Lesson 2 • Sankalpa
After reading the essay, please take a moment to write down your Practice Sankalpa for the duration of the training.
Ascending Mount Sankalpa
“A sankalpa has to do with making a commitment to yourself to do some serious work to release the tensions and issues that are buried deep in the unconscious (samskaras) in order to grow spiritually. When you commit to performing a sankalpa and you do it with fo- cus and a real sense of engaging in it, doors will open for you. These doors don’t respond well to whining, but if you sit and do a practice on a regular basis for a specific period of time you will open up to areas in yourself that you couldn’t previously open. You are doing yourself a favor. It is a very positive thing to do. If you do a sankalpa correctly you should feel different afterwards. You can’t always make a list of its benefits but you should experience an energetic change.” - Sri ShambhavAnanda
A Sankalpa is a promise you make to yourself about doing your spiritual practice. On the simplest level, a sankalpa is a personal commitment to doing your practice everyday at a certain time and in a certain place. As you may know, this kind of commitment is more than just an additional slot on your calendar, it tends to create ripple effects across the whole schedule.Because making space for a “whole-hearted” morning and evening sit, as well as bringing it into your day, takes more than just time— it takes discipline, courage and creativity.
Sankalpas take Courage. We are all uniquely capable of generating tremendous courage in the realm of spiritual practice. This courage comes from inside, from the heart, and yields profound growth. As the Spanda Karika’s tell us when describing the effort of a yogi:
“that effort must not be artificial (akṛita). It must be absolutely natural, filled with intense desire and fervent longing, and originating from the center of your heart. By that force, this great yogī directs their mind to that point of supreme God consciousness.”
This isn’t showy courage, its natural courage that comes from your heart. The courage to trust that the work will get done, and to make time for your practice, is an internal commitment that only you are capable of. This kind of courage yields special results, though, as Babaji describes in the intro to his book “Spontaneous Recognition”, “you must have a burning wish in your heart to transcend your fear, limitations, and philosophy. In my spiritual work, I had major realizations at the death of a closely held ideal.” Often our deepest challenges reveal our deepest realization. Real teaching means real personal transformation, and that’s what this course is here to help you accomplish. But climbing across the mountain range of your sankalpa isn’t just a matter of strength alone, it’s also a matter of creativity.
Free Write: How do you relate to the power of “Un-artificial Effort?” Is this a concept you have encountered in your spiritual practice, or other modalities in your life?
Lineage teacher Swami Muktananda describes the Yogic Universe as a “play of consciousness”. This means that all of manifestation exists not because is ‘has to’, but because it ‘wants to’. All of manifestation is an expression of divine play, and the same goes for our own personal practice. Unless we want to practice and find a way to keep it fun and engaging, we won’t last long. As Sri ShambhavAnanda teaches, meditation is a ‘creative act’— because the present is a moving target and staying present is a dance of awareness, like Shiva Nataraj. Finding a reason to meditate everyday takes creativity and inner ingenuity. As Paul Reps writes, “Until it’s fun, better left undone,” so how can you have a little more fun with your practice today? It might sound cheesy, but even 2 minutes of fun can open the door to a more meaningful sit.
Creativity’s counterpart is skillful means— because it takes a real ninja to make sure that our practice time happens on time, and with quality, because the time leading up to your personal practice usually determines the depth of your practice. For example, perhaps you have a morning routine of checking your email, listening to a podcast, or scrolling a news feed before you eat breakfast— you might find that meditating before doing those kinds of activities keeps your mind calmer and allows you to use your meditation more efficiently. What’s more, you might find that after meditating you don’t have the same cravings for those particular morning rituals. You should expect that meditating every day, twice a day, will change you— not just outside, but inside too. This doesn’t mean that the things you enjoy now in life are bad— not at all— but it simply means that it is wise to allow the practice of meditation to blossom and grow in you as naturally as possible, without too much manipulation by the patterning of our minds. If things want to change, let them change. Try not to cling to routines, expect your life to shift— Doesn’t it sound refreshing and fun to have new interests and appetites? To have new perspectives?
On the other end of the Sankalpa spectrum, we may find that meditating in the evening is a hard animal to corral. We all work hard, and we all need a break at the end of the day— of this there is no doubt. But if our breaks at the end of the day make us tired, groggy or unaware, then we’ll consistently miss out on this valuable meditation slot. Again, there is no easy answer here, you gotta be creative—can you use a guided meditation on a particularly tire night? Would 5 minutes of yoga get your circulation up and allow you to find better focus? Could you prep dinner, but eat it after you sit, so that your digestion doesn’t bog you down? You get the idea— where there’s a will there’s a way, and a little creativity helps too.
Free Write: What does it feel like to be “skillful”? How can you be more skillful in your approach to daily practice?
This all showcases the subtleties of the word “Sankalpa”— on paper it is a personal commitment to a time and place for practice, but in reality it is so much more than that. In the Shiva Sutras we are taught that this kind of commitment is a priceless gem, and one that must be gained again and again, at all stages of our practice. As Sutra 1.15 states, “Although they have utterly achieved the reality of independence, which is absolute freedom, the yogi must still remain active for the whole of their life. This is a great task for such a yogī because for the remainder of their life, they have to remain absolutely active to realize the truth of reality again and again, again and again, so that in the end, they become one with Śiva” (Lakshmanjoo translation). So even for those that have attained high realizations, their personal commitment to their practice remains a challenge— so don’t get down on yourself if you miss a day, or two— put that restless energy right back into your practice in the very moment it arises. Keep your practice moving, no matter the pace. These are the qualities of a yogi— practice, not perfect. And in the end, that is the purpose of this program as a whole— to inspire your practice, because the real Sankalpa of spiritual growth is never finished.
Free Write: What is your personal commitment, your sankalpa, to your practice during this training?