Practicing
Contentment
“Contentment
is a practice. It’s not a feeling of accomplishment from doing something.
Contentment is just being complete in the moment. In the moment, there is just
presence, no future or past, just happy to be here in the moment. Contentment
is an attitude of soul.”
Ram
Dass with Rameshwar Das, (Parabola, p.16, Spring 2021, excerpted from Being Ram
Dass, Love Serve Remember Foundation, Sounds True, 2021)
Ram Dass died December
22, 2019. The book, Being Ram Dass was published posthumously. This excerpt from
it, reprinted in the latest edition of Parabola, is an account of his
mental state after the stroke he had in 1997 which paralyzed the right side of
his body and scrambled his speech. The article shows a very human, angry, and vulnerable
man, who took considerable time to right himself and regain his center of
contentment. Even after decades of being a guru to millions of people, he went
through the same stages of grief that any other person would when faced with
the challenge of recovering from a life-threatening event. What it taught him
was how to be graceful even in a state of dependency, and how to live from his
soul.
He
concluded that he had been teaching and writing about old age and overcoming tragedy for many years without having lived them. Life gave him the
opportunity to experience what he had been teaching, and the humility to
realize that he only had half the story before the stroke. He had the words
without the music, so to speak. The stroke gave him empathy for others trying
to overcome similar disasters and it forced him to live from his heart rather
than being reliant on the strength of his words. It taught him how to listen
instead of talk.
For
many of us, contentment has moved from an intellectual goal to a living
practice. The challenge has come from the isolation forced on us by the
pandemic. I don’t know about you, but I have approached it kicking and
screaming. Like Ram Dass, I have gone through anger, frustration, depression,
and am trying now to find acceptance. Practicing what we preach is no easy
thing. I fail almost every day, but according to Ram Dass, failing the tests
put before us is the very definition of a spiritual path. Keep getting up; keep
trying again until there is a tiny breakthrough; that crack that lets the light
shine in.
Learning something important is the only good thing
that can come out of failure, I believe. Learning that we need one another is
one of the crucial lessons in any spiritual practice. We like to think
ourselves independent and self-sufficient, but nothing could be further from
the truth. We need others and they need us. Despite our intellectual breadth,
and our out-sized egos, we are still mammals who need a pack for security. When
we accept our interdependency, contentment will be the light at the end of the
tunnel.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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