Episode Transcript
My name is Ken Hanuman, and this is my wife, Dr. Anne O'Hare. We both work in healthcare and have been meditating for many years. We also enjoy a happy and fulfilling marriage. Come listen and see how to demystify spirituality and bring it into your home, your hearts, and in all your relationships. We will share our experiences and how we use these principles in everyday life. Welcome to the spiritual relationship. Hello everyone. Welcome to the Spiritual Relationship Podcast. My name is Ken Hanuman and this is my wife, Dr. Anne O'Hare. Today's topic is enjoying a spiritual lifestyle. A lot of people might think that spirituality is about being austere, being, you know, very strict life. It is as if you're moving away from the happiness of the world and you're, you're getting into this. They may think of like a nun or a priest or something like that, or, or like a. A yogi going and living in a cave somewhere or something, right? Mm-hmm. But I would like to tell you, that's not really, no. Growing up, even as a teenager, I was, I was lucky in, in that my grandfather sort of helped me to inculcate a love for a relationship with God and I. I learned to, to love solitude and contemplation. And I guess from the moment I could read, I was reading excerpts from spiritual texts and thinking about it, probably having a desire to experience something spiritual. Anyhow, I think that's what is missing in regular life. That this spiritual dimension, this ability to go within, to experience that stillness within, that feeling that you are your own friend, you are your own cheerleader, you have confidence in yourself. You're not constantly bombarded yourself by other people's opinion, or every time you might not, uh, you might fail or something doesn't work out the way, it's supposed to, or you wanted it to, I feel bad about myself or I question my abilities. And, that's not, that is what spirituality, protects you from. And helps you to enjoy life. And why do I say that? Is that I had a regular life, school, job, family, and I look back and see, you know, I'm very, I'm content. I mean, things could always get better, but all in all, it was wonderful and I learned a lot. This spiritual practice that I had, I learned how to wake up early in the morning and would spend a few moments, maybe about 15, 30 minutes in just sitting quietly reading something good or contemplating or thinking of this relationship with a higher power. And sometimes too, I'll kind of project into what the day might be and maybe is there something that I could maybe decide that I'm gonna behave this way instead of that. Sort of prepare myself because the world, I really don't have control over the world. What is happening? What comes at me? I can't control that. But what I can control is what is within me. And that's the beauty of spiritual life and spiritual practice. So I'll ask Anne to share maybe some of the practices that she has inculcated and find it very enjoyable. Yeah, I, I wanna start out from my childhood also. So I grew up in a American Catholic northeastern environment growing up in the seventies and eighties, and. It was kind of a, you know, we're not going to church, but we're calling ourselves Catholics, that kind of thing. So there wasn't any real rigid following of anything. What I have noticed is that even when church was there, it was kind of like, you go to church to have your spiritual experience and then you go back to real life. Mm-hmm. And isn't that true with temples and everything else too, right? Yeah. It's like you go to the spiritual place Yeah to get your dose of God, and then you go home, and now you're back in your regular life and you hope that somehow your temple experience or your church experience will somehow spill over into your regular life. So one of the things about Raj Yoga that I really appreciate, which is the practice that we practice, and you could just call it spirituality really, because I am a spirit. I am a spirit. So if I'm a spirit, then my life is spiritual. It's funny how we split things up. You know, this isn't real life. Oh, this is meditation. That's your imagination. It's my mind, isn't it? But isn't that make it real to me? Exactly. Yeah. So I think that we have this kind of a mismatch. So that's the background. But to answer your question, what do I appreciate about the spiritual lifestyle? I did always wanna live in an ashram. What's an ashram? And ashram is kind of like a spiritual place where people live and maybe they do yoga, or maybe they pray, but they follow a daily routine. They wake up, they meditate, they do exercise, they do what they call karma yoga, which is that they wash or they clean or they build, or they do things for the environment that they are in, and then they maybe give a class or something. They serve the community maybe they grow their own food. There's some kind of aspect of nature in there somewhere, like maybe peaceful, something inside me always wanted to live there, but it wasn't in the cards for me to do that. I had a family, I got married, I have a family. And I have a job and I have a career, so I'm sure you, a lot of you can relate to that. So if I have, if I'm not living in an ashram and if I know that going to church once a week or if I, I will say my experiences going to church once a week. Does not a spiritual life make okay? Right. Or going to temple or giving what money. Giving money is important, but that doesn't make your life spiritual either. It's part of it, but it doesn't all make, I mean, service is part of it, but I feel that the foundation of spiritual life is the understanding that I am a soul and that my mind, my mind is the internal field of action that I have. So, for instance, we have a physical life, and we're talking about the physical life, but what about the mind? The mind is where I'm experiencing everything. So how does this relate to spiritual lifestyle? My spiritual life is being lived in my mind. I mean, you can do any discipline you like. This is why I, and I hope I can say this for you too, we're not advocating for any religious belief. Any spiritual practice, external spiritual practice. We're not advocating for any specific physical spiritual practice. We're only advocating for spiritual principles. Soul, mind, peace, love, benevolent nature of the soul, the ability to transform oneself. Not the self, but being able to to discern out behaviors and experiences that maybe we don't want to experience anymore and adopt things that we do wanna experience peace, love, harmony, and have our life reflect that back. I would call that a spiritual lifestyle. Right. It doesn't mean that you have to go to this church or that church or do this or do that. Do whatever you like. 'cause guess what's so nice about it? There's so many things out there right now. I'm talking about external. Now I know that some out there are gonna argue with me that this one's right and this one's wrong. I'm gonna say, this is what I'm saying, and you can say if you agree. I have room for what anybody likes. If you like this one, if you like, you know the whirling dervishes in Turkey. If you like to go pray at Mecca, if you like to go, do you know the Jewish temple? If you like the Hinduism, if you like nature, if you like Christianity, if you like, whatever. All of it's perfect. The principle of spirituality. We talk about spiritual life, life, lifestyle. I am a spirit. This is a spiritual lifestyle, that there are principles there. If I'm angry and yelling at somebody, I'm not gonna call that spiritual. Because I'm not in a, my behavior is not in alignment with the spiritual qualities of me. A lot of times people get upset with different religions because they see what they call hypocrisy. Like they'll see somebody in charge of like a spiritual situation and then they act, corrupt or negatively or inappropriately or whatever, and then that turns the person off to that spirituality, I'm gonna say that it is possible to change those behaviors, whichever path you're following. The spiritual essence is the same. So what is a spiritual lifestyle? I'm gonna say a spiritual lifestyle is what you can create based on spiritual principles, and some of those spiritual principles are simplicity, honesty, integrity. Like if you, like we were saying in the last episode, it's very, very hard to be peaceful if you're in debt. Right? So these are just some kind of things. So what, so I could, I could approach it and say, get out of debt is part of a spiritual lifestyle, but I would rather say spiritual lifestyle means you're peaceful. So whatever you're doing that's contributing to you not being peaceful, maybe that should be addressed. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. I think that we've all been told so much, especially in certain cultures, we've been told so much, do this, don't do that, do this and you're good. Do that and you're bad. I don't think any of that's necessary. I think there's a lot of room. If you use the spiritual principles and you take care of yourself and you try to be, I don't know what we could universally call as morally good. Nonviolent like that. I think that's a good enough start. Yeah. One thing in meditation that comes to light and becomes so obvious is that the negative things that we have, the attitudes or the what we might refer to as a vice, let's say like anger or hate. The feelings of fear or anger or hate, they are, they, they're the things that steal your happiness. And the thing is that we say, okay, don't love everybody and don't hate anyone, and all of that. And the way we, when we say that, we're thinking of saying something nice about somebody else or, or so on. But in spirituality, what you learn is that when I feel fair inside of me, when I feel hate, irrespective of who you might hate, like it doesn't, hate is hate, love is love, peace is peace. You see how that's a principle? It's a principle. And that if you recognize that once, that thing, that emotion is present in you, it is causing damage or steals your happiness to you. You are the one that is first suffering, and when you cannot get rid of the hate or the, fear or the anger, you are stuck with that, and it will start to affect all your relationships. So if you recognize that, you begin to develop a love for yourself and, and a patience, and you begin to think, here, let me see if I can re reduce that or remove it completely and replace it with something positive. Not for other people, but for my own peace of mind, for my own self-esteem, for my own, feeling of mercy, and compassion for myself. There's no way you could feel compassion for others if you don't first feel compassion for yourself. So that's one of the valuable principle of spiritual practice and spiritual lifestyle. Mm-hmm. And that ability to change is a source of great joy, accomplishment, and that is why I've been enjoying this spiritual life is not so much about the physical appearance or, or your behaviors so much. It is more of the internal victory that you experience. Two quick things, and maybe we can end on this. One thing is maybe we could boil down the lifestyle into the four subjects because instead of it being like, go to church, dah, dah, dah, dah, which fine if you want to, that's fine. What I wanted to say, so the first thing I wanted to say is what you just said. Is it possible to do all that regardless of what you're following externally? Yes. You can do it regardless of what your life looks like. Yeah. Okay. You can do what he just said. Right? That's the principle of what I was trying to get at. The external activity does not make you peaceful, right. It's become more, you become peaceful and then you can live whichever life you want. There's room for that. So that was my first point. There's room for it. The second thing is I'm gonna talk about, so somebody might be listening to this and be like, where is the spiritual lifestyle? So I'm gonna break it down into the four subjects. In the raj yoga, we talk about four subjects. Yoga, that's meditation. You're gonna sit and meditate every day, every morning. That's it. That's part of the lifestyle. Knowledge. You're gonna study. Yeah, you're gonna study every day. You're gonna pick up your scripture and you're gonna pick, you're gonna read something and you're gonna learn about something, and you're gonna say, okay, today I'm gonna work on patience. Today. I am gonna work on silence. Today. I am gonna work on love. Today I am gonna work on forgiveness. So what are you doing? You're giving yourself a spiritual assignment for the day. That is part of the spiritual lifestyle, yoga knowledge. Second one we call darna. Or like Ken was saying in the beginning, inculcation. What does inculcation mean? It means that I'm taking what I'm learning and I'm make synthesizing it into results in my life. I'm digesting it and using it in my life. So how does that work? Inculcation? Let's say I read about, silence or forgiveness. Let's say I read about forgiveness or read about, self-care, self-love, let's say, and then I go through my day and I'm trying to inculcate that self-love I'm trying to go against maybe anger or judgment or something that maybe I had before, and I'm trying to inculcate what I just was reading about or learning about. That's the third subject. Dharna,or inculcation. The fourth subject is service, and that's what we are doing right now. When you give money to the church or to the temple, that's service. It should feel like service. It should feel, it shouldn't feel like you're being pressured or you're being gonna be tortured if you don't give enough money. You see where I'm getting at with this? There's so much negativity and control that's been attached to a lot of these so-called spiritual things. But if for me today, if I break it down into those four subjects, that is the spiritual lifestyle. Yoga. Knowledge. Dharna ,or inculcation. So you're gonna use what you learn in life. And then Service. Service with money, service with time, service with your attitude, service, with your, you know, everything you have. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We, we do have to step away from just taking care of myself and maybe let some of what you have be shared or. That it benefit others? Benefit others? Yes. There has to be something like that. And every religion, just to be fair, every religion has all four subjects in it. Yes, every religion has all four subjects in it. But if you look at, for us, I feel that if you look at, look at the subjects themselves and you can rearrange your life around those four things, that is a spiritual lifestyle. Yes. Okay. Very good. All that was a good topic. All right, so thank you everyone for listening and we will see you next time. Alright. All righty. Bye-bye. Byebye. When you walk into a room, life gets little. You.
