by Jay Shetty
LETTING GO TO GROW
The broadest intentions often drive efforts to help and support other people. Parents working overtime to put food on the table for their families. Volunteers devoting themselves to a cause. Workers who are motivated to serve their customers. We sense these intentions from the people we encounter, whether it’s the hairdresser who really wants to find a style that suits you or the doctor who takes the time to ask about your life. Generous intentions radiate from people, and it’s a beautiful thing. Time and again we see that if we’re doing it for the external result, we won’t be happy. With the right intention, to serve, we can feel meaning and purpose every day.
Living intentionally means stepping back from external goals, letting go of outward definitions of success, and looking within. Developing a meditation practice with breathwork is a natural way to support this intention. As you cleanse yourself of opinions and ideas that don’t make sense with who you are and what you want, I recommend using breathwork as a reminder to live at your own pace, in your own time. Breathwork helps you understand that your way is unique—and that’s as it should be.
MEDITATION BREATHE
The physical nature of breathwork helps drive distractions from your head. Breathwork is calming, but it isn’t always easy. In fact, the challenges it brings are part of the process.
I’m sitting on a floor of dried cow dung, which is surprisingly cool. It’s not uncomfortable, but it’s not comfortable. My ankles hurt. I can’t keep my back straight. God, I hate this, it’s so difficult. It’s been twenty minutes and I still haven’t cleared my mind. I’m supposed to be bringing awareness to my breath, but I’m thinking about friends back in London. I sneak a peek at the monk closest to me. He’s sitting up so straight. He’s nailing this meditation thing. “Find your breath,” the leader is saying. I take a breath. It’s slow, beautiful, calm.
Oh, wait. Oh okay. I’m becoming aware of my breath.
Breathing in… breathing out…
Oh I’m there…
Okay, this is cool…
This is interesting…
Okay.
This…
Works…
Wait, I’ve an itch on my back—
Breathing in… breathing out.
Calm.
My first trip to the ashram was two weeks long, and I spent it meditating with Gauranga Das every morning for two hours. Sitting for that long, often much longer, is uncomfortable and tiring and sometimes boring. What’s worse, unwanted thoughts and feelings started drifting into my head. I worried that I wasn’t sitting properly and that the monks would judge me. In my frustration, my ego spoke up: I wanted to be the best meditator, the smartest person at the ashram, the one who made an impact. These weren’t monk-like thoughts. Meditation definitely wasn’t working the way I had thought it would. It was turning me into a bad person!
I was shocked and, to be frank, disappointed to see all the unresolved negativity inside myself. Meditation was only showing me ego, anger, lust, pain—things I didn’t like about myself. Was this a problem… or was it the point?
I asked my teachers if I was doing something wrong. One of them told me that every year the monks meticulously cleaned the Gundicha Temple in Puri, checking every corner, and that when they did it, they visualized cleaning their hearts. He said that by the time they finished, the temple was already getting dirty again. That, he explained, is the feeling of meditation. It was work, and it was never done.
Meditation wasn’t making me a bad person. I had to face an equally unappealing reality. In all that stillness and quiet, it was amplifying what was already inside me. In the dark room of my mind, meditation had turned on the lights.
In getting you where you want to be, meditation may show you what you don’t want to see.
Many people run from meditation because they find it difficult and unpleasant. In the Dhammapada the Buddha says, “As a fish hooked and left on the sand thrashes about in agony, the mind being trained in meditation trembles all over.” But the point of meditation is to examine what makes it challenging. There is more to it than closing your eyes for fifteen minutes a day. It is the practice of giving yourself space to reflect and evaluate.
By now I’ve had many beautiful meditations. I’ve laughed, I’ve cried, and my heart has felt more alive than I knew possible. The calming, floating, quiet bliss comes eventually. Ultimately, the process is as joyous as the results.
BREATHWORK FOR THE BODY AND MIND
As you’ve probably noticed, your breathing changes with your emotions. We hold our breath when we’re concentrating, and we take shallow breaths when we’re nervous or anxious. But these responses are instinctive rather than helpful, meaning that to hold your breath doesn’t really help your concentration, and shallow breathing actually makes the symptoms of anxiety worse. Controlled breathing, on the other hand, is an immediate way to steady yourself, a portable tool you can use to shift your energy on the fly.
For millennia, yogis have practiced breathing techniques (called prānāyāma) to do things like stimulate healing, raise energy, and focus on the present moment. The Rig Veda describes breath as the path beyond the self to consciousness. It states that breath is “the life, like one’s own son,” or as Abbot George Burke (also known as Swami Nirmalananda Giri) describes it, “the extension of our inmost life.” In the Mahāsatipaṭṭhāna Sutta, the Buddha described ānāpānasati (which roughly translated means “mindfulness of breathing”) as a way to gain enlightenment. Modern science backs up the effectiveness of prānāyāma for myriad effects including improving cardiovascular health, lowering overall stress, and even improving academic test performance. The meditations I present here and elsewhere in the book are universally used in therapy, coaching, and other meditation practices throughout the world.
When you align with your breath, you learn to align with yourself through every emotion—calming, centering, and de-stressing yourself.
Once or twice a day, I suggest setting aside time for breathwork. Additionally, breathwork is such an effective way to calm yourself down that I use it, and suggest others use it, at points throughout the day when you feel short of breath or that you’re holding your breath. You don’t need to be in a relaxing space in order to meditate (though it is obviously helpful and appropriate when you are new to meditation). You can do it anywhere—in the bathroom at a party, when getting on a plane, or right before you make a presentation or meet with strangers.
TRY THIS: BREATHWORK
Here are powerful breathing patterns that I use every day. They can be used as needed to either induce focus or increase calm.
BREATHWORK PREPARATION
For the calming and energizing breathing exercises I describe below, begin your practice with the following steps.
Find a comfortable position—sitting in a chair, sitting upright with a cushion, or lying down
Close your eyes
Lower your gaze (yes, you can do this with your eyes closed)
Make yourself comfortable in this position
Roll back your shoulders
Bring your awareness to
Calm
Balance
Ease
Stillness
Peace
Whenever your mind wanders just gently and softly bring it back to
Calm
Balance
Ease
Stillness
Peace
Now become aware of your natural breathing pattern. Don’t force or pressure your breath, just become aware of your natural breathing pattern. At the ashram we were taught to use diaphragmatic breathing. To do so, place one hand on your stomach and the other on your chest, and:
Breathe in through your nose, and out through your mouth
When you inhale, feel your stomach expand (as opposed to your chest)
When you exhale, feel your stomach contract
Continue this in your own pace, at your own time
When you inhale, feel that
you are taking in positive, uplifting energy
When you exhale, feel that you are releasing any negative, toxic energy
Lower your left ear to your left shoulder as you breathe in… and bring it back to the middle as you breathe out.
Lower your right ear to your right shoulder as you breathe in… and bring it back to the middle as you breathe out.
Really feel the breath, with no rush or force, in your own pace, at your own time
Breathe to calm and relax yourself
Do this after you’ve done the breathwork preparation above:
Breathe in for a count of 4 through your nose in your own time at your own pace
Hold for a count of 4
Exhale for a count of 4 through your mouth
Do this for a total of ten breaths.
Breathe for energy and focus (kapalabhati)
Do this after you’ve done the breathwork preparation above:
Breathe in through your nose for a count of 4
Then exhale powerfully through your nose for less than a second (You will feel a sort of engine pumping in your lungs.)
Breathe in again through your nose for a count of 4
Do this for a total of ten breaths.
Breathe for sleep
Breathe in for 4 seconds
Exhale for longer than 4 seconds
Do this until you are asleep or close to it.
PART TWO GROW
FIVE PURPOSE
The Nature of the Scorpion
When you protect your dharma, your dharma protects you.
—Manusmriti 8:15
From the outside, being a monk looks like it’s fundamentally about letting go: the baldness, the robes, stripping away distractions. In fact, the asceticism was less a goal than it was a means to an end. Letting go opened our minds.
We spent our days in service; which was also designed to expand our minds. In the course of this service, we weren’t supposed to gravitate to our favorite ways to serve, but rather to help out wherever and however it was needed. To experience and emphasize our willingness and flexibility, we rotated through various chores and activities instead of choosing roles and becoming specialists: cooking, cleaning, gardening, caring for the cows, meditating, studying, praying, teaching, and so on. It took some work for me to truly see all activities as equal—I much preferred to study than to clean up after the cows—but we were told to see society as the organs of a body. No one organ was more important than another; all of them worked in concert, and the body needed them all.
In spite of this equitable coexistence, it became clear that each of us had natural affinities. One might be drawn to tending the animals (not me!), another might take pleasure in cooking (again, not me, I’m an eat-to-live kind of guy), another might get great satisfaction from gardening. We undertook such a breadth of activities that, although we didn’t indulge our particular passions, we could observe and reflect on where they lay. We could experiment with new skills, study them, see how improving them made us feel. What did we like? What felt natural and fulfilling? Why?
If something, like cleaning up after the cows, made me uncomfortable, instead of turning away, I pushed myself to understand the feelings that lay at the root of my discomfort. I quickly identified my hatred for some of the most mundane chores as an ego issue. I thought them a waste of time when I could be learning. Once I admitted this to myself, I could explore whether cleaning had anything to offer me. Could I learn from a mop? Practice Sanskrit verse while planting potatoes? In the course of my chores, I observed that mop heads need to be completely flexible in order to get into every space and corner. Not every task is best served by something sturdy like a broom. To my monk mind, there was a worthwhile lesson in that: We need flexibility in order to access every corner of study and growth. When it came to planting potatoes, I found that the rhythm of it helped me remember verse, while the verse brought excitement to the potatoes.
Exploring our strengths and weaknesses in the self-contained universe of the ashram helped lead each of us to our dharma. Dharma, like many Sanskrit terms, can’t be defined by a single English word, though to say something is “your calling” comes close. My definition of dharma is an effort to make it practical to our lives today. I see dharma as the combination of varna and seva. Think of varna (also a word with complex meanings) as passion and skills. Seva is understanding the world’s needs and selflessly serving others. When your natural talents and passions (your varna) connect with what the universe needs (seva) and become your purpose, you are living in your dharma.
When you spend your time and energy living in your dharma, you have the satisfaction of using your best abilities and doing something that matters to the world. Living in your dharma is a certain route to fulfillment.
In the first part of this book we talked about becoming aware of and letting go of the influences and distractions that divert us from a fulfilling life. Now we’ll rebuild our lives around our guiding values and deepest intentions. This growth begins with dharma.
Two monks were washing their feet in a river when one of them realized that a scorpion was drowning in the water. He immediately picked it up and set it upon the bank. Though he was quick, the scorpion stung his hand. He resumed washing his feet. The other monk said, “Hey, look. That foolish scorpion fell right back in.” The first monk leaned over, saved the scorpion again, and was again stung. The other monk asked him, “Brother, why do you rescue the scorpion when you know its nature is to sting?”
“Because,” the monk answered, “to save it is my nature.”
The monk is modeling humility—he does not value his own pain above the scorpion’s life. But the more relevant lesson here is that “to save” is so essential to this monk’s nature that he is compelled and content to do it even knowing the scorpion will sting him. The monk has so much faith in his dharma that he is willing to suffer in order to fulfill it.
DISCOVERING DHARMA
It is my first summer at the ashram. I’ve cleaned bathrooms, cooked potato curry, harvested cabbages. I’ve washed my own clothes by hand, which is not an easy chore—our robes have as much material as bedsheets, and to scrub out food or grass stains would have qualified as a CrossFit workout of the day.
One day I’m scrubbing pots with the gusto of an overeager apprentice when a senior monk comes up to me.
“We’d like you to lead a class this week,” he says. “The topic is this verse from the Gita: ‘Whatever action is performed by a great man, common men follow in his footsteps, and whatever standards he sets by exemplary acts, all the world pursues.’ ”
I agree to do it, and as I return to scrubbing I think about what I’ll say. I understand the basic gist of the scripture—we teach by example. It taps into my understanding that who you are is not what you say, but how you behave—and it reminds me of a quote often attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi: “Preach the Gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.”
Many of the other monks, like me, didn’t enter the ashram at age five. They’ve been to mainstream schools, had girlfriends and boyfriends, watched TV and movies. They won’t have trouble grasping the meaning of the verse, but I’m excited to figure out how I can make it feel fresh and relevant to their experiences outside the ashram.
The aging computers in our library have an excruciatingly slow internet connection. I’m in India, in the middle of nowhere, and it seems like every image takes an hour to download. After having done research on the speedy computers of a college library, I find the wait painful. But I know that, over in the kitchen, my fellow monks are patiently waiting for water to boil. As they’re doing, I try to respect the process.
During my research, I become fascinated by the psychology of communication. I find studies by Albert Mehrabian showing that 55 percent of our communication is conveyed by body language, 38 percent is tone of voice, and a mere 7 percent is the actual words we speak. (That’s a general guideline, but even in situations where those percentages shift, th
e fact remains that most of our communication is nonverbal.) I lose myself in exploring how we convey our messages and values, analyzing the communication styles of various leaders, and figuring out how it all adds up to be relevant in our lives. Among others, I read about Jane Goodall, who never intended to become a leader. She first entered the wilds of Tanzania to study chimpanzees in 1960, but her research and ongoing work have significantly redefined conservation, attracted women to her field, and inspired hundreds of thousands of young people to get involved in conservation.
Our class gathers in a medium-sized room. I take my place on an elevated, cushioned seat, and the students sit on cushions in front of me. I don’t see myself as above them in any way, except for my elevated seat. We monks have already learned that everyone is always simultaneously a student and a teacher.
When I finish giving my talk, I’m pleased with how it’s gone. I enjoyed sharing the ideas as much as I enjoyed researching them. People thank me, telling me that they appreciated the examples and how I made the ancient verse feel relevant. One or two ask me how I prepared—they’ve noticed how much work I put into it. As I bask in the glow of my satisfaction and their appreciation, I am beginning to realize my dharma—studying, experimenting with knowledge, and speaking.
Everyone has a psychophysical nature which determines where they flourish and thrive. Dharma is using this natural inclination, the things you’re good at, your thrive mode, to serve others. You should feel passion when the process is pleasing and your execution is skillful. And the response from others should be positive, showing that your passion has a purpose. This is the magic formula for dharma.