Right Living – Right Doing, The Work of Living
- All your activities of Living and Doing
- Energy Management
- Presence with and Perfection of Action;
- Full Absorption and Integration of One’s Actions and Experiences
- Building Qualities, Energy and Substance
Live right life, worship God. That is all, nothing more.
—Shivapuri Baba
Your experiences, thoughts, and emotions all carry an energetic charge. You can approach the work of every day life in ways that support the healthy and harmonious acquisition and expenditure of energy. Learning to use internal and external focuses to set yourself up to contain the energy of your experiences is indispensable if you want to generate more energy rather than constantly dissipating it away and needing sugar, caffeine or stimulation or sleep to recover. Using the tools of this dimension you can build and concentrate the energies necessary to attain and sustain heightened states of consciousness and discover the richness of just being alive.
Aim high – work to bring the quality of your activity and content of your experience of it to a peak of perfection. As you go through your day, attempt to carry the benefits from one activity into the next, building energy as you do rather than losing it. When this energy builds into into valuable and heightened states, infuse those qualities into your activity, thus raising you and your actions to a new and higher level.
One of my teachers once said, “If you haven’t got your basic life in order and have not begun to live a life of calmness, stability, service, honesty, practicing the basic virtues and then you meditate or do other spiritual practices, it’s like having a cow that eats organic grass and gives wonderful organic milk, but when you milk that cow, the milk goes into a pail with a couple of small holes in the bottom.” Terribly wasteful. You probably never get to use that milk.
—Sheikh Ragip
A sample of some key things to be focused on throughout the day in working with this dimension:
1. Before you begin an activity, taking the time to take in the support and nourishment of the environment and prepare it to be the best possible space within which to work.
2. Making and sticking with right choices as to what you put your attention on and allow your attention to engage, holding firm against fickle pulls – thoughts, impressions, diversions, and enticements that come your way – that would distract you and cause you to drift off course from what you are attempting to do.
3. Observing energy leaks (what causes you to lose energy instead of build it), closing ones you already know of and any new ones you have discovered.
Effort gives joy. An aim gives a meaning, a purpose to life, and this purpose implies an effort: and it is in effort that one finds joy. Exactly. It is the effort which gives joy: a human being who does not know how to make an effort will never find joy. Those who are essentially lazy will never find joy — they do not have the strength to be joyful! It is effort which gives joy. Effort makes the being vibrate at a certain degree of tension which makes it possible for you to feel the joy….
It is only effort, in whatever domain it be – material effort, moral effort, intellectual effort – which creates in the being certain vibrations which enable you to get connected with universal vibrations: and it is this which gives joy. It is effort which pulls you out of inertia: it is effort which makes you receptive to the universal forces. And the one thing above all which spontaneously gives joy, even to those who do not practice yoga, who have no spiritual aspiration, who lead quite an ordinary life, is the exchange of forces with universal forces. People do not know this, they would not be able to tell you that it is due to this, but so it is.
—The Mother
