Facing Life

Yoga enables you to face the ups and downs of life.

- Swami Satyananda Saraswati

We all want an easy, pleasant life. We all want to avoid painful experiences and unpleasant situations. This is part of our nature. However, to expect life to always go along with our wishes is, well, wishful thinking.

Yoga is a system of practices grounded in a spiritual philosophy. It is comprised of two primary components: wisdom and devotion. Wisdom tells us that life involves both enjoyment and suffering. We don’t get one without the other. Life is a play of opposites: hot and cold, up and down, good and bad, life and death . . . Without these, things would be extremely monotonous!

Devotion helps us to surrender to a higher wisdom and higher love. Unity, or non-duality, doesn’t mean monotony. Instead it means that there is a unified field of Consciousness within all beings and that all beings are contained within this field. Through devotion and surrender we join our individual awareness with that field which we sometimes refer to as God. At the same time we each need to work out our karma as individual “selves.”

Wisdom and devotion give us a connection to an inner center of calm, blissful awareness from which we can better handle the inevitable crises that life brings. It helps us to “let go and let God.”

The individual ego suffers because it wants things its way. We want to be in control but we are only part of a much greater unfolding reality. Try putting your hand out to stop the waves coming in from the ocean. If you’re not careful you’ll get knocked down. Wisdom helps you to pick yourself up out of the sand. Surrender allows you to ride the surf. Fear, doubt, pride and greed cause us to wipe out.

We ourselves are but waves upon the vast ocean of Being. We imagine ourselves to be separate but we are never so. As the mystic poet Kabir wrote, “I have been thinking of the difference between water and the waves on it./Rising, water's still water, falling back, it is water./Will you give me a hint how to tell them apart?” Meditation connects us with that deeper, vaster Self. It helps us to detach from our suffering and find happiness within. Once we are established in that inner sanctum the outer onslaughts of life have a significantly diminished impact.