Sharani

Photo by Sharani Robins

The Passion Quilt meme started with Miguel Guhlin, an educator in Texas who suggested that people take a photo (their own or one from creative commons license) and caption it with what they are most passionate for children to learn.

I first came across the meme when Karen Schneider, the Free Range Librarian Blogger, shared a photo of a child reading and penned an accompanying essay Reading Sets You Free. Hands down, this is one of the most powerful and beautiful treatises on the importance of reading that I have ever come across.

Although not tagged, I was inspired to caption a photo of what I passionately want children to learn in life. As a daily meditator since 1985, I find it to be a powerful tool for growth and learning. I feel it would be very empowering for children to learn how to meditate.

Meditation Teacher Sri Chinmoy answers a question asked of him,
“What is the greatest thing we can do for our children?”

If I know that the best thing for me to do early in the morning is to pray, I will encourage my child to do this. But if I say, “No, I have come to this realisation at the age of forty, so let my son also wait until he is ready,” then I am making a deplorable mistake…
from Sri Chinmoy Speaks, Part 1

The original meme:

1. Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
2. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
3. Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.”

Photos tagged Passion Quilt in Flickr

Photos tagged Passion Quilt 08 in Flickr

With confessed trepidation, I tag:
Pavitrata Taylor, Art Teacher and Photographer
John Gillespie, Web Designer
Kedar, Photographer and Videographer
Thomas Laupstad, Norwegian Photographer
Jessica Langlois, the Cool Librarian

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

Spiritual Teacher Sri Chinmoy composed and performed thousands upon thousands of devotional and meditative songs during his life. He wrote several books on the subject of music as well.

• God the Supreme Musician
• The Height of Silence and the Might of Sound
• The Source of Music

Ponder this captivating concept that you and everything in the world around you vibrates in an inner symphony found in his book The Height of Silence:

There are seven higher worlds and seven lower worlds. Each world has a music of its own and a note of its own. The higher worlds have a music that awakens us, inspires us, illumines us, perfects and fulfils us. The music of the higher worlds constantly comes to us as the harbinger of the highest Height, whereas the music of the lower worlds naturally comes to us as a messenger of destruction.

It is not only the higher and lower worlds that have a music of their own; each individual has his music, each movement has music, each action has music. Each time we breathe in and breathe out there is music. When we don’t pay attention to the inner depth of the action, we don’t hear the music. If we do pay adequate attention to each action, then inside the very depth of that action we are bound to hear music. Unless we hear music inside each action, the action is lifeless.
-Sri Chinmoy

Sri Chinmoy’s vast musical output (over 13,000 songs in his native tongue Bengali alone) seemed to tap into exactly what he describes in this quote about the all-pervading and infinite kinds of music accessible to the spiritually initiated. For just a small taste of his unbounded creative expression, listen to Nirab Amare performed by Kusahli Tarantsova and Rageshri Muzychenko, the musical duo Silence and Sound, a violinist and keyboard player from the Ukraine who are both students of Sri Chinmoy.

Recently I found comfort, insight and solace in contemplation of Psalm 139. As I prayed and meditated on this well-known Psalm from the Bible, its message fostered a feeling of increased intimacy with God and trust in God’s unconditional love. The Bengali lyrics of Nirab Amare translated into English resonated with this teaching found in Psalm 139 with its culmination in a close embrace by the Supreme.

Nirab Amare English Translation
Silence me,
O Self-transcendent and Self-amorous One.
Silence me!
I shall before long start worshipping You
Inside the very depths of my heart
And You will keep me always
In Your fond Embrace.

Nirab Amare.mp3

The score follows:

Nirab Amare Score

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