December 15, 2021
Notes by Dhruva Shreejay
Virtue of the Week: Śama (Quietude of Mind)
Śama is quietude of mind. When the mind is quiet, we know what’s right. We can control our thoughts to be motivated.
When we have to make a choice, there are 2 different paths: the path of good and the path of pleasure.
- The path of good is when you work hard now, and have a good impact in the long run.
- The path of pleasure is when you do something that feels pleasurable now, but it will have no good impact in the long run.
The best way to achieve Śama is by keeping our bodies and spaces clean and organized. By practicing cleanliness, we develop quietude of mind. Shankar ji gave an example that he was trying to get into a habit of cooking instead of ordering out or eating frozen. But whenever the kitchen was messy, they decided to order out. There was a lack of motivation to cook healthy food when the kitchen was messy!
Practice:
We did an activity to investigate – does being clean help us have a quieter mind?
Our practice was to get something sticky and put it on our non-dominant hand. Shankar ji asked us to close our eyes and he read out 10 numbers and asked us to remember as many numbers as possible. Once he was done, we typed as many numbers as we could remember into the chat.
We then cleaned our hands and repeated the exercise to remember as many numbers as we could with our hands being clean.
We saw that we could remember more numbers when our hands were clean.
Lesson from Practice
By keeping our bodies and spaces clean, we can keep our minds clean and are more able to control our thoughts.
Each day, when we have to make our beds we think, “What’s the point? I’m okay with sleeping in a messy bed. Each morning we wake up in a messy bed.” By making our bed, we have more control of our environment, we have more control of our thoughts. If we take the easy path, it will be impossible for us to take the hard path when it matters.
To practice quietude of mind, practice keeping your space clean and organized. Make your bed, keep your room clean. We are much more ready to choose the path of the good, to take the hard path instead of the easy path now for longer term benefit.
Shankar ji shared the Marshmallow experiment with us: When children were given a choice to get 1 marshmallow now, or to get 5 marshmallows in 15 minutes, the children who chose to wait for 15 minutes to get more marshmallows were found to do better academically than the children who chose to eat the 1 marshmallow immediately. This shows that having a quiet mind and choosing the path of the good with long term benefit makes us stronger and more in control of our thoughts.
RAW (Reflection Adventure of the Week)
Keep your room organized. Practice cleanliness of your space and see how it makes your mind quiet.