• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
Mary Reilly Nichols

Mary Reilly Nichols

Yoga • Meditation • Tantric Philosophy

  • Home
  • Study with Mary
    • Ongoing Classes
    • Upcoming Classes & Recent Virtual Classes
    • Corporate Mindful Programs
    • More Interactive Workshops Available
    • Yoga Psychology Training
    • Quotes
  • Videos, Podcasts & Links
    • Videos
    • Podcasts
    • Links
  • Blog
    • Class Talks
    • The Four Goals of Life
    • Yogic Concepts
    • Yoga Practices
    • Classical Philosophy
  • Tantra Newsletters
    • Intention
    • The Heart
    • School of Recognition
    • The Void
    • Fearlessness
  • About
    • About
    • Bio
    • Photo gallery
    • Dedication
  • Contact me
Home » Blog » Class Talks » Absolute Joy

Absolute Joy

Leave a Comment

GustaveDore-Paradiso05

We’ve been listening to Handel’s Messiah and most of the text is from the book of Isaiah – we just heard “He shall feed his flock like a shepherd” which has the line: “take His yoke upon you…” And then we heard the song: “His yoke is easy and His burden is light.”

Yoga is sometimes thought of as a kind of ‘yoking’ or harnessing. You will see puns in the yogic texts like “yoke your mind to the prana” or “yoke the inner energy to the attainment of the crown center.”

We see lots of use of this metaphor in the Bhagavad Gita. The Bhagavad Gita takes place on a battlefield and concerns the conversation between the warrior, Arjuna, and his charioteer, Lord Krishna. Right there on the battlefield, Krishna teaches Yoga. He explains that yoga is not a practice confined to a certain time or space but something that is practiced with every action. He explains that yoga is a kind of orientation toward action in the world.

Krishna uses the word “yukt” which means yoked, united, and it is the root of the word “Yoga.” And Krishna says that a person’s everyday acts can be yoked or harnessed for the goal of enlightenment, if you learn to devote the action to God, who is the embodiment of love. He is saying that everything we do, every action can be transformed into yoga by yoking the action, dedicating it, to the service of the One. The mundane things we do can be harnessed as vehicles to the state of union with God. Buying tea and muffins at the bakery? Offer the action with love to your higher power. Here is a secret: there is no action that cant be offered to That. Remember, Arjuna is about to engage in a terrible battle. Even things we feel are bad, lazy and selfish can be “yukt.” If offered consciously and with humility, it is a real surrender – especially the acts we may feel to be unworthy. Krishna says this skill of yoking can be accomplished by “Abhyasa” (practice) and “Vairagya” (renunciation), and that it brings liberation, the state of absolute Joy. When we work with yogic postures we are practicing this orientation to action. We set our intention to yoke the action to the goal: Joy, liberation, and when we do this simple cognitive gesture, practice it, it becomes habitual, the default setting, and we are able to reap bliss from simple mundane actions.

There is a crucial relationship between vairagya – renunciation – and absolute Joy. Christ likened the “Kingdom of Heaven” which is a state of awareness, to a pearl of great price. That pearl is simple joy,which is purchased with everything you ‘have’. Only one who totally lets go of attachment can experience unconditional joy. People dont understand that this is not a kind of happiness that is dependent upon something. It is freedom from expectations, and surrender. This is possible, easy even, through love.

A salient point here is that detachment is not the same as apathy or negligence. The olympics are coming up and i always remember one time in 2002 when the ice skater Sara Hughes was competing. She was young, and during the program she calculated that it would be virtually impossible for her to win the event, but she thought, i dont have to worry about winning, i can come back in four years, I will just go out and skate for the love of it. And so her action was in a sense full of “vairagya,” renunciation of the results, and because of that, it contained a freedom that perfected her performance and she won the gold! She had both ingredients of yoga going: “Abhyasa,” practice, and “Vairagya,” joyful renunciation. The famous quote from the Isha Upanishad is Tena tyaktena bhunjitha which means, “renounce the world to enjoy it.” Yoga is the marriage of passion and renunciation.

This is the time of year when everyone says Rejoice, Rejoice! (as in the piece we heard from Handel’s Messiah) and sometimes this leads to its opposite because people ask, am I rejoicing? And we say, no, because I’ve got so many things that are wrong – it’s terrible, things not going as i had planned, I’m aging, I’m broke and I’m expected to spend money, by the way… so we find that we’re asked to rejoice – and it ain’t that easy. So yoga is the skill of rejoicing in our reality “as is,” and rejoicing is unconditional.

There are so many levels of peace –

Peace is the consort of Joy, and there are more and more exquisite layers of peace that can be experienced. But we have to make our awareness exquisite in order to perceive them – this is why we do these things with our breath and our consciousness: to sharpen and hone our perception so we can extract a delicate thread of bliss from our daily experiences.

We said we would “yoke” our actions, our asanas, to the goal and we get confused, confounded. What was it again? “Oh yeah, release the results and expectations…how do i do that again…?” Well, here is the easiest thing: Just yoke the prana to love, adore the breath, and by infusing your being with love, which is the highest principle, you will find you have arrived at unconditional Joy. The yoke of love is easy, and its burden, is light.

December 15, 2009
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)

Filed Under: Class Talks

Previous Post: « Assimilation
Next Post: Seamless Robes »

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

The Four Goals of Life

  • The Four Goals of Life : Kama
  • The Four Goals of Life: Dharma
  • The Four Goals of life: Artha: wealth and beauty
  • Moksha: Liberation, the fourth goal of life

Study with Mary

  • Ongoing Classes
  • Upcoming Classes & Recent Virtual Classes
  • Corporate Mindful Programs
  • More Interactive Workshops Available
  • Yoga Psychology Training
  • Quotes

Topics

  • Blog (26)
    • Class Talks (8)
    • Classical Philosophy (2)
    • The Four Goals of Life (4)
    • Yoga Practices (7)
    • Yogic Concepts (5)
  • Classes (1)
  • Featured Posts (9)
  • Media (8)
    • Podcasts (1)
    • Recommended Reading (1)
    • Videos (6)
  • Tantra Newsletters (5)
  • Tantric Philosophy (1)

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 148 other subscribers

Recent Comments

  • Karthik Bala on Feeling it in our bones: Transcending the “Anava Mala”
  • Mary on Moksha: Liberation, the fourth goal of life
  • py on Moksha: Liberation, the fourth goal of life
  • Mary on Pranayama: Breathing Techniques for calming the mind
  • ahli seo terbaik on Pranayama: Breathing Techniques for calming the mind
  • Abhijit C on The Glance of Shiva
  • Mary on The Glance of Shiva
  • Abhijit on The Glance of Shiva
  • Leigha Wendel on The Glance of Shiva
  • Mary on School of Recognition

Before Footer

Featured Posts

Meditation on Vision

Moksha: Liberation, the fourth goal of life

“Of all the instruments of emancipation, Love is supreme.” So wrote the 9th century yogic sage, Shankaracharya who spread the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta: the doctrine of unity. Moksha is the

The Depression of Arjuna

We were listening to the Bhagavad Gita being chanted, and i put it on for a reason. The Bhagavad Gita is pretty much all you would ever really need to follow the path of Yoga. Its name means the “Song

 

The Glance of Shiva

The Glance of Shiva To the Trinity be praise!God is music, God is lifeThat nurtures every creature in its kind.Our God is the song of the angel throngAnd the splendor of secret ways,Hid from all

Life, Death and Immortality

Yama and Nachiketa On Tues. we were talking about death, resurrection, and immortality because it comes up a lot in spiritual texts, in yogic texts and of course in the Easter story. Also, because

Pranayama: Breathing Techniques for calming the mind

Breathing Awareness The core of meditation techniques the world over is breathing awareness. Awareness of the breath refines the mind and leads it into a state of meditation. You will find that

 

The skill of relinquishing

There’s an article in today’s Science Times about kidneys that we may find interesting from a yogic point of view. The kidneys filter impurities from the blood, impurities which are then eliminated. Yoga itself is a purgatory or purifying movement and practice. So we do yoga to purify, eliminate toxins physical, mental and even spiritual. […]

Om

Om as Guru

One who chants Om, which is the closest form of Brahman, approaches Brahman. This liberates one from the fear of the material world. – Rig Veda, circa 1500 BC Rare is the yogic text or scripture that does not extoll Om as a method of Self realization. You will find there that Om is sometimes […]

Flammarion engraving

Intention

You will find that intention on liberation is the means to it. When this intention is full no other means is necessary. But when intention is weak what is the use of a thousand means? Therefore the principal means to liberation is intention alone.” – Tripura Rahasya. (date unknown) There is an interesting story of […]

  • Study with Mary
  • Videos, Podcast & Links
  • Blog
  • Tantra Newsletters
  • About
  • Contact me

Copyright © 2023 Meditation Mary · Site by Forever Ink · Log in