On The Path of Effort
On this path no effort is wasted,
no gain is ever reversed;
even a little of this practice
will shelter you from great sorrow. From the Bhagavad Gita
For this past month of study with the current teacher training group, we read the Bhagavad Gita . I’ve read it now 6 times and each time I find something new in it. Each time I come back to this book, I find that some understanding has cracked open in me. The work that I do on my yoga mat and off, all of the reading, the teaching, the sheer living, plants seeds that with more work and time grow in me as something true and real.
I thought of this as I read poet Ed Zahnizer’s work “How Explain God?” He writes:
The more they explain God
The less they know. I know.
I used to be full like that.
Now I want to be empty
Like the body of a guitar
To magnify the Holy One.
I have thirsted for more–more strength, knowledge, unity–and have wanted visible, measurable results from the work I do. Even if I don’t name that while I’m participating in asana, in reading, in action after action, it is often the truth. What if I could be an empty container, something that could magnify the experience of love?
I think that is what it means to find action with inaction—that when there is only the vibration of effort because that is what I am called to do and not because I am attached to some specific result I can be as empty as the body of a guitar and there becomes no more reason for me to strive. The explanation is only necessary when I do not know. As I understand more how to let go, how to continue working without attaching a need for specific results on the work, I begin to magnify the energy of the work. The energy resonates outward from me.
What I know for sure is that there are times when I feel like I am burned out and I’m going backwards. Sometimes this is when I’ve hit a wall in the practice—I cannot master a pose or I think I’ve mastered it then can’t do it suddenly. Or a more difficult wall like I struggle to sit in meditation for even five brief minutes. Or an even bigger and more difficult wall yet—flashes of anger that are directed at my children or flashes of some spiteful place in me passing judgement on some poor person I encounter. The reminder of all of the work I have done comes as a gentle resonant sound vibrating in me asking me to observe myself in these moments and to forgive these places and find a way to respond—to the folks in my life but to myself too—with love rather than harshness.
I heard a story recently about nurses and burn out. The message was that it’s not showing compassion and care that causes burn-out for these overworked beings, but instead the lack of true connection with patients as human beings and inability to let go of the outcome for patients that causes the burn-out. Nurses are being trained in how to engage more fully in the present with patients and then to consciously–literally and figuratively–wash their hands to release the energy of the patient, to let go of their desired outcome for the patient. It is the same for us on the mat. We must learn to engage more deeply within the present moment and stay very aware of the work we’re doing, but then learn to release the work, to wash our hands of the outcome of that moment so that the energy of the poses or the meditation or whatever work we’re doing can play through us.
When we stay on the path of self-understanding, there is no wasted effort, for the more we let go of, the better we’re able to magnify the ways the work is taking shape within us. Even when it feels like nothing has been gained—no new muscle tone or more joyful attitude—there is still the effort that is subtly making space within us for more emptiness, less of all of the junk that keeps us a little out of tune. Eventually, like a well-tuned guitar we are able to magnify the pure experience of love into our own lives and into the world.