Happy December!Greetings Radiant Beings, Thanksgiving has come and gone. Hopefully, you found time to be thankful and time to be giving. We have arrived at the third email in our seven-part series. In this email, we will assess our sincerity to ourselves and others. To do this, we need to examine what sincerity means. First, let us establish that sincerity and truth are different. Truthfulness is stating the facts of events. For example, "What did you eat yesterday?" "I ate lotus root and peanut soup." Sincerity is being genuine. It is freedom from hypocrisy. For example, your partner asks you if you are into real yoga. You answer with a resounding "YES" because you are afraid he will not like you if you answer, "No, I am not into real yoga. It is a bunch of nonsense for a bunch of flakes. I prefer yoga that tones my ass, not my mind. If you haven't figured it out, I'm as superficial as they come." Suddenly you have found yourself in a duplicitous relationship. You are now doing and saying things to make your partner think you are sincere about your yoga practice. In reality, you are apathetic to the Yamas and Niyamas (think of a road map guiding you on your inner and outer journey), meditation or pranayama practice; you only care about the physical component of yoga. Now you are caught in a web of lies because you want this person to think or feel a certain way about you. We do this not just for our love interest but with people in general because we want to be liked and loved. As a result, we are not true to ourselves. Once they start thinking about us in specific ways, we become attached to the attention we get, and the lies continue. We tend to equate attention with love. This kind of behavior is a manipulation that strokes the ego and creates more obstacles for us in the long run. At soon as you step into hypocrisy, you have set the stage to create a disingenuous relationship. You have put a crack in the relationship that you were trying to cultivate with this kind of behavior. One lie based on insincerity leads to another and another. Once this happens, you have destroyed any real foundation for a relationship. But more importantly, you have made a loose brick in the foundation of the most crucial relationship, the one to know yourself. This kind of deception is worse as it creates another misstep in your quest to know your true Self. Going against your conscience is a setback on your journey as it creates another barrier between you and your conscience; after this happens enough, you lose touch with your inner companion. Whenever we lie or manipulate, it damages our inner well-being until we become so confused lying becomes a way of living for us. This lying leaves us feeling depleted, confused, agitated, and disconnected from ourselves and others. This hypocrisy comes from your wanting to be loved, which is ironic because the true you is LOVE. We must consider that all our contracting behaviors stem from our sense of lack. This lack comes from the fact that we have forgotten our true nature. How our contracting behaviors manifest depends on our samskaras (psychological imprints from this life and previous lives). The fascinating aspect of this drama is we are craving something that we have been and will always be LOVE. This feeling of lack leads us on a wild goose chase, lifetime after lifetime, a fruitless and desperate hunt for something that we are and have always been. I happen to be a white female in this lifetime; what happens if my daily affirmation becomes I wish someone would see me as a white female. My life would be much better if I had someone who could see me as a white female. To make this happen, I lie to others because I want them to see me as a white female, which is absurd because I am a white female. The problem is I don't believe or know that I am a white female, so the hunt continues to find that person to make me see and feel that I am indeed a female and a white one to boot. This kind of thinking causes me to do and say ridiculous things because I think my life will be better if the object of my desire can see me in this particular light. We want others to see us a certain way because we want to feel special, and we think if I can feel special, then I will be worthy of being loved and will be loved. Isn't it strange that we want something that we already are? We continue pretending and lying; sooner or later, our world comes crashing down because our house of cards (lies) has fallen. We are devastated. We lick our wounds, blame the other person for the failed relationship, and then find another poor chap to fall into our web of insincerity. This web of deception is all based on our feelings of smallness. We have forgotten who we are and want someone else to remind us and make us believe. If you don't know who you are, you will never believe what anyone tells you; therefore, you must do the work to ascertain who you are. To do this, you must have a strong desire to end the samsara (cyclical birth and death) of the wild goose chase. To finish this nonsensical cycle, you must come to know yourself and remove all the personas (masks) you wear to please others or to get them to like you. You must grow to like and eventually love yourself; this requires svadhyaya (self-study) and acceptance of who you are. Remember, there is no such thing as a wrong choice, but we make choices that make the route much longer. If you are going to New York from Ohio and want to be there in a few hours, you would take a plane to New York, not walk to New York. If moksha (the emancipation from the cycle of death and birth) is your goal, then you want to be skillful and not waste time making the same mistakes. With that in mind, time to get started. Here are this month's questions. Have there been any relationships that you participated in that you were insincere or disingenuous? What behaviors did you display? What stories did you tell? How often have you compromised who you are to get something from another person? Have you had any relationships you knew would slow or impede your growth as a human being, yet you continued cultivating those relationships? Has your behavior in any relationship adversely affected you and your spiritual growth? How did it adversely affect you? Why did you participate in this behavior? On a scale of 1-10, how copasetic are you with you? What do you want others to see in you? Why do you not see it in yourself? Why is it so important for others to see you in this light? How does this need impact you and those relationships?
Happy Contemplating, and see you next month when we dive into part four of our seven-part series. How tolerant are you?
In Loving-Service, Ranjani
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