Rohini explains how what we do in the world, we do when we turn inward in meditation. If we try to control or “run” our meditation, we are not meditating. In meditation, we have to surrender as we go inward, and not attach ourselves to anything we experience along the way.
Approaching Life
Rohini explains how what we bring to the table is how we approach our lives. We approach spiritual practice the way we approach the rest of what we do. People often try to make spiritual practice into drudgery, and then use euphemisms to let themselves off the hook for being unconscious. If we practice as we should, it will bring …
Narratives Never End Well
Starting from her poem “Ode to the Washbear,” Rohini explains how the shrunken self is nothing more than a narrative, and its efforts to fit experience, and other people, into that narrative are always limiting and destructive. Spiritual practice requires us to identify, disentangle from, and dismantle our narratives.
Delegating Upward, Part Two
Rohini continues her discussion of “delegating upward” by explaining how willful this behavior can be, especially when the “delegators” thrive on conflict and seek to feel powerful by frustrating others. When we are truly serving, “we” disappear and the focus is the work itself.
Delegating Upward, Part One
Rohini explains how, in a variety of settings, people can selfishly toggle between “delegating upward”–passing their tasks to their superiors–and going rogue without appropriate checks. By placing their dramas and perceived needs above the work itself and its larger purpose, they undermine what they pretend to support.
The Subtlety of Real Learning Part Two
Rohini continues her explanation of the nature of real learning. Drawing on readings and her own experiences, she examines the dangers of abstraction and false equivalencies, and clarifies the nature of true mastery on a subtle level.
The Subtlety of Real Learning
Drawing on her poem “The Magic Formula” and an episode from Eiji Yoshikawa’s novel “Musashi,” Rohini explains how real mastery is subtle and extends to everything a master does, and real learning involves a willingness to be humble, empty yourself of ideas, and accept what is offered in the instruction.
The Heart Wins Wars
Rohini discusses the anger and hate that fester beneath “niceness,” and how the seat of the emotions is their battlefield. She conveys through word and experience how the way to overcome hate is to accept it within ourselves so we can arrive at Love, our true nature, which is the only real freedom.
Who Drives the Mind
Drawing on Swami Hariharananda’s commentary on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Rohini details what Hariharananda calls the habitual states of the mind. She explains how most seekers have what he calls a distracted mind, which is sometimes calm and sometimes disturbed. They tend to believe that the calm state of their mind is their true self, when in reality the mind, in all its conditions and activities, is just a vehicle for the Self.
Resolving Attachments
Rohini explains how we can first own, then master, and finally transcend the attachments that keep us confined to a limited and separate existence. She clarifies how easy it is to intellectually own an attachment without really experiencing that ownership, and how we cannot transcend any attachment without first having mastered completely how it operates for us.