The Indispensables List - to life as your art.

Sadhana

Grace

Company

Dharma

Creativity

Humility

Here is a list I consider of some of the crucial things that are indispensable to living a conscious and rich life regardless of our situation in life, making life your greatest work of art. This list gives you the secret components to fulfilment.  Bring this list to your life now and do an audit, an honest one coming from critical self-reflection and look at where you could improve your life. Trust me, everything gets better with this list, these guidelines. 

Let me explain each one briefly to you.

Sadhana-

Doing committed, regular, focused daily practice that takes away the pull and obsession of the world and points you in the right direction, the Self.  These practices are things like meditation, prayer, devotion, and wisdom practices.  Whatever it is that you are drawn to, be the most determined practitioner you can be.  Sadhana, spiritual practice, is designed to help you recognize the truth of who you are which is beyond what the world or rational thought mind can understand or see.  You must go beyond the body and mind in a way that with repeated effort, eventually you will learn and become what you have always been and never knew it.

Grace –

For kids, grace makes total sense but as we grow up, we leave behind our natural mystical natures under the false assumption it’s imagination or fantasy.  This is so sad because once we cut ourselves off from grace, life does become dull and meaningless, and we start to look into unhealthy ways of filling that void. Or we just become dull.  Grace is the independent body and movement of spiritual energy, of consciousness that acts of its own accord and can truly bless our lives when we remain open to it.  Grace is always present for each of us equally and when our awareness begins to grow and we start listening to it, Grace will make herself known to us.  Grace is what awakens, not anything we do ourselves apart from opening to it.

Company –

Two things had a big impression on me that help me keep wanting to help humanity and bring ease and grace wherever possible.  The first one was when I was studying integrative nutrition and came across a 20-year study by National Geographic called the Blue Zones.  This study found the populations in the world where people lived naturally and easily to well over a hundred years old and they found a commonality between all zones.  One of them was community, company. 

The second thing was only this week I watched a show with a famous female Australian comedian called Magda who was looking at the health and wellbeing of Australians.  It was a brilliant show and made me so inspired.  Again, looking at our decline in health the subject of company came up.  Well, community. 

Who we choose to spend our time with shapes who we are and even more interesting, we have become so hung up on being individual and free that we lost, particularly in some of the west, the family unit, the church and spiritual community and with that, our mental health and physical wellbeing.  These blue zone communities were literally that, a community and everyone had people to be with and talk to that were a positive influence in their life and hence made them live longer.

That is a massive reason why I have started a sangha, a spiritual community, to try and create that for like-minded people.  I’m someone who experienced first-hand the breakdown of family values and the impact as a result.  If a family falls apart, we need a strong sense of belonging with great company to help keep us well and living a great life.

Dharma –

It’s no secret I’m the dharma karma queen and at one stage had every intention of being that and was very satisfied with that.  Dharma and karma go hand in hand, but karma is the biggest topic I know and will save for another day.  Dharma if we keep it simple, is living in harmony with life and nature and doing what you were put on this earth to do, be.  All of us here have a reason for being and at the topmost level that is Self-knowledge, awakening, transcendence and transformation.  At the most mundane level, it says to do the best job you can do with what you have, what you are.  Do whatever it takes to be the best partner, parent, friend, worker, and artist and have no attachment to the outcome, just the job at hand. Imagine if people truly understood what it means to live in harmony with nature. That is what we are meant to be doing. If only we stuck to this, we wouldn’t be in the climate disaster we are now, well the man-made part, nature is also at play here.

Creativity-

Ahh, easy to say for an artist I hear you thinking.  Is it?

Not necessarily, being an artist might be the very fabric of this body, but I live in a society and come from a family where that was not encouraged, at all.  It meant I had to sit in the study halls at boarding school in my senior years, miserable and switched off, while watching the art students below outside sketching the flowers in the garden, happy and laughing.  I could never wrap my head around that and all the times including a massive 12-year chunk of my life when being an artist wasn’t to be.  The judgement is horrendous.  Yet creativity is what made this universe. 

Creativity is the pulse of the cosmos, and it isn’t just for the artists, you can tell from my plight. It is for all of us.  We are all inherently creative and part of the key to a happy and fulfilling life is to find what that creative impulse is for us and to bring into our daily lives.  Not all creative people surrender to the creative energy flowing through them and this can make them dysfunctional and miserable.  It is a spiritual discipline to listen to and encourage and even worship the muse that is creativity, the divine feminine energy.

Humility –

The moment you stop thinking you are in control the quicker you will find ease and grace in your life.

When we come from the mind and the body we believe we are something we aren’t, this individual entity that is always comparing itself to everything and everybody around it.  We are using whatever we can to be better or to be pathetic, whatever our tendencies are it doesn’t matter, it’s all ego. 

Who cares? The softest and most open and loving and magnanimous people usually have endured great suffering and had their egos crushed along the way.  In yoga, the word for ego is ahamkara or ‘I maker’.  The meaning we give life depending on the puny amount of awareness we have.  Your education, money, status, and physicality are nothing.  Maybe you have already noticed that the emphasis you put on that only keeps you in a place of differentiation and separation from the world and those around you. 

Give it up.  Take on humility. 

As the great Lord Chaitanya said, ‘be more humble than a blade of grass, more tolerant than a tree, always offering respect onto others and never expecting any in return.' 

Perfect place to end.

I’d love to hear how your personal audit went.

With love. xxx

©MataKamaleshwari