Today's Tarka Practice
Our focus this week will be on the Bhagavad Gita.
The Gita is one chapter out of the Mahabharata, which is one of the longest
Sanskrit epic poems from ancient India.
Yesterday, we ended our tarka practice with the
question, what is your purpose in life or your dharma? Today, we continue on
with that question to a second level of the word dharma. Dharma also means
duty. So here, we could also ask ourselves the question, what is my duty in
life?
The word duty often calls up thoughts of
responsibility or questions like what am I responsible for? This is a question
of ethics. So now, if we yoke together both purpose and duty within the word
dharma, we come to understand that we each have an individual purpose to
fulfill and a way to fulfill it. Not only should we fulfill our purpose but we
should fulfill it in a responsible and harmonious way.
This is one reason that I asked you yesterday to
make a list of your strengths in your journal. Your strengths tell you about
what you do well. We are meant to do these things. It is our duty to do them.
For example, if you think you are very good at teaching others but not very
good at woodworking, this is a hint from the universe. One might say here, it is
your purpose to teach or your duty to teach. It is not your purpose to be a
woodworker. So, another way to find our purpose or our dharma is to make a list
of what we do not do well. If you are still searching for your purpose, you can
eliminate those things from the list that you have difficulty with and those
things that you do not enjoy doing. We are given strengths and talents and we
are meant to use them to fulfill our purpose.
In your journal today, I want you to make a list
of things that you don’t think you do well and things you are not interested in
doing. Now, you have to be careful here because sometimes we have weaknesses
that we are meant to develop into strengths and sometimes we are afraid of success.
When making your list, make sure that the things on your list are not there
because you are running away from them.
Shanti
No comments:
Post a Comment