Holiday Message & Blessings by His Holiness Swami Vidyadhishananda

[happyrain]

Venerable friends and families,

I convey my warmest greetings and earnest blessings to you during the year-end holidays. May your holidays be meaningful, joyful, and free from fear. I pray that your hearts are full of gratitude and kindness despite the tough times that we have had to encounter over this past year.

As holidays embrace us, surrounding our hearts with the warmth of familiar ambience, we often like to reflect and ruminate about our successes or failures in the last year. This reflecting becomes more meaningful when we do not lose the lesson, even if we feel like we’ve lost out. Virtue is strengthened by deeper reflection and learning from the experience.

If you are feeling tired, reflect if this a feeling of good tiredness. During these hard times, it was perhaps not enough to be earnest, you might have needed to exert. Despite good intentions and best of efforts, outcomes might be delayed or not yet visible. Labour of love is a value that builds virtues which seep into the subtle layers of our character. Time well spent in a positive direction and made spiritually meaningful will convert the good tiredness into moral strength.

It is not the kind of tired that comes after staying up too late. This is a kind of good tired that comes with exertion for a good cause. In the back of the mind the notion of good serving is prevalent, and morale is high throughout the labour. It's the kind of good tired that comes from a brisk walkathon to raise awareness of a just cause, a whole day of gardening to create sustenance, or cooking and distributing food to the underprivileged. This kind of good tired comes from helping a homeless family secure affordable housing or running around to deliver much needed essential supplies to senior living and foster homes.

There is often no time to think about body aches, take a shower or soak the tired feet in salt water. The drive to keep on serving comes from the ideal behind serving, resting on the moral high ground that makes us human. No matter the beep-beep in the conscience about the exploitation by cabals and the decadence of governance that affect our trust, our innate kindness drives us toward that good tiredness.

We learn how to anchor during difficult situations, pivot during transitions, adapt to new mandates that do not make sense, and yet be resilient despite the shaming that is often thrust upon us due to our informed choices. Our nascent immunity is built upon the moral values that embellish us and is at the root of our nourishment. This is a good spiritual way to ruminate while overcoming the shortcomings of this past year. Faith is also behind the hope that we can prevail by being generous and gentle. We need not mind being a little tired. We can ride this turbulent tide with faith and moral strength.

I pray that your holiday season will be a respite from the pressure of living to work. This is not the time to exult while opening gift boxes or gorging on sugar, but rather to reflect on how to glow in the collective warmth of human spirit brought about by well-meaning fellowship with careful and prayerful people. Sugar is not a replacement for love even if past habits attract the fake sweetness unknowingly. It is good to find some time for the much-needed rest over the holidays, all the while knowing that the repose of solace is at the core of our year-to-year stamina and fortitude.

Fortitude builds patience and patience supports quietude. Stillness is a natural consequence of quiet reflection, and the silent pauses grow on you. Those pauses are very useful for our stamina. The idea is not to keep feeling tired. Rejuvenation is a natural need of our lives. However mental clearing is at the root of stamina.

Making the holidays uplifting is within your reach, through attemptable affirmations. We need to adapt to the changes inherent in the nature of the world that is, in spiritual terms, constantly slipping away from us. Our current times feel like they are accelerating, rife with clashes of ethos and bipolar ideologies. Now is the time to anchor with moral strength and practical sense.

Tiredness manifests in the body and is usually not an obstacle as long as the mind is imbued with clarity and inspiration. Residing free of rent in a house that is not really yours, how is it possible to avoid its distemperatures? Ashes collected from cremation are merged into the water as the final ablution, such is the essence of our skeletal framework.

The sole shackle is the invasion of unchecked desires in this house which stoke our afflictions. Satisfaction is temporary, whereas genuine fulfillment is lasting. Food is a satisfaction for hunger but understanding the hunger at a subtle emotional level and sharing the food may bring about a fulfilling experience.

Reflecting deeply on the desires (such as the holiday rush for sugar or toys) might allow access to its refined psychic counterpart, aspiration. Ask yourself what your true holiday aspiration is. If a light bulb moment happens, then it was worth all the good tiredness and the nagging aches. Both the mind and the body evolve into a greater state of being disaffected by aging or occasional overuse. Physical decay may cause waxing and waning of mental strength but touches not the core of your being.

Aspiration by its own make up is innately spiritual and is at the root of all noble affirmations. From a spiritual perspective your body and home are refractory as they are not really yours. Henceforth puny desires go awry. Complete fulfillment is not easily given to us by means of this intractable body. The body helps us when we know how to cultivate its strengths.

Good tiredness is a way to pause for reflection, finding a greater meaning about life’s purpose. We repose in our faith when we search deeper. Faith is the forerunner of all that we care for through serving. Faith is ultimately the conviction about a supreme being who is free from the shackles of karma and its impressions.

We are born free, and never meant to be draped in fancy wrappers that are laced in fear from our projections. The daily dose of general dread can be overcome with spiritual fortitude and faith in the supreme being. Holidays are meant for regaining our confidence and deepening our conviction through faith in the supreme being.

God-centred living brings about a faithful and honourable life; this is the experience. Earnest prayers to that supreme being can protect us from the imbalance of adversity and prosperity. Good tiredness might just enable us to repose in our divinity and the purpose of spiritual realization.

With the holy blessings of my meditation lineages,
Swami Vidyadhishananda

PS. I welcome you to join a free New Year livestream on 2nd January 2022. Learn more here.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/what-are-t ... 1132071247

[Sandy]

Thank you Eric,

That inspired message will take not only several readings but deeper contemplation as what is spoken requires something akin to the inner "home work" or introspection. Sometimes that seems the hardest thing of all to do. Strangely, I would at times rather do just about anything then look deep within. why?... well, many and varied reasons I suppose. Perhaps all of us at one time or another have experienced a disconnect. But for me, it manifests in interference from outside sources disrupting my dedicated spiritual practice, something that I suspect my inner agitation with self has called towards me But in frustration I ask myself..."Good grief...why, if you want me to come to you, are you allowing this fifth sulphur crested cockatoo to land on my window, chew up my screen and make a real nuisance of itself while I am trying to meditate?" In a perfect world and by human standards our angels would be busily shooing these adorable persistent pests away, perhaps with a golden broom. lol but alas, I think the good lord has a grander plan that entails real growth for me. As much as I wish that every stillness attempt was silky smooth, trouble free and filled with enough spiritual oomph to light up New York City for a year...it rarely works that way. Spiritual growth like building muscle bulk takes an array and variety of strengthening exertion. In true "Rocky Balboa" form one day we may be elatedly running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and on another day chasing a frightened chicken around a dirty paddock. (if you've seen the Rocky movie this will make more sense. lol) While one seems more fruitful and frankly easier to pursue the other one is just as important because without the chicken run of introspection the real lessons of spirit will not have a firm anchor. Perhaps instead of dreading these unsettled periods we can actually embrace them as periods of real growth, as a lasting understanding comes from these encounters with our slippery inner selves.

So with all that jabbering, I will say that I am hoping the new year, 2022 will provide a carefully orchestrated climb to a new platform of divine growth for all of us as we reach towards the inner heavens and find ever more clearly the face of our God within.

Let's go get that chicken!

xx Sandy

[happyrain]

Thanks Sandy, I wonder if what you're describing is the same aspiration mentioned by Swami V.

I especially like his description of good tiredness- and then, "Holidays are meant for regaining our confidence and deepening our conviction through faith in the supreme being."

But really every sentence here is filled with matter-of-fact wisdom. It's not always easy. Though we have the remainder of this year to find rest, to reflect on what's important and to enter the new year as you've said with faithful and hopeful attitude.

I have a feeling the worldly pressures and bipolar ideologies will increase and really test us. It's important we hold on to Love and the soul felt joy or gratitude we have all felt at one point in our life and share it with one another despite any "differences" presented between us. Everyone deserves kindness and freedom.