The surprising ways Ashrams actually produce growth

I've been living in the Ashram for three months now, dedicating much of my time to the prescribed spiritual practices like meditation, Hatha Yoga, Chanting, Karma yoga, etc. These practices have been truly wonderful—my body has undergone significant positive changes, my mind feels different, and while there’s still plenty of mental clutter, I’ve had many moments of genuine stillness which has been profound to experience. Surprisingly, however, I'm starting to realise that the other 'non-practice' facets of living in the Ashram, are what actually creates the most potential for growth. These facets are both the constant demand of the structure and routine, and how it forces individuals to be in constant contact with each other.

The Ashram really is a highly spiritual, generous, giving, peaceful or harmonious place. The classes are wonderful, and rightly, it attracts people who wish to deepen their sense of spirituality, the connection to the prescribed practices or different parts of themselves and tune out from the distractions of the material world. The Ashram is also highly demanding environment though, and as one spends longer there, it naturally produces uncomfortable feelings & states of mind. It also gently but surely, provokes the full spectrum of interpersonal dynamics amongst its long-term residents: relationships form, abruptly end, or fade away, envy develops, stories are shared and fabricated, conflicts occur within groups, out-casting happens, leaders emerge, resentment festers, and so on. In short, all the normal individual and group behaviours we see in the social world, are also present in the Ashram, if not more!!

Before arriving, I naively believed that the negativity I encountered in the real world wouldn't exist in the Ashram. I imagined it to be a perfect place. So, when I started noticing the subtle yet powerful dynamics at play, I was caught off guard. My mind spiraled into disapproving and frustrated thoughts that feel a bit embarrassing to admit: "Isn't this an Ashram? Shouldn't it be totally peaceful?" and "Wow, I guess it's all just a waste of time, like everything else." After much reflection and reading, I realised that the challenges and tests people face in the Ashram are exactly what make it so effective. The Ashram is designed to bring out and confront the darker and weaker parts of ourselves, helping us rise above them. 

Swami Satyananda, who dedicated his life to teaching in Ashrams, understood that they could be challenging environments for people, but he believed this difficulty was essential for change. In the quotes below, he highlights the importance of facing suppressed and negative emotions and rising above them. He also stresses that unpleasant circumstances are crucial for awakening hidden aspects of the psyche and starting the transformation process.

“All the emotions which have been avoided and suppressed need to come out. The karma which was holding up one's evolution will have to be worked out. The inherent desires and ambitions have to be exhausted and expressed, otherwise they merely remain in a dormant state in the mind as barriers between one's present state of existence and the absolute experience.” —  Swami Satyananda Saraswati, Sadhana: The Path of Transformation

  “Samskaras of the past have to be burned; disease, discomfort, disturbance, insult, unpleasant situations all help to purge foreign matter from the soul. This is the meaning of purification.” — Swami Satyananda Saraswati, Sadhana: The Path of Transformation

What is the spiritual path? 

The spiritual path is a personal journey toward spiritual ideals. There are numerous accessible spiritual texts and practices designed to guide individuals along the way. Stories of Gurus or Swamis who have undergone profound transformation are abundant. Studying their lives, following their teachings, or simply being in their presence can inspire progress. From various sources, I’ve gathered key principles and values that appear to define a deeply spiritual or evolved person. While enlightenment is unique to each individual, these qualities, in my view, are universal to all seekers. 

-  Remain equanimous in all situations 

- Authentically feel and express universal love to all beings 

- To be free from attachment to material possessions or sense of personal identity 

- To fully live in the present moment 

- To live a life of selfless action 

- Feel a radiant inner peace and as such are unshaken by chaos or conflict around them 

- To have resolved inner turmoil and conflicts 

 

The Ashram shows you where you stand

Early on in my Ashram experience, despite fully engaging with the practices, my flaws compared to the spiritual ideal became glaringly obvious. While this was quite uncomfortable at the time, I now see it as a unique and precious gift. In the outside world, even though I knew I was far from enlightened, I had enough escape mechanisms and coping strategies to keep the truth buried. Whenever something uncomfortable surfaced, I could just distract myself with activities that made me feel good, skillfully avoiding any harsh self-confrontation. It seems almost normal in our culture for people to drift through life without facing such truths. Anyway, here are a few examples of situations that brought out some unpleasant truths about myself: 

-  I recall the anxiety I felt around my first solo breakfast shift and how disappointed I felt when not everyone in the Ashram loved the unique ingredients I selected 

- My shyness meant I struggled to stick up for myself with others who were constantly critiquing my cleaning 

- I struggled to balance my social needs with the needs to grow intellectually 

- Resentment festered towards others who were making for friends

- Resentment grew towards people who I didn't see as taking spirituality seriously 

- I felt parts of me enjoy seeing certain people being excluded

- An inability to focus on basic tasks, especially when I sensed conflict or unease around someone

- A lack of courage around having difficult conversations and expressing what I needed to others

As uncomfortable as these experiences were, they were the moments that revealed the most and led to significant growth. As I was practicing mediation and yoga so frequently, I came to be far better at observing and distancing myself from my inner reactions. Somehow, I was able to compare myself to my spiritual ideal, and then my personality commenced evolving. For example, I overcame my shyness to stand up for myself and my boundaries, developed tolerance & acceptance towards behaviours & people I disliked, learned to balance and manage inner conflicts, cultivated the discipline needed to focus, identified unhelpful thought patterns rooted in habit rather than reality, and retrained those patterns to be more positive and life-affirming.

I hope readers can grasp the points I've aimed to share through my honest example in this blog. Life in the Ashram, with its relationships and the stress they bring, makes it impossible to ignore the negative aspects of oneself as they naturally and frequently arise. Yet, being in the Ashram, blending these challenges with spiritual practices, nurtures the process of transcending these parts of oneself.

What I hoped from the Ashram was an environment of peace and harmony, where I could easily commit myself to spiritual practices. In the end, my experience was quite different, which I am truly grateful for. 

 

A New Chapter

I gave my mother a call this morning as I was sitting in the town's trendy health foods cafe. We had a lovely catch up as we always do. She's had surgery recently on her foot where she developed some kind of debilitating arthritis condition. But her recovery time requires her to be immobile for 3 months or so, making her engagement with the world around her fairly limited. I've been away for a long time too, its coming up to four months since I've been living in an Ashram. My stay there means my contact with the outside world is also fairly limited and so for each of us the regular catch up had more rigour than normal. 

We discussed the normal kinds of things like how certain family members are going, how are we progressing with our immediate goals and the evolving ideas around our potential futures, perceptions around the nature of the outer world around us. I told her specifically, that I had decided to sit myself down in the local cafe this morning to just, write. I said that I hadn't really written seriously for a long time, but that in this moment I'd recognised my experience of the Ashram had forced me to. 

In the Ahram there is always so much happening both between people in the living arrangement, and internally for any spiritual aspirant. I had committed myself to the practices as thoroughly as I could have, and learnt as much as I could about the tradition I was now immersed in. In recent weeks though, my reading dropped off, admittedly, partly due to finding a chapter from the Upanishads that really required a lot of digesting. Also, my focus on the practices themselves had dropped off somewhat too. When this happens, a genuine seeker has to ask themselves why. Am I losing faith in this process, this tradition? Are there other desires arising in me that are causing me to deviate from my intention? Are any of the desires healthy...?

As the tradition, and well a lot of Eastern spiritual thought will tell you, the answer to these questions arises when one creates space within oneself. This occurred for me quite successfully four days ago on Sunday afternoon when I decided to use my limited time off to go for a bush stroll in the neighbouring forest. As I tried to observe every thought, and sensation as I traversed the incredibly natural and bushy realm, it occurred to me in a flash of insight, that was far more illuminous than the typical kind of activity that seeks to distract the soul from itself. 

The insight arrived in a series of questions to myself: Maybe you're full? Maybe you've absorbed too much? Maybe there's simply not enough room inside to put it in? Then I started to answer these questions with more questions, however, I could tell these were now answers because of their positive tone which reflected excitement and relief: Maybe, just maybe, it's time to write again!!?? Maybe you've reached that point!!?? Maybe what you feared was a dwindling of commitment, was in fact, the opposite - an inner requirement to spiel, describe, articulate, share!!

Of course, this was where I was at. I mean if I was to just step back from myself for just a bit, the amount of experience and ideas that have been trailing through my mind recently is so large that I wouldn't be able to actually discern it all properly. This is perhaps the point of it all, that there was too mush going on internally, and so it was time to document. 

In response to this story, Mum suggested I start up a blog, because she knew how much I had written in the past and she knew that I loved delving deeply into ideas and to make sense of experience, but that I should I find a way to communicate these with the world, rather in relative solitude or isolated conversations. 

Immediately, following that conversation I looked up how to start a blog and for no reason in particular chose Blogger over WordPress. When I signed in through Gmail, I found a bunch of blogs that apparently, I'd already written from 2013. Blogs that were fairly interesting, deep and compelling to my reading eyes. It turns out that I had actually started this project about 12 years ago, which stopped abruptly enough for to me completely forget about it.

I don't really know why this first attempt at blogging stopped so definitively. But I do know now that any commitment or resolve that I'm making right now is far stronger than what would have been those years ago. 

I won't dish out those reasons right now, but I will disclose my resolve. This will be to regularly (at least once per fortnight), post to this blog. At this stage I'm not exactly sure what the posts will be about, or even why I'm posting aside from an obvious need to communicate my experience. Some of the posts will be direct reflections from my experience, some may be educational around topics that have recently fascinated me, they might be the lyrics to songs or the songs themselves. I'm sure as time progress a style and intent for the posts will refine and crystalise into something more particular. As for now, it will stand as it is, quite loose. 

What I can say assuredly, however, is that I am committed to a spiritual path. This is my direction I've chosen as an individual which will surely take me down and through many different types of experience. Thos blog, is ultimately a reflection of that journey

Thinking too much

Do you think too much? Do you come up with great ideas, but dont follow through with them because you gave it so much thought that you managed to think your self out of it? And then you ended back where you were originally, excpet worse; because when you were thinking about whether or not you should follow through with this amazing idea, you stopped living in the present. Through that thinking process, which you probably enjoyed - because you like to entertain ideas in your mind - you ignored all the joys that your present situation has to offer. When we do this for too long, we start to forget about how good our present situation is. The only way to enjoy it, is to dream of a better one! And bitch about this one!

And so we become dreamers and thinkers, who mean well, but grow increasignly less jovial about our life. We start to lose control and belief in ourselves, and we get to a point where we feel like our ideas will never become anything! Our hopes and aspirations will never become anything. We sit, stuck in a stale mate, never progressing, never ending a game of wishing. And this all occurs because of thought. But why does this thought occur? and stop us from mobillising?

Unfortunately in this society we are taught to think and not feel. Our educational system encourages decisions based on thought, and has little room for decisions based on feeling. For those of us who are truly the earths creatures, we are guided by our connection to the earth, and the feelings we receive from the universe. If your thoughts are ideas, and become easily made into a tornado of such, then you are placing too much importance on the thought process. Your ideas are beautiful. They are what makes this world shine bright, but you must remember that you never need to justify them. You must learn about your ability for inner knowingness, and always trust this, without needing further thought.

Our thought becomes the clouds in a beautiful blue sky. They clog up the beautiful clearness but fullness of that deep blue, and move in the way of the sun and its rays stopping its energy from reaching its home. Your life is that home, and you should not let those thoughts clog up and kill your life. Learn how to trust your inner knowingness.

Ambition and desire

As soon as we have personal desire and ambition, we isolate ourselves. We become focused on the goal, on the future objective, and put this before what is really important. I myself have done this on many occasions, put my work before my friends and family. I have felt many times that I need to work to keep my friends and family. The reality is that the more I put emphasis on my work, the further I am from my family and friends, and my soul wains every time. But every time, soon after I feel this burning desire to chase again, to give myself a goal, to get myself out of my situation and into a better one. I start to hate my situation, and bitch about the people in it, because I start to dream of better people in some distant world if I do this and this. Its this crazy cycle. I know that the pursuit is the devil in me, and I remove myself from it when it comes, but I always find myself coming back to it. Why?

Its not hard to come up with a few answers for this one. We are reminded every day of the possibilities this world has to offer us. We are taught to idolise famous people, sports people, models, musicians, which creates gaps between classes in society. We have the lower people, the middle, the upper middle and the elite. Everyone is reminded of the elite, and now in this prosperous society which is full of opportunities, we are told that anyone can achieve whatever they want. Anybody can do anything. You can be whoever you want to be! This is what the modern self help people are teaching to people. They say that you can model the habits and adopt the beliefs of people who have reached success and then you can be just like them - looked up to, respected, deserving, earning lots of money. Do we not see that this whole system is a giant trap!? Is it not designed to keep us wanting, to keep us moving up an endless scale, which leaves us forgetting about what is really important. Why is society set up like this? Why does society push away from friends and family, rather than bring us closer?

Well I suppose that from a functionality perspective, a nation of ambition would equal a nation of productivity. A nation of productivity has a good economy, can achieve more greatness in many things, which can build a reputation amongst other countries in the world. In other words, our society is programmed for unhappiness. Our society is founded on ego, where the best are rewarded and the worst are not. This is why everyone is unhappy. How many people do we know are truly happy and content with their lives? How many people feel at peace with their lives? I can sense sadness in almost every person I meet. Even when I go out socialising and people are at their finest, expressing themselves loudly and exuberantly. And yes, even the finest people, the intelligent and the successful, they too have these deep anguishes in side them. In fact, most of these figures may perhaps be the worst off, because they are the ones who have truly separated themselves from society. Often they have lived lives of chasing and dreaming, overcoming and backstabbing to reach their goals. They are the ones who are truly alienated. In some cases, the ones who truly have broad purpose, the true actors and true leaders, or musicians or sportsman, have realised that their talents/abilities are not theirs, they are merely gifts from God unto which that person is born to share with the world. For the truly talented, it will not be hard for you to remove yourself from your work and spend time with your family, because your work seems fairly easy for you. As long as you remember that your gift is not yours, it is Gods, your gift is not used for your personal achievement, but for humanity, then you will become closer with the important parts of this world, rather then farther.

Even when I say these words, my depth of feeling is to find my great talent. We all want to be talented and gifted don't we? The truth is that we are. We all have different streams of purpose. The less intelligent people will generally have greater capacity for caring and loving. These people, just by emitting this care and love to the world is a gift. Any one of these people who realise that this is their true gift, and devote themselves to this gift selflessly, will overtime receive recognition anyway.

Thankfully, society recognises good will. Us caring people tend to forget that it is a talent, because it is so easy for us, but we must remember that it is. We can often feel like we are unappreciated for what we do, and when we feel like this, we must firstly become aware, then secondly replace this feeling with joy, by realising that you are doing Gods work as he set it out for you. When people disrespect you, and or take advantage of your gifts, or your gifts have expired on that person (meaning that you have cared all you can care for this person, or you have said all you can say) you must be able to let yourself go from them. We are not here to save individuals individually, but we work together by spreading across the globe by putting our self in a place for some time, then moving on. Because when we leave, your message becomes very important for the learner. This is when they realise how it feels to have Gods touch of human selfless care and/ or wisdom be with them - when it is without.