Mary Oliver wrote “You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.”
Ram Dass said, “Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.”
There are a lot of ways to tell the same truth.
Tonight I taught a restorative class around the topic of selfless service – seva, and karma yoga. The two might seem at odds. Karma yoga is literally the yoga of action, and restorative is… restorative.
The connection is clear if you dig in, though.
True service is spontaneous, and that kind of spontaneity can only rise from instantly available clarity. The way to get to true service is through true rest: the kind of rest that transcends the ego and gets you as close to divine consciousness as you can. The Bhagavad Gita makes this pretty clear: what stands in the way of selfless service is anger and fear, and more (or less) specifically, the rajasic mind and body that generates those things. The balancing of rajas is exactly what restorative yoga is up to energetically.
It’s not all about building houses and teaching free classes at a community center. Service shows up in a lot of ways – it is anywhere that life sees life, life sees life in peril, life sees life suffering, life sees life and life acts, realizing that all life is connected.
I was reminded of a story: I had a relative by marriage who made things difficult for some people in my family. But, even with difficult people, sometimes the light comes through. One night about twenty years ago, I was chatting with her – at a Hannukah party, I think – and I commented that I liked her earrings. Without a second of hesitation, she plucked them out of her ears and gave them to me.
Maybe she needed to be appreciated in that moment. Maybe I needed generosity in that moment. Maybe we both needed acceptance, or something pure.
I still have the earrings. There was something so absolutely pure and unforced in the moment that I could never get rid of them, even though I don’t wear them often. The last time I wore them was probably B’s wedding, which I remember because she realized she didn’t have anything blue just a few minutes before the ceremony, so I took the earrings out of my ears and gave them to her to wear for the day.
I wore them again tonight. It’s the first time I’ve worn fancy earrings in a long time, but it felt nice, even if I had to figure out how to work them around my mask.
India is having a hard time right now. Donate to giveindia.org or missionoxygen.org.