Goddess Lakshmi brings spirituality home

Sometimes spirituality becomes an escape from the daily grind. Every day, for most of us, we have these routines, which are very mechanistic. Who doesn't have to deal with bureaucracies, with computer updates with paying bills, with routines to support family members, whether it's taking children to school or to their activities, taking care of people that are not well in the family, and all these very ordinary things which constitute this daily grind of our lives. And sometimes spirituality becomes the way in which we can replenish ourselves, nourish ourselves, nurture ourselves away from the daily grind.

So we think of going somewhere far away to a monastery or forest retreat somewhere in a beautiful location where we can get away from this ordinariness of our daily lives, enjoy some time, in a beautiful place, perhaps doing beautiful creative things that nourish the soul, spending time, just even attending to the call of the soul, some attention to what is that souls call and feeling. Who are we, beyond all of these roles that we have to fulfill all the time, right from the moment we are born? Who are we before all that and underneath all that, that primordial self that second chakra, which is the foundation self, before we step into the many familial roles, societal roles, and all of these other roles, roles in our workplace, all of these other roles that we must fulfill? Who are we underneath all of that? What is it that we yearn for, that has nothing to do with what is going to be validated in the world what might bring us money or not or what other people might celebrate? But what is the deepest yearning within us just simply even to listen, to attend, to taste even to just allow it to flower within us?. So this is where we have this real hunger.

And we don't think that that is ever going to be located in our everyday lives, that it must be somewhere else, it must be this other. Goddess Lakshmi, in Indian tradition, is the Goddess that invites us to bring sacredness, self-inquiry, divinity, creativity, all of these things that we hunger for back to the home. And this is the home of the body, the home of domesticity, the home of the workplace, the home of the real world, the world of paying bills, and doing computer updates and dealing with bureaucracies. She invites us to bring it home. Today, Goddess Lakshmi has been largely interpreted as the goddess of material prosperity of wealth and abundance. And there is a very material aspect to Lakshmi, as I said, she does ask us to attend to the every day.

That is another thing we have a sense that spirituality has nothing to do with material reality. In fact, material reality is a bad thing. And we have to escape into a spiritual reality, which is the opposite of material reality. And Lakshmi proposes that there is no difference that the spiritual and the material are in the one in the same place, and that is in the everyday of our lives. Now, this invitation is more radical than it appears. At first look, when we bring the self-inquiry home, when the proposal is that our authenticity and our souls flowering can happen in the everyday in the midst of our family in them in our workplaces. That is quite a challenging proposition. Because that means that we may be sensing that it could upset the status quo.

The values, the systems, and the relation friendships, in family, in workplaces, they are far more vital to us than we realize. We think that what is more heroic is going and doing something important out there, not in those ordinary places. There is not much celebration, when we are doing things in our domestic sphere, I often think that parents should be rewarded for the work that they do. But that is invisible work. The heroic work is like the archetypal heroic journey, it is going and doing something out there a big social justice cause or something we do that spectacular, and that wins us medals and awards. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. But very often there is equal or more ferocity and courage required in those shifts we make in the intimacy of our bodies, our homes, and our workplaces.

I have seen that in my programs, people often come to Lakshmi, thinking that this is going to be quite easy. Or sometimes they reject Lakshmi thinking it's too ordinary, because we think our everyday life, our body, that is ordinary, we must be somewhere extraordinary, that spirituality or spiritual self-inquiry is something magical and extraordinary, and cannot have anything to do with the boredom and the grind of our everyday lives. But when we consider bringing the practice home, when we consider turning to the body, to the wellbeing of our body, to the wellbeing of our expression, within our family, within all of those roles, to the wellbeing within workplaces, then it really becomes home, our spiritual practice actually comes home. And we become quite nervous sometimes, and, and afraid.

And it's important to give ourselves a lot of compassion in these moments. Let me share with you the story of the archetypal warrior Arjuna, Arjuna, was the world's greatest warrior, he had fought in many ferocious battles, he was almost like a one man army. But when it comes to the seminal battle of his life, which was a battle with his own family, his cousins, and his elders on one side, and him on the other side, he completely loses courage, he loses heart, he falls on his knees, and he says that he cannot fight. And he even proposes that he is going to flee the battle. This was unimaginable. And so we can be kind to ourselves that when we come to those spaces of intimacy, it can be a very forbidding ask.

And the help comes from the teaching of Krishna, which is that if we can focus on the unfolding of our authenticity, and not think about the consequences, if we are, if we put it's like putting the cart before the horse, if we start worrying about what is this going to do, and I don't want to change anything, I must maintain the status quo. But somehow, I must find this authenticity without changing anything, which is what Arjuna was doing for a while, then we become paralyzed. But if we can focus on the unfolding with all of our integrity, if we focus on the unfolding of our own authenticity, without thinking that this is to maintain or to destroy the status quo, because neither is irrelevant. What is relevant is the spending of our time and energy, often in the simplest of ways, it doesn't have to be noisy and having to make everybody around us change. It has nothing to do with that. The changes within ourselves how we attend to the needs of our body, to the needs of our sensation, to the to call for rest and balance to the call for doing something creative and fulfilling making time for that. In simple ways. It doesn't have to be when we think that spirituality has to be something big and spectacular. That's what paralyzes us.

But if it is something very simple, like taking a walk whenever it's possible to enjoy a sunset or doing a little thing going for a class or doing something that brings us joy, that finding time to rest. And even if we are not able to do it every day, once in a while doing something that nourishes and replenishes us. So these little things are what we need to be attending to that cry of the soul, these gentle things of beauty, creativity, expression, and nurturing. And they don't have to be very big things like I need to not take off for two weeks and go somewhere and then it becomes impossible, and we become paralyzed. And neither is it about overthrowing everything, nor is it about making sure everything is stays the same, because that is not in our hands. But what is in our hands is to make sure that we in this precious life we have that we can allow a soul to express itself in small and quiet ways.