"Yoga is the stilling of fluctuations in the mind," according to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the earliest known written codification of yoga's principles. One of the first Indian thought leaders to bring yoga's "royal path" to the U.S. was Swami Vivekananda, when he delivered inspiration and insight to the Parliament of the World's Religions in 1893. Staying in the US for several years following, Vivkenanda spread lessons of light and perception that are still relevant today as we prepare to engineer daylight by turning clocks forward and mark our first anniversary with COVID-19 at the same time.
Imagine you found yourself sleepless, wandering alongside a lake in the middle of a dark, windy night. Restless, your troubled mind might mimic the choppy water whose fluctuations fracture an otherwise steady beam of reflected moonlight. A few deep breaths of fresh air could bring stillness to your mind so that you might experience a more continuous stream of conscious presence, just as if the winds settled and clouds floated away, the still and glassy waters now could reflect a continuous and luminous moonstream.
In the days to come, we'll renegotiate our relationship to daylight with the bumping forward of clocks, an hour of lost sleep on Sunday morning, and a readjustment of circadian rhythms. In the weeks and months to come, we'll renegotiate our relationship to the coronavirus, a relationship that depends on vaccine accessibility, COVID-19 variants, and our own will and resources to remain safe and vigilant. The challenges, shared and individual, continue.
And so, when challenges rise up like winds in a storm, and our mind feels fractured by fluctuations, it can be useful to remember that a steady stream of enlightened guidance is always there, just like – throughout its cycles – the moon is always there reflecting light, even and especially in the darkest of night.
