How to be of use

If you want to be of use in the world, be a lighthouse.

Stand firm, whole, solid and shine your light, so that those in need can find their way home.

Don’t be a lifeboat, rushing out towards those in trouble, but finding yourself now also in danger. Tired, exhausted and seeking to pick people up and put them into your boat. Learning to sail one’s own boat well is the purpose of every life.

Don’t be the sea: look now, how I am drowning too.

Don’t clamber into their boat, weighing them down with your ideas of what you would do in their situation, and submerging them with your feelings about what they are going through.

No, be a lighthouse: calm, unassailable and ever-present. Guiding folks away from danger and home to their own unique sense of safety. Trusting people to find their own way. Knowing that experiencing the storms of life builds strength and resilience in every human.

Soon enough, you too will have to navigate the dark waves of life with courage and with faith. Then you yourself will seek that one true beacon, glowing in the darkness.

Sarah x

Why am I so tired?

A word about energy.

What depletes your energy and what fills up your tank is completely unique to you. There is simply no point in comparing your energy levels to other people’s. They are not you, you are not them.

If you are required at some event, be alert to how this effects you: the first time you leave this event (be it a work commitment, a family gathering or even lunch with friends) exhausted, wired or discombobulated, that’s the start of the learning.

Each time you learn what your body and soul can cope with. Listen carefully.

The next step is to understand what you need afterwards to bring yourself back into energetic balance: a treat, a day in bed, the chance to decompress over drinks with friends. You know your thing (I hope. If not, start trying things out. You need to know what works). Talk if you want to talk, escape to solitude if that’s what you need, look at beautiful things, be alone in a crowd.

It is simply no good to carry on failing to manage and maintain your energy because you can’t find a way to give yourself what you need. You are a grown up and you don’t need anybody’s permission to look after yourself the way you know you need looking after.

Please don’t fall into the (ego) trap of thinking that everybody needs you to turn up, be there, sort things out. The world would much prefer you to be a healthy, content, generous human, than a worn out husk.

Sarah x

Satchitananda - Unconditional Love

There are many different types of love, but the only one that really matters is the unconditional kind.

When Ram Dass met his guru, he was aware that guruji could see everything hidden within him - the good and the bad, the shame and the guilt, the deepest, darkest hidden secret things - his guru saw all of this. What was equally evident to Ram Dass was that guruji loved him anyway, wholly, completely and without needing the slightest thing in return.

This is the real meaning of true love: a love that knows you are lovable, right here, right now, exactly as you are in this moment. We are all full of doubt and mistakes, but we are all made of love and deserving of it.

This love is satchitananda (sat=truth/chit=consciousness/ananda=bliss) and as Georg Feuerstein writes:

… this bliss is not a state of mind, but the condition that remains when all psycho-mental phenomena have been transcended.

Satchitananda lies behind everything, always.
There is nothing we can do to earn or find this love.
Our work is only to remove all the barriers that we have placed between ourselves and it.

Oh, those barriers are sticky! The quest to be worthy of love, the nagging self-doubt and rehashing of past mistakes. We think we are unworthy; we are wrong. The work of yoga is to connect with unconditional love and once connected to let it run through our veins. It is not enough to receive it, we must be able to give it too. And we can’t have one without the other. If you think you can easily love everyone, but you don’t love yourself just the same, then you have a little more work to do.

By its very definition, unconditional love cannot belong to some and not to others; it can’t be possible for them, but not for you.

This is how Larry Brilliant describes the wonder of Neem Karoli Baba's love:

what ... staggered me (was) not that he loved everybody, but that when I was sitting in front of him, I loved everybody.

For all cynics who think that all of this sounds a little bit narcissistic, I ask you: if everyone loved unconditionally and felt themselves worthy of love would they be grabbing on to power and prestige to prove themselves? Would they be talking badly of others and being unkind? Could they hurt anyone or anything?

No, people who understand this wisdom and embrace it, live in kindness, live in peace.

Sarah x