Dharma is a path of action, one that is embedded in the cells of your body. My dharma is writing. I have other gifts, other talents. I teach yoga. I am life coach. I use the tools of yoga, my intuition and my life experience to help others over come tough obstacles. I’s pretty good at. At least that is the feed back I get from my clients. But the one thing I love more than any other is writing. When I write I know I am connecting to a part of me that lives in the very morrow of my being. I am writing. It is me.
In his book, The Great Work of Your Life, Stephen Cope cites the Bhagavad Gita as the source of all teachings about Dharma, about or sacred duty. He states that the Gita makes it clear that our biggest obstacle, the thing that separates most from ourselves and our dharma is self-doubt. He tells us that the yoga tradition has called doubt, “the invisible affliction.” He goes on to say, “We do not suspect the was in which doubt keeps us paralyzed.”
I spent 61 years of life doubting that I was a writer. This is the face of every teacher I had telling me I had a gift for writing, for expression, for putting ideas together, and for understanding the human condition. So what, I thought. I need to make money. Only famous writers make money and I will never be famous. Oh, I wrote off and on throughout my life, usually at times when I felt most lost, most at risk, divorce, abortions, depression, child-bearing and rearing. But I never sustained a steady practice. I always gave up and got a job and boy did I have some awful jobs. I was a clerk at Blockbuster. I waited tables. I worked for catering companies serving food at other people’s parties and taking home the left overs. I worked as a clerk in a chauvinistic law firm. I ran a cheese shop. I sold kitchen equipment. I worked for an orthodontist digging around in the grungy mouths of kids with braces who did not brush their teeth. I worked in theatre as a props manager, a publicist, and a box office manager.
I did have one job I absolutely loved. I worked for the man who is now my husband. He opened and operated one of the first natural food stores in the mid-south, Squash Blossom Natural foods. I was either his second or third employee and I worked for him pretty consistently for over 8 years. People thought we were married and that we ran the store together, which we did, run the store, but we were not married, to each other. Anyway, it was a great job. I loved it until I could not do it any more. Jimmy and I had an affair and as hard as we tried we could not keep our lives on track. He remarried a woman who hated me and banned me from the store, and I went back to my husband and children. For the longest time I believed I would never again have meaningful work. Had I known then about Dharma, I would have told you that mine had been stolen from me. I was wrong.
I opened a yoga studio in 2001. All the great teachers came, Rodney Yee, Cyndi Lee, Richard Freeman, Shiva Rea, Doug Keller, Rod Stryker, and others less well-known.
Midtown Yoga was and still is a gathering place in the heart of midtown Memphis. Great teachers, excellent classes, very successful. I hated it. I was miserable the entire time I ran the studio. I worked too hard, worried too much, struggled to be the very best leader I could be, but I was not cut out for the job. I made money, the studio did extremely well, but I suffered and suffered and suffered until finally I was diagnosed with breast cancer. A lumpectomy, radiation and recovery required that I give up some things, but I did not quit working. Anyway, that was then, this is now. I sold the business in January, 2013. What a relief. I tried for so long to make something that I was really good at my dharma. The Bhagavad Gita talks about doing that. Pretty much says it is better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at the dharma of someone else. Each of us is unique in that way. We each have a destiny, gift to give. Mine is writing. I see that now. How do I know?
I know writing is my dharma because 1. I embrace it fully without reservation. No more doubt. 2. Writing consumes me. I am utterly committed to this work. I will never give up. I am passionate about writing therefore, for the first time, I am passionate about living. 3. I have given up being famous or even successful. I write because I must. I have no idea where writing will ultimately take me, but I am going regardless. 4. Because writing, my words, my inspirations, the energy I have to write all come from my Soul. When words and ideas present themselves to me, I sit down and write. I never know where it will go. I love that about writing. It is always an adventure.
My dharma, your dharma. . . . .it all boils down to the same thing and here I must, once again quote Stephen Cope, who I consider to be one of the world’s best writers. Of dharma he says this:
“Dharma eventually takes on a life of its own. It does things spontaneously that you had no reason to expect. It begins to drill down into the deepest parts of your mind. Soon you begin to see that this dharma is not just any old stick of bamboo. It is a magic wand. A wish-fulfilling wand. It is a way to know – to interact with, to be in relationship with – the deepest parts of yourself. It is a vehicle to know the world.”
Writing is the vehicle through which I know the world. What is yours? Do not squander you life.