Chapter 15. The Bhagavad Gita, New Hampshire, April 2013

Friday April 7, 2023

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I’m feeling called to share this chapter from my book, The Rising of the Divine Feminine and the Buddhist Monks Across the Road: A Memoir, which I have been serializing here on Substack. I welcome and appreciate your support ✨🌟💖🙏🕊️

In interfaith seminary, one of the most transformational experiences for me was our study of the ancient Hindu sacred text, The Bhagavad Gita. It’s also amazing to me that this study transpired already 10 years ago, and what I learned from the Gita still applies in my every day life.

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Chapter 15. The Bhagavad Gita, New Hampshire, April 2013

A visit to Jamie in the maple sugar shack gives me a break from all the reading and writing for my interfaith seminary homework. Walking the few minutes up the driveway, I muse to myself how everything is relative: today’s 45F temperature is colder than any Sydney winter I experienced growing up, but after the arctic freeze of winters here in the North East, 45F now feels balmy to me. One of the many things I love about the maple season is that it signals the end of winter: the temperature must be above freezing during the day for the sap to run, but still below freezing at night. It’s as though the freezing temperature at night resets the trees. 

The windowed sliding doors leading into the sugar shack are fogged over. I pull them apart to enter. Jamie’s silhouette is shrouded in a sweet-scented warm maple steam—it looks like he’s enveloped by a cloud. The radio is set to NPR. I quickly tune into the fact that it’s an interview with an author called Cheryl Strayed about her new book Wild—a memoir detailing her hike along the Pacific Crest Trail. Maple steam swirls around me as I take a seat on one of the three bar stools. Jamie opens the black, cast iron door to the firebox underneath the twelve-foot long stainless steel evaporator and feeds pine logs into the red-hot fire chamber to keep the sap boiling. It makes me think of a movie clip I’ve seen of a man feeding coal into a train’s steam engine.

After closing the cast iron door, Jamie sits back down on his stool, and together we listen to the interview. Sun streams through the windows and glints off the large stainless steel evaporator with its four legs standing on the gravel floor. When the interview finishes, he turns down the radio. 

I ask him, “So how do you feel about having swapped your Manhattan corporate office for a sugar shack in the forest?”

His ear-to-ear grin answers my question. “I love it,” he says. “I don’t miss New York City at all.”

He knows my ideal was when we lived and worked in Manhattan and drove up on weekends. Having said that, it’s also true that I enjoy living up here and being a student again. Maybe I’m just a life-long learner. We chat for a while then enjoy a companionable silence for a bit. He asks if I want to listen to more NPR, I nod, and he turns it back up.

~

Back down in our log cabin, this month I’m reading the required chapters of one of Rev. Stephanie’s books, An Ordinary Life Transformed: Lessons for Everyone from the Bhagavad Gita. The questions she poses at the end of each chapter lead me to investigate within. What are my spiritual beliefs? What is my conditioning? I put down her book and press the keys on my laptop, typing out my responses. 

The more I read, the deeper I want to dig into the Bhagavad Gita—an ancient, Hindu sacred text that I’ve never even heard of before. I become obsessed. Over the next few weeks I buy seven different translations of the Gita, mostly ebooks and some physical books too. I sit on the couch with my feet up, Kindle app open on my laptop, with physical books spread out around me too.

Outside, clouds now hide the sun, but every now and then a ray of sunshine beams through the window and lands on my legs. When I find a sloka, or verse, in the Gita that is particularly meaningful to me, I locate that same sloka in each of the seven different editions. Each translation offers a slightly different aspect—also shining a ray of light on the sloka, illuminating another layer of understanding. 

I’ve become a Gita nerd, I laugh at myself obsessing over this ancient text.

I learn that Hinduism is the oldest religion in the world with a recorded written text. Evidence exists that indigenous faith traditions—such as Shamanism, the Aboriginal Dreamtime, Native American Indian spirituality—all date back thousands of years earlier, but they don’t have recorded sacred texts.

I also learn that the Bhagavad Gita literally translates to Song of God. 

I discover the external and metaphoric story of the Gita begins with Prince Arjuna facing a war about the struggle for control of the monarchy—a battle will ensue to decide the succession to the throne. When Arjuna (who represents our humanity) walks onto the battlefield, he becomes consumed with doubt. 

In a tense moment, he faces his enemies and recognizes some of them as members of his own family. 

He faces his uncles and relatives in addition to beloved friends and revered teachers. He turns to his guide, Krishna (who represents our divinity) for advice. The bulk of the Gita is the conversation that ensues, as Krishna explains to Arjuna how he must live his dharma, and that he must cultivate the courage to do so. 

This concept of dharma will take on a special significance for me. We do not have an exact, equivalent English word, for the Hindu word dharma. But its meaning centers around the idea of our “sacred duty,” or “the great work of our lives,” or our “personal legend” as Paulo Coelho puts it in The Alchemist. Or as the poet Mary Oliver writes, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” It can also be thought of as one’s purpose, or ‘what lights you up?’  

I also read how Vivekananda, one of the Hindu monks responsible for introducing Yoga to the Western world, asserts that by reading just the one sloka 2.3, 

“one gets all the merits of reading the entire Gita; for in this one sloka lies embedded the whole Message of the Gita.” 

In this sloka 2.3, Krishna tells Arjuna:

Don’t give in to this impotence! It does not belong in you. Give up this petty weakness, this faintness of heart. You are a world conqueror, Arjuna. Stand up! 

(The Gita nerd in me has provided seven translations of this sloka in the appendix to give a sense of the subtle differences in translations.)

The essence of this sloka is Krishna telling Arjuna to cultivate the courage to fight the battle that is his destiny to fight—a battle that happens to be with members of his own family. 

Two aspects of this sloka become particularly meaningful for me. 

The first is the spiritual principle of cultivating the courage to live one’s dharma.

The second is the fact that Arjuna faces his own family on the battlefield. Isn’t it family with whom we have the most karma?

~

Eight months into a daily spiritual practice (see Chapter 7. Sadhana) one morning something happens that points me towards recognizing my own dharma.

After drinking a latte with Jamie, I go upstairs to the small room I’ve transformed into my own sacred space. Entering the room, a cream-colored, oversized armchair is on the left, a wood-grid window is in front of the comfortable chair, and to the right, the slanted wood-paneled apex ceiling reaches all the way to the floor. As a kind of altar, a small wood shelf attached to the perpendicular wall just to the right of the door displays items that hold meaning for me: smooth and rough gemstones, crystals, a small clay hermit crab shell with a hand sticking out which was made by a university friend and given to me for my 21^st birthday, a framed copy of the Desiderata. When I was a kid, Nan had pinned the Desiderata to the back of her bathroom door. As I sat on the toilet I must have read and re-read that sacred text hundreds, if not thousands, of times. It amuses me now to think of this juxtaposition of the sacred and profane. 

On the floor in one corner of the room, where the slanted roof meets the floor, sit two toy monkeys made from blue cloth and dressed in colorful clothes, holding hands by Velcro strips. They were given to me by two dear friends and colleagues at Penguin, who knew I love how naughty and mischievous monkeys can be. Within a year, I will chuckle at the irony: when a Buddhist monastery takes root across the road and we become friends with a particularly cheeky and irreverent monk, we will affectionately call him a monkey. 

On the oversized armchair, I sit on a dark purple zafu—a meditation cushion. Sitting cross-legged on the zafu, I lean back into the support of the cushiony armchair. I sense into the peace and quiet. I feel safe in this space. 

I lean forward and pick up a small orange lighter from the two-foot-high wood stool in front of my chair. Rolling my thumb over the lighter’s ignition wheel, I feel the warmth as the flame appears. A blue tinge dances at the bottom of the yellow flame. First on the lighter, then on the wick of the white pillar candle. 

Setting the lighter down next to the candle then sitting up straight, I bring my awareness to the vital and alive energy within this human body. Softly engaging the muscles in my core, my spine is firm but not stiff, with my chin slightly down and the crown of my head reaching up. Out loud, I state my intention:

Thank you for the courage to claim my spirituality in the world. 

I set the timer on my iPad for three minutes and do the Sikh breathing meditation that Rev. Stephanie showed me. Holding my hands up next to my shoulders with palms facing forward, I stick my tongue out of my mouth and up against my top teeth. Breathing in through my mouth and out through my nose, I gently keep bringing my attention back to my breath, until the timer chimes, letting me know three minutes is up.

On my iPad I find the recording of Gobinday Mukanday—the courage mantra Rev. Stephanie sang for me that brought me to tears. (see Chapter 9. Courage, New Hampshire, October 2012.) This rendition, by the Sikh musician Snatam Kaur, is a call and response chant. I press play and sing along. It’s as though my heart gently floats on the angelic beams of sound from Snatam Kaur’s melodic voice. I’ve been chanting this mantra in my daily spiritual practice for many months now, but I never tire of it. Rev. Stephanie teaches, “First you do the mantra, and then the mantra does you.” I also sense the truth in what I’ve read about how, like a musical instrument being tuned, chanting tunes one’s soul.

When the chanting ends, I allow a moment of silence. Pausing like this is new for me. I usually rush to fill the silence. But a chord was struck within me, when Rev. Stephanie said, “Silence is the language of the soul.” 

I set the timer to twenty minutes. My hands, palms facing upwards, rest on my thighs. I close my eyes, bring my awareness to my breath, and observe the thoughts as they pass through my mind. When I notice a thought, I remind myself to surrender into the deep and peaceful space within my heart. For twenty minutes, I repeat this practice of simply observing whatever arises in my mind, then bringing my awareness back to my heart and breath. 

I find this practice nourishes me. I take refuge in this sacred space. 

Time and time again, when I feel as though the wind of Life has blown me over, like the keel of a boat, my practice brings me back to center. Whenever I may feel anxious about something, or even just out of balance, after sitting in practice, I feel refreshed and rejuvenated, equanimity restored. Normally, I continue this practice until the timer strums after twenty minutes. 

However, today, after about ten minutes, I hear a voice.

“You know you need to write.” 

This is not a thought passing through my mind. 

It’s as though I receive this voice in my heart.

When the timer does strum, I end the practice by restating my intention aloud: Thank you for the courage to claim my spirituality in the world. And I blow out the candle. Then I pause for a moment and think to myself, What was that? 

A part of me worries I’m hearing voices. But at the same time, I trust my inner knowing of the truth this voice has spoken. 

~

The following Saturday in our seminary class, we sit in circle and it’s my turn to talk about my homework. 

“I want to share something that happened in my daily spiritual practice. I feel vulnerable in talking about it, as I’m worried you’ll think I’m a nut job.” 

Everyone smiles at me and holds the space, encouraging me to continue. 

“Well, similar to all of you, each day I begin my practice by saying aloud my opening intention—mine is, ‘Thank you for the courage to claim my spirituality in the world.’ Then I do a Sikh breathing meditation for three minutes, then I chant along with Snatam Kaur’s rendition of Gobinday Mukanday. For the last twenty of my practice, I meditate or do centering prayer. Well, last week, the strangest thing happened maybe about ten minutes into the centering prayer part of my practice. I heard a voice that said to me, ‘You know you need to write.’”

Stephanie responds, “That’s wonderful.”

It’s as though her smile beams sunshine at me.

“You don’t think I’m nuts?” I say.

“I would offer, ‘on the table,’” she says. “That by chanting the Gobinday Mukanday mantra in your daily practice, and through diving deep into the chapters we’ve been studying in the Bhagavad Gita, you have been cultivating the courage you need to recognize your own dharma. And I would offer that the voice you heard is simply a whisper of your soul, pointing you in the direction of how you can live your dharma.” 

“Mmmm,” I say, taking a moment to pause and reflect. “I have to say that up until recently, I would not have admitted to myself that when I was a little girl, I loved writing books and thought one day maybe I’d be a writer. I guess somewhere along the way I lost the courage I would need to offer my creative gifts in the world. Instead, I got as close as I could to writing, by working in the publishing industry for twenty years. At least I was able to earn a living while being as close to the art and craft of writing as I had the courage to be.”

Rev. Stephanie brings her hands together in prayer position and bows her head towards me. I do the same back to her, then I pass the little angel talking stick to the next woman in our circle. This continues on around the circle, giving each person a turn to share. 

What feels weird to me is that no one seems fazed by what I shared. Not only was I blown away that I heard a voice, but it also feels outrageous to me, to claim that I’m a writer.

In reflection, I’m amused that my dharma could be so obvious to the women in our sacred circle, and yet it took me twenty years of my adult life before I cultivated the courage to claim what I knew when I was a child.

~

This mystical experience inspired me to take writing classes at the Grub Street writing center in Boston while finishing the seminary program. But the Gita still had more to help me on the writer’s path. Especially sloka 2.47. (And yes, seven alternate translations of this sloka are also available in the appendix.)

Focus your mind on action alone, but never on the fruits of your actions. Do not consider thyself the creator of the fruits of thy activities; neither allow thyself attachment to inactivity. 

This idea is liberating for me—living my dharma by cultivating the courage to offer my gifts in the world, metaphorically placing that gift on the table, and remaining detached from outcomes. 

It is through learning how to let go of outcomes, that I am able to pursue the art and craft of writing and live my dharma. By concentrating on the process of writing and cultivating the craft, rather than getting hung-up on the fruits of my actions (that is, the outcome of possible publication and acclaim, which is food for my ego) I can practice being open, but not attached, to outcomes. This allows me to relax and enjoy the process. It takes the pressure off. 

When this spiritual principle permeates my heart, it eases anxiety and suffering. 

Every day, to live my dharma, I have to remember to practice being open to, but not attached to outcomes. 

I also appreciate how this sloka offers an alternative to the Christian idea of sacrifice, which I have observed, is so often associated with martyrdom. Sacrifice — as outlined in this verse of the Gita — comes in focusing on one’s actions, but remaining detached from the outcomes. 

Also the aspect of, “Do not consider thyself the creator of the fruits of thy activities,” points me towards how all creative expression simply flows through me. After I put in my 10,000 hours of practicing the craft of writing, I get to simply be “the garden hose the water flows through” as Joyce Carol Oates famously wrote. The author of the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, points to this same phenomenon: a state of consciousness where people experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. By simply allowing Flow.

Click to read chapter 16.