Ramana’s Garden, Lakshman Jhula, Rishikesh 2019
Many happy memories. My first time working with children. My Guru at the time told me I should be working with children over and over again. She finally set it up for me to volunteer at Ramana’s Garden orphanage and school. The founder had been a disciple of the late Papaji. Her Guru had told her to take care of the children on the banks of Ganges. So she has made it her own life’s work to set up this orphanage and work the children.
The children taught me many things. I always resented authority. It has never been kind, fair, or attuned to my being or needs. Working with the older teen children was very challenging as they didn’t respect my boundaries or authority. The founder of the orphanage was very harsh and direct with the children from my perspective, but I soon learnt it was done with love.
Children need boundaries, and they absolutely need to respect you or they become simply unable to hear you. I arrived there with the best intention to pour my heart out to the children, and try to be their best friend. However, international volunteers come and go, and their emotional connections with the children can cause as much of a sense of instability and loss as the benefits of being a source of love for them.
I learned to respect the love underneath the harshness of the orphanage’s founder. Children do need structure. They need routine. They need stability. A bright source of love in expression is one thing. However, I see the urge to be their best friend was mostly about satisfying my own need for connection. They need to be shown respect, and by demanding respect and establishing healthy boundaries you yourself become a role model on how to do that.
Spiritual Evolution, Devolution
I won’t say much here. Though there is no person that needs to spiritual evolve or who should worry about spiritually devolving, there is, for me, some truth to it. I experienced a deep beautiful deep relaxing into nobodyness there. Just love in and out of action.
I met a German girl there, and out of habit I pursued a sexual connection and relationship with her. A heady mix of loneliness and lust. It was action from the stand point of the identity with the personal self. Don’t get me wrong. There will always be a personal self, and it will do its thing. It is identity with it that distorts it, and create self-will and action where it wouldn’t naturally.
I should have kept my focus inwards, and not pursued the image of material self-gratification in a desired image. In a spiritual place like that, doing seva, I should have been more vigilante of the movements of my own mind, and let the oppurtunity and portal into that relationship pass me by.
As Mooji says, I should have placed the whole weight of my self in presence and not stepped back into person-hood. The relationship was a pointlessly pursued image of mind. Mind mistake.
For others, a sexual relationship may have been natural. For me, it was a mind-based desire born of self-identity and self-cherishing. There is so much of my personal self wrapped up in sex and the desire for a relationship and connection. Psychologically, it gets complicated, twisted, distorted. Self-image, shame, self-worth, validation, mental lost, trauma, fear, gender. My painful psychology around sex, sexual longing, and sexual gratification mean self-identity is really knotted into experiencing the personal self as a sexual being.
Having said that. The medicine is not in untying and undoing the intricacies or the psychological knot. Rather, it remains in confidently abiding as presence and not getting involved at all in the psychological inner conflicts of personal self – a personal self that we are not. Let them be there. Fire doesn’t need perfect wood to burn. Even cow shit will do. Be the fire. Place all the mass of self-identity into the light of presence regardless of the contents of experience, burn it all up as fuel.