My spiritual practice aims to cultivate a mind and heart that can find compassion for all beings. After the 2012 rape and murder of Jyoti Singh in India, I was feeling lost and defeated. I emailed a dear friend, “I can’t find compassion for the men who raped and killed her,” I wrote. “My heart is just not capable of doing that.”
After having a child, I kept wondering when I would go back to feeling like my “normal” self again…the Reema that I was before having a baby. I waited and wondered. I felt nostalgic and frustrated. Then one day I realized that that Reema is gone.
My work is not to try and retrieve who I was before having a baby but to be receptive to who I am now. Instead of this being depressing, it is exciting! Instead of holding on to what no longer exists, I feel like a child discovering who I am.
Mamas, if you are like me, you don’t easily believe people when they say it is ok to leave your kids for a while (if they are in good hands, of course). Well, I did it...for three weeks.
Since I’ve been back from my trip, it feels like we were never apart. The lesson I learned: When the bond is deep, you feel the truth: Time and Space do not exist.
It is what we give that matters. Not what we get.
Let go of the results of your actions!!! This is one of the main messages in the yoga scriptures and I am just starting to realize its profundity.
If I feel like I am not going to get love back, I realize I hesitate to give love. I hold back, flirting with fear, resentment, anger, jealousy.
These are lyrics to a beautiful, indigenous song of South America. Such lyrics are found in the Yoga traditions of South Asia as well. When singing mantra in the yoga tradition, it is understood and stated clearly in the scriptures: "We sing to the deity to awaken the deity within. If you think the deity is one and you another, you do not know.
My spiritual practice aims to cultivate a mind and heart that can find compassion for all beings. After the 2012 rape and murder of Jyoti Singh in India, I was feeling lost and defeated. I emailed a dear friend, “I can’t find compassion for the men who raped and killed her,” I wrote. “My heart is just not capable of doing that.”
"Don't hide behind your compassion," says Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, a classic book of timeless wisdom. The Gita emphasizes that we each have a very specific purpose. In Sanskrit, the work we were created to do is called our, Svadharma. Deep down, we know what we are meant to do. Krishna warns us: "Where there is personal attachment, sentimentality arises and we may fail to follow through with our purpose."
