PLAYOUT INSTEAD OF WORKOUT

 Spark 4

August 11, 2014

PLAYOUT INSTEAD OF WORKOUT

       We postpone a good thing many times because of the false belief that we have to do a lot of it. Either the length of time or the intensity required scares us. Exercise, meditation and study, for example, remain on the back burner though we keep saying they are important. We even admit we enjoy it when we do any of them. We surely do enjoy these truly good things. How come we do not do them regularly?

     It’s the perception that makes the big difference. There are people who look at play as though it’s another work, and there are those who look at work as though it’s play. Can we look at scriptural study, for example, as play? This can help us get down to it without resistance. And once we start it, we are more likely to enjoy it than otherwise.

     “…you don’t have to suffer to feel good. You can make exercise a “playout” instead of a workout,” writes1 Dr. Dean Ornish in one of his great books. Though the book is mainly about reversing heart disease, it is a work that those who do not have high cholesterol also ought to read. Dr Ornish covers a lot of spiritual topics including meditation in this book. He gives his own example, “I play tennis whenever I can because I enjoy the game and I like the way it makes me feel afterwards.” Is it not wonderful if things that are good to do and things that we enjoy come together?

     We can apply this principle to many a good thing in daily life. We must see if we enjoy the activities that we are contemplating of including in our daily or weekly schedule. Once we find we enjoy any of them, we must learn to just do it, without mental noise like resistance, complaint, guilt at not doing or pride at doing. It should become as simple an affair as combing our hair is. We don’t pride over our regularity in combing our hair. We just do it, don’t we?

     It is important to unburden ourselves of the dozens of shoulds and should not’s in daily life. There’s otherwise much dissipation of mental energy in every one of these issues. Let us identify healthy practices, and learn to do them with ease, with pleasure. That would be a mature relationship of ours with those good ingredients of a well-spent day or week. We may add to our list things like listening to music, gardening, calling some friends or relatives on telephone and making brief, kind inquiries etc. Let none of them put pressure on us; let us not forget them either. There surely is a gentle way of right living. Can we do things gently, and can we drop things also gently?

     If we learn this art of going about right living in a gentle way – without shouting at others or ourselves – we will perhaps discover that life is good here and now.

Swami Chidananda

Back in India now


End Notes:
1 Page 318, Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease, Ballantine Books

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