Path of Descent

Religion  - from the Latin religare “to tie back”

Yoga – “to yoke”

At their root, the practice of religion and yoga refer to the same thing, a yoking or tying back in. 

What exactly is being yoked?

The scriptures and mystics teach that the “yoking” is between the consciousness and the divine Self or God.  While we are never disconnected from this root source of our aliveness - God never lets us go - we come to feel we are disconnected only because we forget we are connected. 

Our suffering grows from the soil of this disconnection, our forgetting. Here we are speaking about a very specific kind of suffering.  This is not the suffering of bodily pain or heartbreak.  This is the suffering we experience in our forgetting our unity with God where we come to believe we are only our small self and all that happens to this self. When we forget, we come to believe that we are our gains and losses, our achievements and failures, our wealth and our poverty. 

Paradoxically, it is within this path of descent into suffering where we are most likely to find our connection to the divine. When we are lost, abandoned, betrayed, our egoic self falls into humility and even humiliation. Where the ego has lost control, it can feel as if we are falling into a dark void. Yet, it is in that falling where we can catch a glimpse of the presence of what is much larger than our small self, God embracing us in our grief and woundedness. 

Realizing our (re)connection to God, we feel held within a much larger frame of reference than our own small perspective. An infinite space opens to hold and heal what has been injured. In this holding, we can feel an outpouring of love.

I wonder why were we made by our creator to be so forgetful? It maybe because without forgetting we would never know the presence and love of God in our lives.  We would be like the fetus attached to the mother through the umbilical cord.  It is only when the baby is born and separated from the mother can she begin to know her separateness from the mother. In that separateness, the love and care that the mother gives to the child is the bridge back into togetherness.  Separateness bridged by love back into connection.

This gives us all a chance to be a bridge back to God for each other or as Hafiz writes, "Be an oasis".  Through our kindness and caring to each other - the kin, friend, stranger, dying, orphan, or widow - in small and large ways, we help to open up that door back to our groundedness in God, mystery, divine presence.  We can come to know God's love in our love and care for each other.