Sharani

Hope is a dress that my mother once wore
A fiddle tune I heard that has no words
Hope is the one thing we have never lost…
-Susan McKeown River (song lyrics excerpt).

River by Irish-born Celtic musician Susan McKeown is a real favorite in my music library. While I enjoy the melody, I fell in love with this song by McKeown even more for the phrase, “Hope is a dress my mother once wore. A fiddle tune I heard that has no words.” I am thinking of these poetic song lyrics about hope and its importance right now now as I observe the whirlwind of change and uncertainty unfolding in America with reverberations felt around the world.

Along with the volatile world events, the October 11th one-year anniversary of my spiritual teacher Sri Chinmoy’s passing is fast approaching - called Mahasamadhi in the case of an illumined spiritual master leaving the body. Thus, my heart is heavy and full of concern — whether for the ravages of hurricanes, financial turmoil or the closeness of memories from memorial activities for Sri Chinmoy one year ago. Given all that is happening, I feel that blogging right now about my latest fun discovery (the Animal Clock in Central Park for instance) from within my own little universe doesn’t quite work.

Odd is it for me that even as I bear witness to tremendous upheaval and sad memories, I find myself inwardly buoyant. Meditation like an anchor is holding me fast in its arms. Recently my regular travels to New York to meditate with other members of the Sri Chinmoy Centre leave me immersed in deeper and deeper peace, serenity and faith.

Back home I even find that in spite of a storm of ongoing uncertainty for the fate of public libraries in Massachusetts (my chosen profession for over 20 years), I am greeted by sweet, encouraging dreams when I sleep at night. In the dream world, I encounter healing advice, support and teaching.

I can only surmise that my spiritual outlook is ringing like a bell with the message that the true meaning of life is not found in outer prosperity or material things but rather in union of our soul with God. And the clapper inside that bell is none other than hope.

Hope is more important than ever when times are troubled. The Webster’s Collegiate Thesaurus gives “trust, confidence, dependence, faith, reliance and stock” as synonyms for the word hope. Sri Chinmoy placed abundant importance on the role of hope in his philosophy and teachings. In an interview with journalist Joel Martin, Sri Chinmoy stated,

He who treasures hope can make progress…
without hope we cannot even budge an inch…
Is there any human being who can live on
earth without hope?
-Sri Chinmoy

I will be concentrating on hope through this stormy weather, humming that fiddle tune that has no words and thinking of more lyrics from Susan KcKeown’s River song:

Hoe is a river that flows from these stone walls
into an ocean we have never seen…

Related Resources:

• Poems and Pages on Hope from Poetseers.org
• Sri Chinmoy’s Mahasamadhi

Listen to the song:

River - Susan Mckeown

The Importance of Gratitude

“My own gratitude heart is all that matters.”
-Sri Chinmoy

Down through the ages, great thinkers in religion and philosophy recommend cultivating gratitude as a key to happiness and satisfaction. A task as simple as keeping a daily gratitude journal in which one reflects on one’s blessings can powerfully transform life. Yet what if you get stuck in the starting gate with only a blank mind or or cliché ideas that don’t resonate in your core being when you try to count your blessings and cultivate a thankful spirit in your daily life?

The Three Questions of Naikan

One tool to increase gratitude in your life is a process of self-reflection called Naikan originated by Yoshimoto Ishin, a businessman and Buddhist practitioner of the Jodo Shinshu sect in Japan who lived from 1916-1988. Naikan literally means “inside looking” in Japanese and the core practice in this form of psychology popular in Japan is to ask yourself three questions while contemplating your interdependence with the world around you – whether family, friends, work, pets, things, our higher self, etc.

Question 1. “What have I received from ________?
Question 2. “What have I given to ____________?
Question 3. “What troubles and difficulties have I caused __________?

Taking the time at the end of your day to spend 20-30 minutes to look back over the day’s experiences through the lens of these questions can create a radical shift in perspective towards one of increased gratitude. The first question prompts a serious inquiry into all the gifts large and small that we received from others. The second question helps to counteract a spirit of expectation that the world owes us special treatment. Instead of taking the results of the first question for granted as our due, we stop to ask what have we given back to the world around us? Question 3 is the biggest shift of all for those moments when it is easy to dwell on life’s misfortunes and what we didn’t appreciate in someone else’s actions. By turning that perspective on its head, instead try to honestly assess in what way you might have been the source of hassles for others in your day’s interactions. Naikan’s founder Ishin actually recommends that you try to spend sixty percent of your efforts on the third question since it is endemic to human nature to think that the weaknesses of others are insufferable yet our own deserve to be downplayed and minimized.

My own test of trying Naikan in relation to a recent work situation proved very revealing to me. As I embarked on a new project in my job to run a book group, I sought out and received advice, mailings, faxes, phone calls and meetings/conversations that guided my nascent efforts. As I plowed ahead trying to keep up with this task in relation to numerous others, I have yet to formally thank a single person for their time and assistance. Oops!! Naikan has just opened my eyes to some tangible gifts I received to assist me in accomplishing a task and the wisdom of me finding time to write some thank-you letters that won’t require mental gymnastics to express sincere appreciation. This personal experience with the three questions finds me saying Naikan works! Use these three questions in your life to increase and cultivate gratitude. Gratitude achieved, happiness won.

“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” –G. K. Chesterton

Paper lace grace
flutters al fresco
a ticker tape parade
thousand happiness wish
-Sharani (July 2006)

I slowly moved forward in walking meditation, silent, reverent, linked in a seamless circle with others taking darshan from the teacher. With each completion of another time around in our circular passage, a rarefied and angelic feeling of happiness washed over my interior being, deepening with each step. My usual enchantment with beauty found mostly in nature stepped aside as the overwhelming beauty of this breeze of happiness dawning within fed my soul. What kind of fool must I be not to realise it sooner! Happiness is the best kind of beautiful. It feeds our myriad longings and banishes dissatisfaction. Now instead the centrality of abiding satisfaction bubbled forth from within into the bloom of a smile - or to be precise more like a wide and open grin.

Happiness is a complex and elusive wayfarer on my life road. It evaded me when I faced hardships as a child and as I wrestled with feelings of inadequacy. Now these many years later, unless felt as an authentic reality I am usually reticent to paint it on the surface of my life in some kind of superficial nod to its legitimate importance. If it doesn’t honestly dawn from inside up and outward, I shy from hastily donning this garment, however valuable it might be.

Therefore, the solid feeling of happiness that spontaneously graced this walking exercise in meditation struck me with its immensity and tangible power. One thing I know for sure - my meditation teacher Sri Chinmoy offered a very special gift this day with a blessing in the form of kindled happiness. I felt ever so ready to jump up on a soapbox and eagerly declare that happiness is the best kind of beautiful. Not to worry. Maybe my smiling eyes did the talking for me. They can serve as shining testament along with the sweet memory of this experience now imprinted on the tablet of my heart.

My heart’s dawn has come.
Inside my heart
I see only one thing:
The happiness of a God-intoxicated
Beauty-life.
-Sri Chinmoy
Twenty-Seven Thousand Aspiration-Plants, Part 9