Truth is What Works

OK. So you may have noticed, like I have, that my blog has come to a screeching halt, as my mom would say. It was about a year ago that I had an experience that made me think of the first yoga sutra and I wanted to write about it on the blog. Then I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool to start with the first sutra and then go through them all one by one?” I realized that it was sort of a monumental project, but decided to try it anyway, giving myself permission to stop if it wasn’t working out. The posts have definitely been fewer this year, but I enjoyed my process of looking up the words in each sutra, reading commentaries, chanting the sutra a lot and waiting for something to write about it.  But now it has been a while and I keep thinking of a book I read recently where the other quoted William James frequently, “Truth is what works.”

It’s time for a little kriya yoga: tapas, svadhyaya, ishvara pranidhana (aka effort, self-study, surrender or act, observe, be open). In my experience, it is important to do practice, to commit to something and do it regularly (I have talked about this in some of my not-so-recent recent posts). That said, I have definitely had the experience of putting practice above self-study or surrender (I’m thinking especially of my ashtanga days) and I can tell you things get out of whack. We get rigid and become ruled by the thing that is supposed to helping or serving us.

So, with my big idea for my blog, it’s not so hard for me to give it up—I knew it was a long shot. But I spend a little time looking at the situation. Am I giving up just because it’s getting hard? Did I just lose my focus? What do I want to get out of writing here? What do I want to give through the blog posts? And other questions like that. My conclusion is that if I’m no longer posting anything, it’s not working out. Time for surrender.

And when I was doing my questioning, I saw that one of the things I liked about my idea to go through the sutras was that I would study them some more, which I think will be my new commitment. I can still go through and re-read them and look at different commentaries and maybe have some new topics for the blog along the way. So kriya yoga is a circle—you act, observe, be open and then you act again based on what you learned.

Hope to “see” you soon.