I have had a very productive day, but I have also stayed up far too late, so this is going to be a short entry. i'll start off speaking about the song I mentioned yesterday - Kinaare. A very short synopsis would be that it is a song about trusting in your own guidance and intuition and courage and i extend that to divinity - and hence we are our own shores.
The lyrics start off with saying how we often search in the for comfort and guidance in others, that in every disturbance or upset that we face in our lives we look for these shores. It then goes onto say, that those who were travelling with us, our friends and families, have done with bit, said their words and flowed past. Even if all our guides, or boatmen, all together abandon us, we have the ability and the will to be our own guide and will sail ourselves through this disturbances. If a small situation or experience, does blow up into something big and fearsome, we will hold onto a hope or a silver lining and find our own shores.
The song speaks of the situation with respect to being in the water - the disturbances are
The lyrics start off with saying how we often search in the for comfort and guidance in others, that in every disturbance or upset that we face in our lives we look for these shores. It then goes onto say, that those who were travelling with us, our friends and families, have done with bit, said their words and flowed past. Even if all our guides, or boatmen, all together abandon us, we have the ability and the will to be our own guide and will sail ourselves through this disturbances. If a small situation or experience, does blow up into something big and fearsome, we will hold onto a hope or a silver lining and find our own shores.
The song speaks of the situation with respect to being in the water - the disturbances are
shown via the word bhanwar- which is a whirlpool, then of courses the references to the boat men, to people flowing past us, to being our own navigator and lastly it mentions nehar- canals (tiny issues) turning into sagar large oceans (big problems).
I love the four main lines of the song that you can hear being repeated -
kaise honge kum
hain jahan hain hum
khud hi toh hain hum
I love the four main lines of the song that you can hear being repeated -
kaise honge kum
hain jahan hain hum
khud hi toh hain hum
khud hi toh hain humn
kinaare
how will these lesssen?
they'll always remain with us and be available to us
we ourselves our
our own shores.
It is one of those believe in yourself, trust in yourself and carry on kinda songs. At different points in my life it has given me solace, I remember staying up late one night in Bali, thinking about how to tackle certain administrative hurdles with the cafe project, and I was so dejected at the lack of solutions that i wanted to shut the laptop and never think about it again. I laid on my back staring up at the ceiling looking for some inspiration and hope and felt a tear trickle down the side of my face - in total exasperation. I picked up the phone telling myself, I shall not allow myself to get into this dark spiral of "everything falling to pieces" at 11:00 pm in the night, and searched for this song on YouTube and played it, singing along - telling myself to be courageous, to keep the faith and find that strength within me to carry on and try, once more.
I pulled it up again last week, when i was practicing my evening flow session, and after it ended i replayed it just because I wanted it to really sink in me and i was smiling as i flowed through a vinyasa practice singing along to Kinaare. The difference between me singing along last year in Bali vs this year, is that last year i was desperately trying to make myself believe these words so i could draw solace from it. But this year, I completely believe in these lyrics and I feel that I am my own strength, that I only need to look within and hear what's happening inside and all answers, comfort, joy will be there - available for me.
This change is something I hugely value of course. The distance from being a in job and seeing myself as someone who wasn't adding all that much value to my own life and also maybe to the lives of others I was working closely with, has helped. A friend of mine said to me " Nayana, take your time, do things you love, give yourself some space to be and breathe, you've been working for 10 years, take a break". Now my father worked in a job for close 40 years before he retired, and he did not need "breaks". Most people his generation did not need breaks - or could not afford breaks. And I thought I needed to be that wired and that committed and dedicated and that the idea of a break in life where I was not being "useful" or "productive" was preposterous.
So soon after leaving my job, I jumped into the Bali project. Thankfully, now looking back, that did not work out. And so here I am genuinely "taking a break". Well, not really, Im still working as a yoga teacher - but I am not freaking out about how much money I am making, how free I am in the day, how my Gmail calendar looks quite empty most days of the week. I view as the free time as me time, where I can read and write and spend all the time i want with my parents and friends and whoever else I wanted. And there is immense value in these things.
My biggest joy is the time I have to share meals with people i love. There is nothing more joyful for me than a table full of bounty, with my parents or my friends sitting around, sharing our daily lives, speaking about what's happening in the world, gazing at sunsets, laughing uncontrollably sometimes. The happiness it has added to my life in unparalleled to anything i have experienced before. It is not the crazy high of being in a Coldplay concert (OMG! that is a mad high though), but it is a more stable subtle everyday sweet juicy happiness that eventually flows through in anything else i am doing with my life.
One of the things I did do was join a Bhagawad gita course with a group and a teacher guiding us, we meet every 2 weeks and it is quite intense but I am enjoying. It was one of those things i had often wished I had more time for, and now that I have it - im using it for exactly that. I have always wanted to learn an instrument or learn how to sing and learn how to dance an Indian classical style and Im suitably located in Bangalore that allows me those options. And I'm going do it.
The one thing I do wish I was doing more of is writing. All I need is to sit and open Blogger, stare at the white space in front of me and start typing and words will flow. i just need to do it more - hopefully i will get better at it.
And the one thing I am finally doing more of is teaching yoga. I have often spoken about how I am terrible at public speaking, my inside quiver and I definitely shiver on the outside. Jerry Sienfeld in one of his shows spoke about public speaking - here's the video. That is exactly how I feel about speaking in front of an audience. But that changed and that changes, every time I sit at the seat of a teacher in a yoga class. I belong. And everything that then comes to me (which I believe to be from a very divine source) is transmitted (hopefully) fluently to my students. I have always loved teaching yoga, but I loved the practice too much to be a full time teacher and earn a living from it. I somehow felt I would taint it with money, or it will lose it's sacredness or that I will lose the joy of it if i were to take up a teaching job and put myself on a schedule of sorts. The money aspect, I am learning to deal with, and sacredness I have still retained, in fact my thirst for knowledge regarding the subject has increased so much, i am going deeper and deeper and thankfully in the more sacred paths. And I have avoided putting myself on a schedule by not teaching at a studio and sticking to a private practice.
I'll end this post with the concept of ikigai (生き甲斐) which I will speak more about in the next post. Ikigai,. a japanese concept, is the idea of following your bliss or finding that sweet spot where the things you are good, the things you can make money from, the things that the world needs and the things that give you joy --- are the same. Here's a lovely little post about Ikigai and an accompanying image :
kinaare
how will these lesssen?
they'll always remain with us and be available to us
we ourselves our
our own shores.
It is one of those believe in yourself, trust in yourself and carry on kinda songs. At different points in my life it has given me solace, I remember staying up late one night in Bali, thinking about how to tackle certain administrative hurdles with the cafe project, and I was so dejected at the lack of solutions that i wanted to shut the laptop and never think about it again. I laid on my back staring up at the ceiling looking for some inspiration and hope and felt a tear trickle down the side of my face - in total exasperation. I picked up the phone telling myself, I shall not allow myself to get into this dark spiral of "everything falling to pieces" at 11:00 pm in the night, and searched for this song on YouTube and played it, singing along - telling myself to be courageous, to keep the faith and find that strength within me to carry on and try, once more.
I pulled it up again last week, when i was practicing my evening flow session, and after it ended i replayed it just because I wanted it to really sink in me and i was smiling as i flowed through a vinyasa practice singing along to Kinaare. The difference between me singing along last year in Bali vs this year, is that last year i was desperately trying to make myself believe these words so i could draw solace from it. But this year, I completely believe in these lyrics and I feel that I am my own strength, that I only need to look within and hear what's happening inside and all answers, comfort, joy will be there - available for me.
This change is something I hugely value of course. The distance from being a in job and seeing myself as someone who wasn't adding all that much value to my own life and also maybe to the lives of others I was working closely with, has helped. A friend of mine said to me " Nayana, take your time, do things you love, give yourself some space to be and breathe, you've been working for 10 years, take a break". Now my father worked in a job for close 40 years before he retired, and he did not need "breaks". Most people his generation did not need breaks - or could not afford breaks. And I thought I needed to be that wired and that committed and dedicated and that the idea of a break in life where I was not being "useful" or "productive" was preposterous.
So soon after leaving my job, I jumped into the Bali project. Thankfully, now looking back, that did not work out. And so here I am genuinely "taking a break". Well, not really, Im still working as a yoga teacher - but I am not freaking out about how much money I am making, how free I am in the day, how my Gmail calendar looks quite empty most days of the week. I view as the free time as me time, where I can read and write and spend all the time i want with my parents and friends and whoever else I wanted. And there is immense value in these things.
My biggest joy is the time I have to share meals with people i love. There is nothing more joyful for me than a table full of bounty, with my parents or my friends sitting around, sharing our daily lives, speaking about what's happening in the world, gazing at sunsets, laughing uncontrollably sometimes. The happiness it has added to my life in unparalleled to anything i have experienced before. It is not the crazy high of being in a Coldplay concert (OMG! that is a mad high though), but it is a more stable subtle everyday sweet juicy happiness that eventually flows through in anything else i am doing with my life.
One of the things I did do was join a Bhagawad gita course with a group and a teacher guiding us, we meet every 2 weeks and it is quite intense but I am enjoying. It was one of those things i had often wished I had more time for, and now that I have it - im using it for exactly that. I have always wanted to learn an instrument or learn how to sing and learn how to dance an Indian classical style and Im suitably located in Bangalore that allows me those options. And I'm going do it.
The one thing I do wish I was doing more of is writing. All I need is to sit and open Blogger, stare at the white space in front of me and start typing and words will flow. i just need to do it more - hopefully i will get better at it.
And the one thing I am finally doing more of is teaching yoga. I have often spoken about how I am terrible at public speaking, my inside quiver and I definitely shiver on the outside. Jerry Sienfeld in one of his shows spoke about public speaking - here's the video. That is exactly how I feel about speaking in front of an audience. But that changed and that changes, every time I sit at the seat of a teacher in a yoga class. I belong. And everything that then comes to me (which I believe to be from a very divine source) is transmitted (hopefully) fluently to my students. I have always loved teaching yoga, but I loved the practice too much to be a full time teacher and earn a living from it. I somehow felt I would taint it with money, or it will lose it's sacredness or that I will lose the joy of it if i were to take up a teaching job and put myself on a schedule of sorts. The money aspect, I am learning to deal with, and sacredness I have still retained, in fact my thirst for knowledge regarding the subject has increased so much, i am going deeper and deeper and thankfully in the more sacred paths. And I have avoided putting myself on a schedule by not teaching at a studio and sticking to a private practice.
I'll end this post with the concept of ikigai (生き甲斐) which I will speak more about in the next post. Ikigai,. a japanese concept, is the idea of following your bliss or finding that sweet spot where the things you are good, the things you can make money from, the things that the world needs and the things that give you joy --- are the same. Here's a lovely little post about Ikigai and an accompanying image :
Image : Toronto Star and Medium
I think I am finally following my bliss.
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