Wisdom Work for 11 April 2022

I am forwarding you a Words of Wisdom writing of Ram Das’ because our Wisdom Topic this week is Service, SEVA, Karma Yoga. (Bhakti Yoga is the yoga of devotion). The Wisdom Questions will be posted next, but you can at least get started with the idea of our service as Seva and it comes in many forms. He uses the name, God, which I know we have many other names for the Divine (masculine and feminine) so I hope this name works in this message.
I’m excited about trying this out consciously this week. I hope you will enjoy the play also, “serving as an offering and practice for awakening.”

“Karma Yoga and Bhakti Yoga are usually grouped together, because Karma Yoga really is serving others as a way of serving God. You serve others as a way of putting flowers at the feet of God, honoring God, and so doing your ‘seva,’ or service, becomes a technique of doing this.

So doing your ‘seva’, your service, can work in a devotional sense, where you are consciously considering your action as an offering, saying, “This is my Karma Yoga, I am doing this now as service to you, as an offering to God, and it’s work on myself.”

Or, I can do it from a meditative point of view called “meditation in action;” discussed in Trungpa Rinpoche’s book Meditation In Action. In this instance, when I am washing a pot, I don’t wash the pot as an offering to God, I just come into the process of washing the pot until I’m fully in the moment, and I quiet my mind into washing the pot until there is just “washing of the pot-ness,” and that is also Karma Yoga.

Once you are starting to awaken, you look around for practices to purify and help awaken. Most people see meditation as this practice. It’s a clear and simple yoga, and you say, “Well, while I do yoga, I do my meditation, and then I go to work, or then I live life, or then I’m gonna do good or something like that.”

Karma Yoga is taking all of the “good or something” that you are going to do after your meditation, and making it into an offering and practice for awakening.

So it’s a perspective, an attitude of offering and seeing how the actions you are performing are much more than the actions themselves.”

Here are the wisdom questions to go with our Topic of Karma Yoga, Seva and Our Service in the world.Ram Das talked about service in two ways….one as serving others as serving the Divine and it becomes devotional service and the other is serving by becoming so present with what you are doing, and the mind becomes so quiet and you become one with the action. There are all kinds of ways of looking and practicing service. Ram Das was saying in the article, “Once you start to awaken, you look for practices to purify and help awaken. Karma Yoga is taking all the good or service you are going to do and making it an offering and practice for awakening.”Let us investigate how the actions we are performing are much more than the actions themselves.

1. This week, experiment with your service to others…Is any of this helpful that Ram Das is talking about?

2. How do you envision your service in the world?

3. What are your beliefs about serving?

Thanks everyone…..I hope there will be some nuggets for you in there.