Hydrogen
Chakra: *Knees*
♍Sign: *Virgo*
Mantra: I Analyze Hydrogen. I Analyze the atoms in the dance of life.
🔥Activation: Gently bend the knees, honoring flexibility and humility.
Today’s practice brings back memories of the time I lived in the ashram. There was a daily schedule of work and sadhana (chanting programs). Before moving there, I imagined that the people living there were chanting all day, every day. That was what I wanted. I wanted to be fully immersed in the vibrations of Sanskrit; in the presence of the divine, all day, every day. It was such a strong fantasy that when the opportunity to go there became a sliver of a possibility, I threw away everything to go. After I arrived, the reality of what living there would be like hit me like a bucket, and strung me up like laundry.
There was constant work to do, and no time to rest. Cooking for dozens of people, cleaning up a 3 acre property with 5 buildings, and making sure the Gurus had everything they needed at all times. There was no instruction manual, and everything had to be done using intuition. If the teachers had to tell you to do something, how to do it, or what they needed; you failed. As a woman, I was expected to do all the cleaning, cooking, and tending to the men. It was exhausting. The men? They only needed to do the chanting and take care of the occasional broken faucet or burnt out light. I soon began fantasizing about leaving. It felt like torture to be working for so many hours in the day, only get 5 hours of sleep, and be failing to meet the expectations of the teachers over and over again.
Then one day a fellow ashramite said something to me that stays with me to this day. I was helplessly wiping down the vast communal kitchen counters and started to cry in frustration. “Is this it?!” I yelled, “Is this my life now?! I just clean up after ungrateful people over and over again?!” The man in the kitchen looked at me with deep empathy in his eyes. He used to live at the ashram too and understood the depth of difficulty in being there. “Yes.” He said. “But I think that rather than trying to think about what else you could be doing, the goal is to pay such close attention to what you are doing in the moment that you find all the nuances of how it is a reflection of what is inside you. Then every action becomes a sadhana (spiritual discipline).”
I was stunned. Suddenly my torture became medicine.
By focusing on the little, seemingly insignificant steps in life, we build a bridge to a more fulfilled greatness. This is the concept of Hydrogen in Virgo. A balanced and humble necessity in the string of events of any task or achievement. The simplest particle, when repeated and combined over time, surmounts to the blazing magnitude of a Sun.
As I focused on the smallest steps of my tasks, I paid attention to how I could optimize it. I became so efficient with my daily tasks that I was done in a fraction of the usual time. It freed up my day so that I could chant every time my teacher was in the temple, and even in the free time that I had created. My ability to pay attention enhanced to a point where I could access my intuition more easily, and fulfill tasks before they were asked.
I’m convinced that this is an unending process. As the molecular structures that are our responsibilities in life evolve, we need to keep paying attention and building our efficiency. Now I have a home, a family, a job, and a community. Now I have Isha. I endeavor to pay such close attention to her that I can intuitively know what to do before she has to find a way to tell me. So she can focus on expanding her consciousness rather than developing Ego dramas to have her needs met. Wish me luck. Hahaha.
I Analyze Hydrogen. I Analyze the atoms in the Dance of Life.
❤️