Bhagavan Das plays the Sitar

A sitar is a very complicated instrument. This one had dozens of strings, and I didn't know how to tune it. I didn't know where to begin, so I left it in the empty room next to Ram Dass' room. Every day I'd bring it flowers and worship it as Sarasvati -- the goddess of music, art, and letters. For weeks I sat with it and meditated.

One day, the sitar spoke to me and told me to pick it up. I picked it up very respectfully, as if I was holding a beautiful woman in my arms. Then it said, "Tune me." And I started tuning the strings. For the next couple weeks I spent hours tuning the sitar, never playing it. Finally, something happened and it all came together. I started to play. But it didn't feel like I was playing the sitar -- it felt like the sitar was playing me. Sarasvati was playing the sitar by using my fingers. I never had a lesson. I just surrendered to the Goddess. The music was sublime.

-- Bhagavan Dass, "It's Here Now (Are You?)

chance and symbolism

Everything for a reason, everything with a purpose.

The other night I had a particularly depressing time on the town. The beginning of the 4th of July, around 1am. I got so flustered that I changed my dinner order to take-out, and sat there debating whether to pay cash or credit. I counted my cash and put my card on the table. Finally went with cash. And I was so done, that I just left the cash on the table (in Mew York City!), walked to the front desk, and told the waitress "I left it on the table" as I fled the scene of the crime.

he next morning I counted my cash. Something like $75 total, about $20 of that in 1s. I couldn't find my ATM card but didn't think much of it... until I had spent almost all my cash on a new pair of shoes, a new shirt, 2 slices of pizza and a drink. I had $8 left. And spent 30 minutes searching for my ATM card in vain.

I made it through the night through the kindness of strangers. The club gate girl who slipped me in, the girl who bought me bottled water.

Come the next morning, I had a single $2 bill and began to strategize how I might transform that and a metro card into a passage to the airport the next morning. It felt like Burning Man all over again, in a way.

Anyways, waltzed over to the restaurant, and asked the maitre de about a lost card. She was super sweet, checked the office, asked the bartender, even called the manager. No luck. I told the bartender "I lost my green card." He said "That sucks." And I replied, "Good News, Bad News... Who knows?"

Back to the homestead all 35 feet south, a renewed effort to find my card. It *will be* here. I *will* find it. A mere five minutes later:

bending three magazines (with a sneaking suspiscion), I sense something rigid inside one of them. Hmmmm... I grab them by their spines and shake. Low and behold, what falls out of, but my little green ATM card. Right behind the flap of "quiet your mind... 5 poses for inner calm," followed closely by "Transform your life with yoga of the heart"

This was a powerful message atop the Ram Dass Be Here Now, and Bhaghavan Dass' It's Here Now (Are You?) reading of the night prior. Slowly, but surely, a picture is forming...

Yogic advice for Troubled Times

Your story about an experience can both define and direct your emotional response. The way you choose to interpret things will deeply effect the future of that encounter, or the future relationship with that person.

But when you put the story aside, emotions are simply emotions. At the heart of all these emotions is energy itself. Love is a particular kind of energy. Sadness is another. Anger is another. Each of these emotions has a characteristic felt sense -- for anger, a hardness of the heart or the gut; for love, a melting, rippling heat in the heart; and for sadness, a sinking, heavy feeling through the chest.

In times of upheaval one of the most powerful things that you can do is to practice catching each wave of emotion as a felt sense in the body, without acting on it or attaching to it. This is a kind of meditation practice; you keep bringing your attention to the sensation of the emotion in your body, just as you would bring your attention back to the breath again and again. You sit in the felt sense as long as you can, noticing the stories and thoughts that arise, constantly bringing attention back to the present moment and to the feeling of the emotion in your body.

As you do this, the feeling will begin to change. It might dissipate, or it might just lead to a different series of feelings. It's in that gesture of learning to be with emotions as sensation and energy, and then letting the shift, that you will begin to realise the path you are meant to follow.

-- excerpted from Yoga Journal, Feb 2008