Holi lessons for the spiritual seeker

 

When sacredness is attached to a celebration, it becomes total, complete. It’s not just the body and mind but the spirit also celebrates. Then celebration dawns spontaneously and life becomes a vibrant fountain of colors. The sacred festival of Holi is not just about outward celebration but also inner wisdom that we must pay attention to. When you are in knowledge, then all the colors in your life coexist peacefully. Harmony in diversity makes life vibrant, joyful and more colorful.

Make friends with enemies

One of the messages of Holi is: Make friends even with the enemy. Let there be no enemy. Why is an enemy born? When we have animosity within us, then an enemy is born. If we have no animosity left in us, then we would have no enemies either. We shouldn’t mind if someone else considers us as an enemy but we shouldn’t perceive any animosity from our side.

All colors co-exist

Life should be full of colors! And each color is meant to be seen and enjoyed separately. All colors emanate from white, and when mixed again, they become black. Similarly, in life, different roles played by us should exist peacefully and distinctly inside us. For example, when a father continues to play his role of a ‘father’ in office, things are bound to go for a toss. When your mind is white and consciousness – pure, peaceful, happy and meditative, different colors and roles emerge. We get the strength to play various roles with full sincerity against the background. All we need to do is dip into our consciousness time and again. Between all the roles, we have to take deep rests, in order to play each role sincerely.

Be Aware of Your Desires

The only way out is to focus attention on the desire and surrender it. This act of focusing awareness or sight on desire or Kama is called ‘Kamakshi’. With awareness, desire loses its grip on our mind and surrender happens and then nectar flows out from within. If you look at the picture of the goddess, Kamakshi, holds a sugarcane stem in one hand and a flower in the other. The sugar-cane stem is so hard and has to be squeezed in order to obtain sweetness, while the flower is soft and collecting nectar from it is so easy. This truly represents life, which indeed has a little of both! It is far easier to obtain this bliss from the inside than it is to try to extract pleasure from the outside world – which needs a lot more effort.

Become a witness

Nature has all colors and so does your mind. You feel happy, unhappy, angry, jealous, compassionate, generous…all these colors of emotions come up in you. The mind is not the same all the time. But when you know you are not that, you are not these colors, moods then you can truly enjoy these colors. You become a witness to all the mind games that go on inside of you. What troubles you most in life is not someone else but your own mind. When you identify yourself with those emotions, you think that is you, then you are in trouble. Meditation is the way to move into this witness state.

This itself is the message of Holi - go hug and color everyone, bow down with respect and radiate love. On this occasion of Holi, spread the colors of love everywhere making life buoyant and colorful.

Wishing all Happy Holi!

Meditation and its many meanings


Meditation is not an act; it is the art of doing nothing. The rest in meditation is deeper than the deepest sleep that you can ever have. When the mind becomes free from agitation, becomes calm and serene and is at peace, meditation happens. When the mind is engaged in some activity, it gets tired.

So any type of concentration, contemplation or any activity in the mind can drain your system. Meditation is that which doesn’t drain you, but just gives you deep rest and we withdraw from all sensory activities like seeing, listening, smelling, tasting. It is almost like sleep, but not exactly sleep.

Meditation is not concentration; it is de-concentration, letting go. When can you rest? Rest is possible when you have stopped all activities. When you stop moving around, stop working, talking, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, thinking—then you get rest or sleep. In sleep you are left with only involuntary activities like breathing, heartbeat, food digestion, blood-circulation, etc. 

But this is not total rest. When the mind settles down, only then total rest or meditation happens. There are three modes to our consciousness: waking, dreaming and sleeping; and a fourth mode is the meditative state. That is, you are aware from within and yet fully in a deep state of rest. Meditation calms the mind and gives it deep rest.

What happens in your mind when you have to wait for something? Do you notice the time passing by? In waiting, you observe every moment that is passing by and this very waiting can take you into meditation. When you have to wait, you can either be frustrated or meditative. Feeling time is meditation.

Meditation is that journey from sound to silence, from movement to stillness. It complements activity, though it appears to be completely opposite. For a layman, we can categorize the whole thing in seven layers of existence: body, breath, mind, intellect, memory, ego and the reference point of change which we call the “self.”

You know in life, we notice everything is changing. And how do we know the change, if there is no reference in the mind? There is something in us that is not changing. That something that has been with us, we call it the Self or the non-changing aspect of our consciousness. So, meditation is a journey to the non-changing reference of our Self, the consciousness.

Now, many people ask how to quiet the mind in meditation or how to get into a deeper meditation? So I would say, first accept the noise and not fight it. You fight with it and feel that you should not have this noise. The more you want to get rid of it, the more it will stick to you. The principle of consciousness or mind is such that resistance does not eliminate it but makes it grow. So first you have to let go and not resist it.

Second focus on the five different ways of getting into meditation. Breathing will help you get rid of the noise. Proper food can also make an impact on meditation. Exercise, posture and refined emotions, good understanding, all of these will aid meditation.