Dish Karma: Speedy Sutra 3.25
To live you gotta eat, and to eat you gotta dirty a dish— so it’s only logical that living requires that we do some dishes. Dish Karma, as with all karma, is unavoidable. The very fact that you’re eating means there are dishes to do, just like the very fact that you are living means there is karma to clean up. This goes for all yogis, from the newcomer to the enlightened practitioner, as the Shiva Sutras teach: “For an embodied being, prārabdha karma is unavoidable. The yogi may be just like Śiva or they may be an ordinary person; prarabdha karma … cannot be cast aside or abandoned.”
Sitting to meditate can sometimes feel daunting, like staring at a sink full of dishes. When faced with this reality we tend to just ‘look the other way’, and dirty another dish with some kind of distraction. But as we just saw in the Sutras, our karma, our ‘dishes’, cannot be cast aside or abandoned. As Sri Shambhavananda also teaches: “If you find yourself in a particular arena of life, in this or that situation, that is where your karma has taken you, and you have to work it out. If you just run away from it all the time and don’t deal with it, then you have to come back again. So you might as well confront your issues now. Then you can avoid wasting about twenty years to get focused enough to begin to meditate again.”
That’s why the ashram is here— to not only provide you with the soap, the sponge, and the running water to help you do your dishes, but also the support and guidance to make the entire process ENJOYABLE! Yes, you read that right, MEDITATION and DISHES CAN BE ENJOYABLE! In fact, they must be enjoyed in order to be done at all, according to the remaining part of the earlier Shiva Sutra: “Prārabdha karma cannot be overcome unless it is enjoyed. For an embodied being, prārabdha karma is unavoidable. The Yogi may be just like Śiva or they may be an ordinary person; prarabdha karma must be overcome by being enjoyed. It cannot be cast aside or abandoned.”
Two Minute Meditation: Sitting in your chair, keep your body still in a relaxed way— just like holding a dish still to clean it. Visualize your breath as the gentle running water of the faucet, let it run over you for a moment. As you feel the breath pouring over you, begin to scrub your dish clean with the sponge of mantra. The lineage mantra of Shambhavananda Yoga is “Om Namah Shivaya”, I bow with respect to the Inner Self. And when all of those elements are in play— we add the magic ingredient, JOY! Yes, joy. (Which literally happens to be a real type of dish soap, lol!) Now try to work for two minutes in this way and watch as your load starts to lighten, one breath, one mantra, one joyful moment at a time.