of images that we exist in some sleepwalking dream existence where even time itself seems to be accelerating at a chaotic rate. And to quell the anxiety we feel if we find ourselves separated from this bombardment – even if for a brief moment – we look for the nearest thing that will take the edge off: food, sex, drugs. And this is no news to you: all this leads to suffering – mental, physical, spiritual. But that’s okay, because it is common understanding among the Sages that it is our suffering that brings us to seek the Light.

In the Bhagavad Gita (2.69), Krishna says the yogi is awake and radiant when everyone else is asleep. For the yogi, when the masses live out their day in material existence, it is as dark as night. The gist is, as people live out their finite ego-dream worldly existence, which is mired in the darkness of ignorance of the True Self, it is the illumination of the yogi that lights the way in this darkness. In the Yoga Sutra, Master Patanjali (1.36) says, “You have a light; meditate on it. This is the end of sorrow and lights up the internal expanse of the Self.”

There is light in darkness. In meditation, we are taught to draw the shade, to withdraw ourselves from the distraction of the world and pull our sense faculties inward. This creates an environment of darkness and stillness, allowing us to become intimate with the light of our awareness. Without the stillness and the dark, we may never become intimate with the subtle song of our Soul. We all have a guiding light, a source of infinite wisdom, truth, and joy – Shantih. Yoga asana, as movement, liquefies the contraction and armor accumulated from our disconnection and allows our physical body to be ever increasingly still so that, in the words of Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching, our mud settles and the waters clear.

This month, in class, we will practice simple, brief meditation so a lifelong practice can be established. We also offer a weekly meditation class with Ruth Sykora – Sundays at 9:15a.

In Yoga we dwell,
Jeffrey
December 2024