Soul on Fire #067 | Shut Up and Experience

Whakarango!

The maori have a word for experience called Whakarango. It sometimes means listen, deeply listen or experience with the senses but it’s not a word you can just define with other words. It’s something you have to be... I had an assignment last year where I practiced it with my community. Now I am practicing it with my body, emotions and situations - deeply listening in life like a meditation!

I believe this is a profound way of being which impacts both the context (our experience) and the content of our life (our performance)

I don’t know about you but overthinking is one of my favorite ways to pass time. I literally do it like people smoke, drink or use media to procrastinate being alive. It’s fear of what might happen if I fully participated in life. I have always related to life as lame, mundane, stupid and boring. Haha! Thats how life occured to me as a teenager and it had me show up resigned, irresponsible and cynical about anything that was’nt sugar, graffiti or sex.

You can probably imagine or relate to how that would impact my performance. This essay is a reflection based on applying some sound advice from Atmananda. He shared with me the principle of being with emotions rather than ignoring, running from them, shooing away or resisting them. I am also grateful to him for pointing to being present, being with life and not over analyzing it!

According to the book The Three Laws of Performance by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan performance correlated to how situations occur to us.

The key to increased performance is to stop overthinking the situation and get the facts. Ask the question “What’s true here?” Forget interpretations, beliefs, dogma, and judgments about how things should be and just observe physical reality.

Most thoughts are just opinions, judgements, stories and agreements of what others have said. Actually many of our unlimited number of daily thoughts are underpinned by mainstream unspoken philisophical, religious and scientific/unscientific agreements about life. Check out this good advice Krsna gave to the enlightened warrior Arjuna before he went to fight an epic war:

In the material world, one who is unaffected by whatever good or evil he may obtain, neither praising it nor despising it, is firmly fixed in perfect knowledge.

Srila Prabhupada’s Purtport: There is always some upheaval in the material world which may be good or evil. One who is not agitated by such material upheavals, who is unaffected by good and evil, is to be understood to be fixed in Kṛṣṇa consciousness. As long as one is in the material world there is always the possibility of good and evil because this world is full of duality. But one who is fixed in Kṛṣṇa consciousness is not affected by good and evil, because he is simply concerned with Kṛṣṇa, who is all-good absolute. Such consciousness in Kṛṣṇa situates one in a perfect transcendental position called, technically, samādhi.

Humans interpret everything through the mind which has two functions - to accept and reject. So rather than accepting and rejecting just be with what’s so. What we resist persists! The Christians have a prayer that captures this nicely:

So the invitation is to shut up and experience life by giving up your interpretations about how people are, how they should be, how you should or shouldn’t be. Just listen, ovserve and experience life as perfect and have that be the context you come from when trying to change it rather than actually thinking its your responsibility to change it because it sucks.

In this way you can create a foundation for courageous living based on serenity and knowledge.

Key actionable ideas in this essay

1. Literally just shut up!

2. Think about your situation in terms of whats objectively true about it

3. Listen to your emotions and see what they are telling you rather than telling them they are wrong, unnesacary or bad

4. Stop judging based on what you think is true

5. Meditate

6. Fix your mind on God and attain samadhi (trance of truth)

7. Bonus: Listen to this Kirtan jam at The Loft last Thursday by Sitapati