by Chameli Ardagh: The innocence and evolutionary intelligence of your spiritual longing can easily be kidnapped by ambitious, critical thought loops.
Before you know it, you associate being really harsh and judgmental towards yourself with being a good and responsible Yogini.
We criticize and push ourselves; we cringe in shame of all our flaws and bad habits; we compare ourselves with others and call it “growth.” We fear that if we don’t push and judge, nothing will change.
Look a bit closer. Notice what happens to your consciousness when you go into self-judgment: it actually contracts, and there is very little movement there. Very little space for growth.
Be kind to yourself, sister, on this wild ride of awakening. What will make you grow is love. Everything grows in love. Everything grows in love, because love is space.
Everything is evolving all the time without you pushing it. When you jump off the hamster wheel of never-ending self-judgment and self-improvement; when you bring kindness and compassion to your experience, the space around your experience expands and evolution has space to breathe and unfold.
The most intelligent thing you can do is to actively cultivate kindness and compassion, to strengthen these qualities within you like you would strengthen a muscle.
Kindness and self-love is not something you sometimes feel and sometimes don’t feel, a luxury for when you have time, or something you hope to tap into in those special, saintly moments. This spacious kindness is deeper than your feelings; it is the roots that feed your life. It is a yoga, a sadhana, a committed practice.
In the Hall of Shakti Mirrors, White Tara is the Goddess of Compassion. She symbolizes this capacity within us to hold and grow ourselves and the world in love. She teaches us we don’t need to exile any part of ourselves in order to be free. She is spaciousness and wholeness, a medicine we are so thirsty for in this fragmented, uprooted world we have created.
Tara guides and awakens us to the Yoga of Compassion.I like to define Compassion as presence with warmth. Compassion is like a warm blanket of space you can pick up and wrap around you, no matter what you are experiencing. And you can at any time offer this spacious warmth to people, animals, plants, water, rocks, and food. Even your teacup, clothes, bed, and computer. Your relationships, your projects, your visions and memories-everything responds to love.
