Wednesday, July 19, 2006
key tO happiness at wOrk: strive and let gO
As we progress in our yoga, we are often nice and steady and comfy when we're in yoga class. We may even practice the openness and even-mindedness by extending the yoga practices into our home life. Yet, the instant we enter into our office the next day, we're back where we started: angry, stressed out, unhappy and lost souls. "Is there a yoga for happiness at work?" our yogis often ask me in the studio.
I understand the desperation, the exasperation in that plea. I, too, was a part-time blissed out yogi and a full-time stressed out executive. Perhaps it is even worse for the yoga?! Because we encounter an episode of peace in our yoga class, our daily chaos at our workplace feels even more chaotic for the contrast.
This, you will be happy to learn, has been explored by the ancient yogis. In fact, they wanted more than anything to develop a complete coherence between our inner peace and divinity and our outer unrefinement and profanity. The sages came out with something called the "yoga of actions" or Karma Yoga. "Karma" means "action". They were interested, not just in how to make our daily actions happier and freed from stress, but they were also interested in how we can transform ourselves by making each and every action the realm of our yoga practice. Remember they were striving for unity (yoga): a coherence between our internal and external worlds. This means the yoga practice is all pervasive, all encompassing.
So what does Karma Yoga involve? There are a series of guidelines on how to purify our actions. The purpose of the practice is to bring about coherence and its resultant peace and happiness. The central idea of Karma Yoga is that the key to happiness in the present is through purifying our daily actions: each act becomes full of passion and empty of selfish expectations. We become mindful of the fact that while we can set our intentions, plan our actions, execute our every step meticulously, we can never, never shape the ultimate outcome of our strife. There is an emptiness inherent in our actions and it is a delusion to think otherwise: we think we can affect changes in a situation or in the world. The reality is that the world is made up of a whole lot of folks, thinking the same thing! So how could each instance possibly become true? What results from a heck of a lot of individuals thinking this way and acting from it is that almost all people end up disappointed that things do not work out the way they wanted. Taking the wider perspective, we see the need to let go of the strings we have attached to our actions and their outcomes. We simply act with the best intentions and are happy simply with the fact that we do.
In doing this, we are, in fact, liberated by freeing our actions from self-interest. In turn, we are freed from the tyranny of expectations which can never logically be met. When we work, we offer up each fruit of our labour to the larger good, without any expectation of any returns to ourselves, except the satisfaction of having put in your all into the work and having done so with the interest of all. We strive and then we let go. Each task is never too mundane, never too distasteful because it fits into a larger purpose: to contribute your daily toil to something greater than yourself. Never disappointed with outcomes. . . . Then when you do get rewarded, that's like a special job bonus!
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I understand the desperation, the exasperation in that plea. I, too, was a part-time blissed out yogi and a full-time stressed out executive. Perhaps it is even worse for the yoga?! Because we encounter an episode of peace in our yoga class, our daily chaos at our workplace feels even more chaotic for the contrast.
This, you will be happy to learn, has been explored by the ancient yogis. In fact, they wanted more than anything to develop a complete coherence between our inner peace and divinity and our outer unrefinement and profanity. The sages came out with something called the "yoga of actions" or Karma Yoga. "Karma" means "action". They were interested, not just in how to make our daily actions happier and freed from stress, but they were also interested in how we can transform ourselves by making each and every action the realm of our yoga practice. Remember they were striving for unity (yoga): a coherence between our internal and external worlds. This means the yoga practice is all pervasive, all encompassing.
So what does Karma Yoga involve? There are a series of guidelines on how to purify our actions. The purpose of the practice is to bring about coherence and its resultant peace and happiness. The central idea of Karma Yoga is that the key to happiness in the present is through purifying our daily actions: each act becomes full of passion and empty of selfish expectations. We become mindful of the fact that while we can set our intentions, plan our actions, execute our every step meticulously, we can never, never shape the ultimate outcome of our strife. There is an emptiness inherent in our actions and it is a delusion to think otherwise: we think we can affect changes in a situation or in the world. The reality is that the world is made up of a whole lot of folks, thinking the same thing! So how could each instance possibly become true? What results from a heck of a lot of individuals thinking this way and acting from it is that almost all people end up disappointed that things do not work out the way they wanted. Taking the wider perspective, we see the need to let go of the strings we have attached to our actions and their outcomes. We simply act with the best intentions and are happy simply with the fact that we do.
In doing this, we are, in fact, liberated by freeing our actions from self-interest. In turn, we are freed from the tyranny of expectations which can never logically be met. When we work, we offer up each fruit of our labour to the larger good, without any expectation of any returns to ourselves, except the satisfaction of having put in your all into the work and having done so with the interest of all. We strive and then we let go. Each task is never too mundane, never too distasteful because it fits into a larger purpose: to contribute your daily toil to something greater than yourself. Never disappointed with outcomes. . . . Then when you do get rewarded, that's like a special job bonus!