I write this at the end of a family vacation in India. The trip has been a tremendous workshop in seeing through the karma by which I am talked into choosing the isolation of ego over conscious compassionate awareness. In mischievous delight, Life offers me the teaching of belonging through an off-beat and charming movie.
A hardworking and loving housewife becomes the target of her family’s scorn and criticism because of her lack of English fluency. Traveling to New York for her niece’s wedding, she joins an English class and stuns her family by proposing the wedding toast in fluent English. She confesses that what she really learned was not English but to love herself. “So long as I did not love myself, so long as I believed I was unequal,” she says, “I disliked everything I was associated with. I could not belong.”
She could have been speaking for me. On this trip, I had the experience of watching karmic conditioning suborn my practice and turn it into a case for not belonging, a cause for judging the people I love because they were not making choices for freedom.
With our practice, with guidance I received, I was able to move beyond separation and into unconditional love for this being, and by extension for all beings (family included!). I was able to see that I belong as long as the walls of identity do not separate me from the intelligence that animates. Loneliness is an artifact of ego, and harboring differences is ego’s way of maintaining the illusion of a self-separate from life.
I discovered how difficult it is not to be triggered by karma and to avoid the whirlpools of conditioned reactions, especially as we move about in an egocentric karmically conditioned world. It reinforced for me why we cannot practice without Sangha.
Sangha is a composite of the Sanskrit roots san, "together" and gha, "to go." Sangha means “those that walk together.”
I am struck at how apt this description is. To me, Sangha is the sense of belonging that comes from being united in the choices we make for freedom. It is the collective experience of having been given the gift of practice, the shared understanding of the struggle that is associated with making the choice for unconditional love. It is the space where it is safe to practice, where we are supported when we stumble and where our sanity in not questioned when we choose life over karma.
As I walk this path, I am deeply grateful to Sangha, without whom this journey towards freedom, towards belonging in life, towards unconditional love and acceptance would be a truly lonely one.
Homage to the Sangha. Homage to all who are approaching this holy path. Homage to all who follow and establish this holy path.
In gasshÅ,
Ashwini