Teaching Moments: Place of Refuge

In this Teaching Moments episode, Sangha member Arati and Satyam discuss their experiences of finding refuge in the heart, our meditation practice, and the sangha. Episode notes can be found below.

Arati:

Talking about my practice is not something I’m very familiar with…I feel like I am still trying to learn, understand, and feel for what it means to have a spiritual practice. The talks that the sangha members gave at the intensive really resonated and inspired me to try and open up as I could relate to a lot of what they talked about and how they used their practice during rough times.

The last couple of years have been very turbulent for me and I can’t say I’m totally on the other side so a lot of my experience is still current. A 10 year marriage ended and with it took a lot of people I considered family, I lost my house and most of my belongings, I left a job that I worked really hard to get to where I was and with all that change…so much else was shaken up and lost. It felt like my entire world and what I relied on for stability, security, safety, and comfort was all pulled out from underneath me in a blink of an eye. It felt so quick that I didn’t know who I was anymore. When people would ask me how I felt..it felt like I was jello, in the in-between…it was so scary and uncomfortable. 

Early on when these changes started happening, I went to Shoshoni for a weekend training with Satyam and Abhaya and when I returned to the east coast, I signed up for an online yoga teacher training with them. During that training, everything was falling apart and it was so hard for me to show up for those classes let alone meditate on my own each day. But ever since I connected to this practice, it’s been there for me when I didn't know what else to do.

I had always dreamed of going to India and what better of a time than when you’ve lost everything? And because I have this practice and have been warned over and over throughout the years…I knew I wasn’t going to find anything out there to solve my problems or the key to my happiness but staying or going was equally tough. So I left my job and went on a big adventure with my new partner. I was traveling the world and in a newish relationship and although I’m so grateful for both of these experiences, after having my life dismantled, it definitely wasn’t a vacation.

I won’t go too much into my traveling and it did strengthen my gratitude for these teachings and for Babaji but I also went through a lot more discomfort on so many different levels. Because of the state I was in internally, the chaos, uncertainty, and unfamiliarity all around me was so challenging physically, emotionally, and mentally. I kept making a (small) effort to do my practice but I have been exhausted by life and my mind felt like it was torturing me when I would sit to meditate. Still feeling pretty lost, I reluctantly reached out to Abhaya and asked about spending some time at Konalani.

On the Big Island there is a place called the city of refuge where, in ancient Hawaiian times, if you committed a crime and you made it to this point, you would be absolved of your punishment, which was typically death. That sounds pretty extreme and I wasn’t running from a crime but even though I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, getting myself to the ashram felt like making it to my own place of refuge.

I was right, it hasn’t been easy. Being at the ashram is not an escape from any of your problems and most days, they are highlighted for me. But I’ve been able to get some clarity and reconnect to my practice in a big way. I have a reason to wake up each morning and am committed to doing my practice each day no matter what. I’ve got a place to sleep, food to eat, work to do each day and the support of the sangha. When I have to face my stuff - feeling lost, confused, disoriented, sad, overwhelmed - I can be in the flow of the ashram and I can remember that I am here to do this work.

My idea of a refuge has really deepened during my time here. I asked Babaji how I should work while I am here and he said to stay centered and when I feel myself getting drawn out to come back. He’s also pulled me aside during seva and told me to stop worrying and that I need to relax. 

I’ve always liked Babaji’s surfing references because I surf a little bit and I found this quote where he said: “It is a lot like surfing: there is a wave of energy causing the transformation in your life. Your job is to keep centered and to keep your balance. That means you don’t go to extremes mentally and emotionally. You don’t get overly excited or overly conservative. Try to stay centered and balanced.”

It’s been hard for me to find this state of being centered and balanced because my mind really wants to analyze all the loss and feel all the emotions over and over. It hit me during a movie yoga night when there was a really intense scene happening and I could feel myself getting pulled into the drama, feeling the anxiety and anticipating what was coming. Babaji told us all to take a breath and in that moment, I released the grip on the scene and felt a sense of relief and peace inside. 

It was so easy to realize that the movie was separate from me and the emotions I was feeling weren’t me. It made me wonder what if surrendering my own stuff was that easy? I truly want to experience my inner self as a place of refuge that’s always with me and can’t be taken away. So, I’ve really been trying to connect to this place inside and cultivate my inner refuge while I am meditating, while I am doing seva, and everywhere in between by recognizing that I am feeling heavy, tight, anxious or having negative thoughts and drawing my attention inside, relaxing, and allowing there to be calm.  

In Spiritual Practice, Babaji says: “What we are looking for when we meditate is peace of mind. Peace is the most incredibly valuable thing in the whole universe. Our minds are always active. They try to define us through our experiences.Though that may be useful to a degree, it is not the truth. The truth of who we are and what we are lies beyond the chatter and the noise of our minds. When we move beyond the chatter we will find clarity and a real sense of being present. We will begin to have a deeper understanding of our existence.” 

I am so grateful to have an actual place of refuge to go to and for the support I’ve received over the years and especially recently. It’s helped me prioritize my practice and start to feel my feet on the ground again. Mostly, it has helped me feel a glimpse of my inner self that is beyond the chatter, beyond anything external, so that I can feel safe, secure, and at peace no matter what.

Satyam:

A line that really stuck with me from Arati’s presentation was “I truly want to experience my Inner Self as a place of refuge that’s always with me and can’t be taken away”… I do too, and I’m sure you do as well. As she taught, We have a place of refuge in our hearts, a place we can go to at any time to dissolve the obscurations of daily life. But like the place of refuge here in Hawaii, It takes effort to get there, and effort to remain there, but no matter how much effort it takes what’s most important is that it really is there. 

And as Arati taught, we can find refuge in our practice if we are willing to seek it out throughout our daily practices, tasks and activities. We have to find refuge in each repetition of the mantra, each weed we pull, each breath we take, each dish we wash, each posture we practice... In classic non-dual understanding, the place of refuge is only revealed to those willing to walk with refuge. As the Shiva Sutras put it, ‘the path is only revealed to the revealer’— the path to the place of refuge is only revealed to those who are seeking refuge in their path. 

This unique effort is of course nothing new, but a foundational topic in every practice. How do perform mantra in a way that leads us to its place of refuge? We can’t yell the mantra, or do them faster, to accelerate the process— we start from where we’re at, and work our way from the vibration in the mouth, to the throat to the heart. The same goes for the breath— you can’t just jump into breath awareness, the mind pushes and pulls it immediately. You have to lengthen and smooth out the breath, and then slowly but surely release that effort and arrive at the experience of refuge in breath awareness. Swami Rudrananda always taught that the WIsh to Grow practice begins at a superficial level, none of us mean it at first, but we simply repeat each repetition with a little more sincerity, and eventually we arrive. 

The topic of refuge inspires a deeper appreciation for how we practice, not just what we practice, which has been at the forefront of Babaji’s teaching over the past year and a half. When he says we need to learn to relax as we practice, in my opinion this doesn’t mean we relax and then practice, as if they are two separate things, but that we learn how to use our practice to help us relax, that we use our practice not to blow up our karma, but release ourselves from it. Babaji recently used the analogy of dropping something out of your hand as a way of understanding surrender— when you use each mantra as a way to release, each breath as a way to release, then you become released. This is what the topic of refuge means to me, and how it has opened up my practice. 

So let’s take time to walk through our practice with refuge and see if the path to the place of refuge in our hearts naturally unfolds for us step by step.