Start to examine motives and feelings at the root/heart of your actions. Can you step forward from śraddhā?

Theory

Practicing several short sessions a week ensures that you are - deeper than ‘intellectually’ - meditating on śraddhā. This has a spill, saturation, perfusion effect on your whole life.

The difficulty of ‘changing your life’ is that we lack the strength, resources, and knowledge to do it. Other forces are too strong. We cannot ‘will’ change.

However, if we incline our will to the small changes that matter (small, consistent practice), our whole life changes. Again, you cannot force or wish or pray for this to happen.

The only way it happens is if we consent to doing it.

Practice

You can already ‘do’ the whole sūktam! The trick is to lay in many repetitions. However, you want to repeat many times with greater accuracy EVERY SINGLE TIME. You know from doing japa practice how statechanging noise and repetition for several minutes at a time is: don’t lay in mistakes, laziness, or day dreaming. Instead, try to have each succeeding repetition be more clear and precise than the last one. You might try reciting the whole sūktam ten times or more: but do it right. More and more right each time.

IN THIS LESSON

REVIEW mantras 1-2, receive mantras 3-4.

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Get into a practice of saying śraddhā, not ‘faith’.

The word ‘faith’ conveys blind faith and can conjure the harms of religion. śraddhā is not a doctrinal belief. Nor is it a socio-political-cultural identity.

It is a deep inner sense of meaningfulness in the universe, and a willingness to seek the truth.

Our path through life requires conviction and perseverance. Śraddhā is a force that can open us to new knowledge and experience. It is a prerequisite to science and forms the basis of good relationship and meaningful pursuit. It graces us with a willingness to see things through and accept our humanity.

  • In Patñjali’s Yoga Sūtras, śraddhā is said to be the first step in the process of yoga. श्रद्धावीर्यस्मृतिसमाधिप्रज्ञापूर्वक इतरेषाम्

    śraddhā-vīrya-smṛti-samādhi-prajñā-pūrvakaḥ itareśām

  • Vīrya should be understood as heroic power, courage that comes from knowing and believing in a deeper truth, and virility or potency. śraddhā is the force supplying this. Courage without śraddhā is foolhardiness. Action without śraddhā tends toward selfishness.

  • human beings are patterned, memory based creatures. The storehouse of memories shapes and determines our perspective. For one with śraddhā, our memories are infused with a recollection of purpose, integrity, and humility. We don’t forget ourselves or the meaning of this life, which infuses each day with a soft sacredness regardless of circumstances or outcome.

  • Self transcendence or a state of yoga, samādhi is often (mistaught) as the ‘goal’ or highest result of yoga practices.

    Samādhi is real. But it is not the end: wisdom is the end and the purpose of yoga.

    But there IS no samādhi without śraddhā.

  • Prajña is experiential wisdom. It is the difference between intellectual understanding and person experience.