I will not die an unlived Life (July 29 2008)

Life is Bliss. Ananda.

No matter how harsh I think my life conditions are, at times (which is not often, mind you).

Life is Change. Life is Sacred. Life is Love. Life is Evolution. Life is delicious dishes and exquisite wines. Life is traveling halfway across the world to visit a foreign city and feel at home there. Life is meeting someone, never to be the same again. Life is crying to overcome a broken heart. Life is the smell of freshly cut grass on your way to work. Life is the most tantalizing sunset that blesses your reunion with old and new friends in Malibu. Life is the gushing waves of the great ocean licking the rocky coastline of Catalunya. Life is sitting at the edge of the Grand Canyon and watching the magnificence of the Universe unfold as the Light changes again and again and again and again. Life is tears on my cheeks as the sun disappears in front of my eyes into the Great Ocean off the coast of Kerala for the last time this year.

And yet, are we honoring this Life? Are we living ecstatically or are we living just because we have to? Are we doing our utmost to conquer the most amazing experiences that are just waiting to be had in this Incarnation? Are we certain that we will be old before we die?

What are we waiting for to fully spend each breath, and bear no remorse?

How can I, how can we be aware of our existence, of the immense impact of each of our Lives and of our Collective potency as Humanity and yet, not be moved into action? We are all blessed with Sva Vimarsa, the Awareness of the Self, and with Sva Sva Vimarsa, the Self's sense of being aware of itself. And yet we allow ourselves to be frozen into inaction?

I am aware of the potency of my actions. I acknowledge the power that I can unleash in my practice on the mat, and the forces I can create in my universe off the mat. And that bears great responsibility. Damn it, a true sense of duty, I should say. How can we live a Life that is the mere shadow of what it could be, given the wealth, education, and safety we are all blessed with in our societies?

Every second, you and I have a choice to negate our instinctual nature and refuse to change the world. Or we can choose, with every breath, to take this Life, this AMAZING LIFE, which we have been gifted by God, the Universe, your parents or Mother Nature - whatever resonates with you - and turn it into a field in which we can plant seeds and harvest miracles. Gandhi used to say that 'we are the change we want to see in the world'. And we are.

Surely, our impact can be as radical or as subtle as we wish, from Da Vinci's transformative effect on civilization to that of any one of us adopting a single stray animal from the SCPA before it is killed. WE CAN CHOOSE, at every opportunity, to live this Life, TO LIVE THIS LIFE EXTENSIVELY, or to crawl through it. We are all born with so many gifts... Some can draw, some can act, some can sing, some can cook, some can love like there is no tomorrow, some can inspire, some can convince, some can dance, some can empathize, some can turn their back and leave... We all are blessed with a wealth of potentialities and possibilities. But do you wake up in the morning with the determination of the warrior, set to fight his battle? Do we use our gifts for the benefit of the Universe or do we let them go to waste?

That book that you have always wanted to write will only be manifested if you sit down today at your computer and start. You long-renounced dream of going to Cambodia and teach mathematics to children as an act of charity will only materialize if you identify and contact a suitable NGO today. These regrets, which you bear, of never telling your estranged sibling, who is gay, that you love him just as he is, will never dissolve until you have the courage to pick up your phone, dial the number and say the words. NOW.

On the day we were born, we have all been presented with the canvas and the brushes needed to paint a most beautiful, meaningful and inspired Life. But do we? Or are we wasting yet another incarnation by dwelling in our own unbearable confort?

I choose, this year, in two thousand and infinite, to live my Life to the fullest. To stretch my energy into all corners of my existence. To leave no gold nugget lying on the ground. I commit to loving, standing up for what I believe in, renouncing what depletes my energy and manifest my potential wherever I can. I will not die an unlived Life.

Because when we are dead, there is really not that much we can do anymore, kinda. ;-D

Read out loud with me:

I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear
Of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days
To allow my living to open me,
To make me less afraid,
More accessible;
To loosen my heart
Until it becomes a wing,
A torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance,
To live so that which came to me as seed,
Goes to the next as blossom,
And that which came to me as blossom,
Goes on as fruit.

Dawna Markova