A Heart Full of Love

Have you ever had that feeling? It can come from many places, but only if you give yourself the opportunity. My personal experiences of this feeling have greatly multiplied over the last year. They have come from events like meditation, singing Kirtan, holding or talking to a child, spending quiet time with someone you care about, watching a sunrise/sunset or even just driving down the road. But you have to be open to receive it. 

The feeling I'm talking about one is where your heart literally feels full. Like there's not enough space in your chest to hold it. It's a feeling of deep connection and resonance between your inner self and the rest of creation. It's a feeling of openness too. Like your heart is directly connected to something else, something greater than you. This isn't quite traditional American emotion love of another individual. That's a more specific feeling, different from this one. When you love a Significant Other, for example, you may be willing to take risks to protect them, to share deep inner thoughts with them, to feel a solid connection based on shared experiences. But that's different and more narrow than what I'm talking about here. Opening yourself up to another person may be a good start, but it's not the end point - you need to open yourself up to everything, to nature, to the world, to the Universe. 

Verily, I cannot find the words to express it more clearly. I hope that you have had the opportunity to experience this at least once in this life so far. It's painful to think that many people out there have never grasped this feeling.  Holding a peaceful mind and a compassionate heart allows you to find this experience in more places and more readily, in my experience.

I do know for certain that there are actions that make this feeling simply impossible. Some examples:

• Being angry - anger at another person or events precludes any possible positive inner emotions to be realized
• Being unkind - differentiated from anger, because you can be unkind in your actions even if you're not angry
• Violence - I am willing to bet not a single human on this planet has held love in their heart during an act of violence. You cannot aim to injure another living being in the name of Love. If you can hold a gun in your hand and feel Love, you have some serious issues that need to be resolved. There may be feelings of power and dominance that narrow minded people attribute to love, but this is self-loving. And one of the causes of personal suffering. 
• Revenge - If another has harmed you or someone you love, revenge is a common modern reaction. "You hurt mine, so I shall hurt you." This is folly. Additional pain and hate does not heal or resolve the initial action. This is a viscous cycle and nothing to do with Love. 
• Over-indulgence - This could cover many things from drinking and drugs to money and physical possessions to sexual or other personal gratification. Yes, there are use cases, in my opinion, where partaking in these events is harmless. Alcohol and mild drugs can ease social tensions and temporarily relieve personal suffering. Most everyone in a modern society needs some money and possessions. Sex and some selfish acts are obviously fun and lead to temporary happiness. The over-indulgence or uncontrolled attachment is where the problems start.

When the true goal is the end of suffering and helping every living being find eternal happiness, these are roadblocks and distractions. One must aim to live their life in harmony with nature and other living beings. This brings you closer to feeling, as best as we can in these temporary earthly bodies, that resonance and connection of the vibrations of the Universe hidden from our plain sight. 

Realize, too, that you don't need to be sitting on a beautiful warm beach watching the sun rise to achieve this ecstatic feeling of Love. You can find it driving down the road, being in tune with the present moment, with the Now, and viewing the leaf-less trees on a bitterly cold winter day. But you have to be personally open and available to receiving it. Then when it strikes.... Oh my! What joy and happiness! Tears well up in your eyes, your heartbeat quickens, and the vibrations of the Universe pass freely through you. Ecstasy. It's available all the time. You just need to put aside the angry mind, the fear and hate preached by so many vitriol people in this world. World peace starts with inner peace. Loving Everyone starts with Loving Yourself.

 

A little tangent here as I was working through these thoughts:  I am not Christian, and many of the words I've used above are from Eastern traditions and not modern Christianity. However, I firmly believe true Christians think of this experience in a similar way. These people are Christians who look to the words and teachings of Jesus in the New Testament and other resources to find the message of Light and Love he consistently preached. Very little of this can be found in the Old Testament world of a vengeful and controlling supreme being. There primary tools in the Old Testament is fire and brimstone, fear and revenge. And the "Christians" who pull from such sources to argue against science, who expound hateful messages against people who are different from them, who self-righteously claim they are due to inherit the kingdom of heaven while shoving anyone else to the side, these are not people of Light and Love. These are not true Christians. These are people full of self-love and are only increasing suffering in the world around them. And they will never find their heart so full of Love that they just need to sit for a moment and weep in happiness. I feel sorry for them.

“The moment you understand yourself as the true Self, you find such peace and bliss that the impressions of the petty enjoyments you experienced before become as ordinary specks of light in front of the brilliant sun.” -- Swami Satchidananda, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

Credit for the image

On real-world chanting

I am quite familiar with the concept of chanting mantras. I have done this as part of meditation and of course it's part of Kirtan as well. However, while I've read a lot about this practice, and done it myself, I'm not really sure how it's "supposed" to be done. That is, while I have found benefits using chants in my own way, I've never been taught if there's a proper way to do it, or if there are typical ways in which this is used outside of meditation.

Last week we ran across a movie called Hippie Masala on Amazon Prime.  It was free, and we were looking for something hippie-related, so turned it on and got about half way through that evening. It's a fascinating semi-documentary about Europeans who took hold of the hippie counter-culture movement in the 1960s or 70s and gave up on Western society to live a more basic life in India. Many who followed that path returned home a few years later, but this is a story about some of those who stayed forever in India.

What caught my attention was one man in particular (pictured above), who while in the process of some menial task (lighting his pipe, which was a multi-step process), started simply chanting out loud while doing it. His particular chant is one I'm familiar with (Om Namah Shivaya). Only his take was slightly different. He would say "Om Namah Shivaya Shivaya Shivaya Shivaya Shivaya..." with the repeated Shivayas trailing off in volume before starting again from the beginning. So here I finally found an example of someone who's chanting to maintain mindfulness during a task. The documentary wasn't full of commentary (in fact, the initial commentary is fairly degrading, calling hippies "freaks"), so you kind of had to piece all this together. Thankfully I'm familiar enough with the culture and practices that it all made sense to me.

So what's the takeaway for me? I've been chanting more, and more often out loud. For example, I was frying a few eggs for lunch the other day. I am very picky about my cooking eggs, and when things don't go right (broken yolks, whites running into each other, or other things that tend to set off my OCD), I get frustrated - which of course leads to a negative mind coming into play (i.e., in the Buddhist view). So I was frying my eggs, 3 in a smallish pan, and when they started colliding I immediately sensed frustration building. So I chanted. I literally used the repeated Om Namah Shivaya the guy in the movie was using. The primary effect is that you separate yourself from the task. I am not the eggs. I am not the cook. This task isn't about me at all. It's just something that needs to be done to satiate my body's hunger. Attachment to things and activities is a core cause of suffering (more Buddhism). By bouncing out of that mindset and simply performing the task, no matter how poorly my cooking experience goes, it doesn't really matter.

Kirshna devotees do a lot of chanting during tasks like this. My understanding of their concept is that you're not cooking eggs to eat at all, but instead you are performing tasks (cooking, eating, cleaning up) and all of these tasks should be devoted entirely to Krishna (essentially and literally, devoted to God). By chanting mantras (or Sloka or Stotra), they are consciously dedicating their present actions to Krishna.

For me, I have too many scientific and atheistic views I'm still attached to for me to think about this as a dedication to an anthropomorphic deity. However, I am in a place where I've recognized the power of living in the present moment:  not ruminating on the past or worrying about the future (c.f. Ram Dass, Eckhart Tolle). And so my chanting a mantra during a task allows me to recognize the process for what it is. A task to accomplish without attachment. My eggs ended up edible (although required some extra folding to fit on my bagel), and I had no feelings of frustration arise from a less-than-perfect egg experience. I've since expanding the use of this and a couple other mantras when performing tasks like cleaning up, taking a shower, shaving, folding clothes, etc. I already have been doing this in a way when driving as I listen to Kirshna Das and similar Kirtan-style music almost exclusively (except for the occasional flip to NPR). The results are immediate. Unpleasant tasks just become tasks. Driving in heavy traffic just become driving to Point A, and I'll get there when I get there.

In reviewing the literature, there are recommended mantras for specific tasks. I haven't gotten that far yet. But I do have several go-to chants that allow me to pop out of attachment and "watch the watcher" with ease. If you find yourself feeling frustrated and angry over little things, don't keep feeding the negative mind. Let yourself watch the watcher. Do it consciously at first, but you'll find it comes more and more easily to you with a little practice. Once you know that feeling, chanting a mantra could help get you there faster, or preemptively before you even have a chance to slip.

Om Namah Shivaya Shivaya Shivaya Shivaya Shivaya

Om Namah Shivaya Shivaya Shivaya Shivaya Shivaya

Om Namah Shivaya Shivaya Shivaya Shivaya Shivaya