August Theme: No Mud, No Lotus

By: Seán Johnson, AYC Director

This month our theme at AYC is “No Mud, No Lotus,” drawn from Buddhist meditation trainer Thich Nhat Hanh’s inspiring phrases. The lotus can symbolize many issues. The lotus is revered for the best way it pushes up via the thick heavy mud finally rising to open and bloom in beautiful type and coloration into the sunshine. The dense, fertile mud is important to the creation of the lotus– simply as problem, disclarity, grief, thriller, despair, and different difficulties — can at instances be an important fertilizer for our personal private development.  We honor the lotus and the mud as a mirrored image of an earthy lifestyle and yoga that embraces the nitty gritty as an important a part of a sensible spirituality.

Within the spirit of “No Mud, No Lotus,” I’ve been re-reading a stupendous e-book that was launched to me by my first yoga trainer Doranne Crable some 30 years in the past “Letters To A Younger Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke. I used to be affected by a damaged coronary heart once I first learn the e-book, and had turned to yoga and different religious practices for emotional therapeutic. I discovered nice solace in Rilke’s phrases concerning the worth of being deeply current with unhappiness. I hope you discover some nourishment in his phrases as effectively:

“Maybe many issues inside you may have been remodeled; maybe someplace, someplace deep inside your being, you may have undergone vital modifications when you have been unhappy….If solely it have been doable for us to see farther than our information reaches, and even a bit past the outworks of our presentiment, maybe we’d bear our sadnesses with higher belief than we have now in our joys. For they’re the moments when one thing new has entered us, one thing unknown; our emotions develop mute in shy embarrassment, all the pieces in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the brand new expertise, which nobody is aware of, stands within the midst of all of it and says nothing.

That’s the reason the unhappiness passes: the brand new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our coronary heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is now not even there, is already in our bloodstream. And we don’t know what it was. We may simply be made to imagine that nothing occurred, and but we have now modified, as a home {that a} visitor has entered modifications. We will’t say who has come, maybe we are going to by no means know, however many indicators point out that the longer term enters us on this approach with the intention to be remodeled in us, lengthy earlier than it occurs. 

And that’s the reason it’s so vital to be solitary and attentive when one is unhappy: as a result of the seemingly uneventful and immobile second when our future steps into us is a lot nearer to life than that different loud and unintentional level of time when it occurs to us as if from outdoors. The quieter we’re, the extra affected person and open we’re in our sadnesses, the extra deeply and serenely the brand new presence can enter us, and the extra we are able to make it our personal, the extra it turns into our destiny; and afterward, when it “occurs” (that’s, steps forth out of us to different folks), we are going to really feel associated and near it in our innermost being. And that’s essential.”  

– Rainer Maria Rilke