Growing Your Teachings

An essay doesn’t start as an essay, it starts as a seed. A seed of inspiration that floats through the space of our practice and lands in the fertile soil of our hearts. As Swami Rudrananda tells us, the work of a seed breaking through it’s shell is a tremendous force which he likens to the ‘wish to grow’, and that wish is how that seed reach through the soil into the light. Writing an essay is first and foremost about growing, and second about documenting that growth in a way that can help others along the path. We don’t write an essay, we grow it, and we grow with it. 

A seed breaks soil, and eventually forms a stalk. That stalk forms leaves and eventually we have a sapling. A sapling has the roots to survive a small drought, or a bigger storm, but is also small enough that it can be safely excavated with love and moved to a new location. The sapling is our teaching, what we give our students in the form of an essay. It’s a sapling they can bring home with them and plant in the soil of their life and practice. It’s important to recognize that each sapling we give has three essential parts that make it a full and healthy plant, the roots, the stalk and the leaves. As we grow our essay from the seed of inspiration, we can support the teaching process and ensure that your essay will transplant easy into your student’s life with a little focus on it’s essential aspects.  

Every sapling needs deep roots, and these roots represent grounding our work in a Sutra, or other ancient text. Like roots, these foundational yogic texts ground your essay in history, and draw nourishment from the unseen source of cosmic consciousness. Like roots, sutras  are from another time, and another land, and require a good bit of “excavating” if they are to serve our students. It is rare that a presentation would need more than one sutra to guide it’s message, and we should expect to repeat a sutra many times during a presentation, and unpack it skillfully, if we want to really give our students a chance to receive them. Like nutrients hidden deep within the earth, sutras should be taken in small concentrated doses that often need to be taken in slowly and consciously. Don’t be afraid to sit with a sutra, and repeat multiple times to ensure it is fully received.

We don’t write an essay,
we grow it, and grow with it.

Working our way up from the roots, we find the stem of the sapling, or trunk of the tree. This represents the use of satsang quotes in your essay, teachings of individuals who have achieved a high inner realization and are able to maintain their connection to their source as they speak and act in the world. In the ShambhavAnanda tradition we have the resources of Sri ShambhavAnanda, Swami Muktananda and Swami Rudrananda, as well as rarer resources from Bhagavan Nityananda. These teachings bring the roots into the world, in a certain time and space that helps to re-contextualize them in order to better understand and use them. Similar to the roots, we usually don’t need more than one or two quotes of this caliber to support our presentation— too many quotes is similar to a soup with too many spices, it soon becomes hard to digest. In general we should always try to fully use the quotes we present before adding more ingredients to the soup. To help support this, always leave time after a quote for absorption, and plan to repeat certain aspects of the quote as you unpack it. 

And finally, we have the leaves of the sapling catching the sunlight of the atmosphere, lightly swaying in the wind, each one unique like a fingerprint. The leaves of the sapling represent a personal story that grew from our work. This portion of the presentation helps people relate to the teachings in a real and practical way, affirming that it is indeed possible for all of us to accomplish. This is also the part of the presentation in which you can really connect inside, leave the script behind, and help your students ‘feel’ what you ‘felt’. 

Though our own personal stories are incredibly valuable, like the leaves on a tree, we should also remember that leaves are transient: this essay’s breakthrough becomes compost for our next essay. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just the nature of growth. For that reason we shouldn’t rely on our personal stories as the core of our work, let your work rest more heavily on your Sutra and/or Satsang quotes, as well as their interpretation. As we all know, when we plant a new sapling, the leaves fall away, but the roots and trunk remain. The student will soon be growing their own leaves within this topic, so even though our story is an important part of the process, it is not the most important part.

So we see that a presentation has three distinct parts: 
Roots, Trunk, Leaves: Sutra, Satsang, Story. 

As you begin to grow the sapling of your teachings, remind yourself of these three intrinsic aspects of a healthy plant. If you can bring all of these aspects into your essay/presentation, you can be sure that this sapling has a good chance of making the transition from the soil of your practice to soil of your students.