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Continue Your sadhana

A spiritual discourse on maintaining consistent practice and motivation.

"To begin anything in life is easier. To build a house is easy, but it is very hard to continue or maintain the house. Similarly, your spiritual sādhanā or your physical sādhanā needs a lot of inner effort."

"Imagine a water well... This bucket is your sādhanā that will bring water to quench your thirst. Between the water bucket and yourself is a string or a rope, and that rope is your motivation or willpower."

The speaker addresses the challenge of sustaining spiritual practice, using analogies of a water well, a persistent ant, and a water pump to illustrate the necessity of unwavering motivation and positive thinking. He warns against doubt and negative thoughts that break one's 'rope' of willpower, emphasizing that love and continuity in practice are essential for growth and harmony.

Filming location: Strilky, Cz.

DVD 311

The main thing for all of us who are sitting here is to continue our practices. For many, this is not easy, including many yoga teachers. They are teaching; they think it is their obligation, yet they themselves do not practice. That is very sad. Many, many yoga teachers are busy with different things and do not practice. To begin anything in life is easier. To build a house is easy, but it is very hard to continue or maintain the house. Similarly, your spiritual sādhanā or your physical sādhanā needs a lot of inner effort. We know that it doesn't matter what you are doing, whether for physical health or spiritual development—both need practice. And practice requires a very harmonious relation to your practices. If you lose your aim, it means you have lost your motivation. If you are aware of your aim, there will be motivation. An ill person knows they want to become healthy and will search for a doctor. It doesn't matter how—walking, by car, by bus, by train—because the aim is to come to the doctor. Similarly, our aim is to achieve higher consciousness, and that needs constant, constant motivation. Imagine a water well. Many don't know what a water well is because when you have water at home, you turn a little piece of iron and water comes. But it was not always like that. In many countries, they now have electric pumps. In old times, they used to take water from the well with a bucket and a string. This bucket is your sādhanā that will bring water to quench your thirst. Between the water bucket and yourself is a string or a rope, and that rope is your motivation or willpower. You pull water out from, let's say, twenty meters deep. Before you could reach the bucket in your hand, the bucket was still at eighteen meters. It had already come out; only two meters were left, and the rope broke. What happened? The bucket will fall into the water well, and the water will also fall. Now you are standing there with this twenty-meter-long rope, which broke near the bucket, and you have no water. This illustrates that our aim is to get that water through the bucket of our sādhanā, and that sādhanā needs positive thinking. You are doing your prayer and mantra, but inwardly you have negative thinking. It means your rope is very fragile, is rotten, and it will break. So it depends on you whether you will be successful or not. Whatever you are searching for, only you will find it. If the intensity of your search is as it was in the beginning... That is why Gurujī said in one bhajan, "Oh Lord, day by day my love should increase." And what is happening with you? Day by day your love is decreasing. How will you achieve your goal? When the love is gone, everything is gone. Then comes disharmony in life—either with your partner, children, colleagues, neighbors, in your study, or in your profession. When you lose this love, then it's finished. It is dying day by day, and when this day-by-day dying happens, it is a very cruel cruelty within you, not outside. Your negative thinking towards your aim is very bad. You should not have this thinking. But when you think selfishly, wanting to fulfill some material desires and wishes, and after some time when it's not fulfilled, then you are in doubt. And doubt is the first bacterium which will slowly, slowly kill your motivation. The bacteria are so fine you don't even see them in the air. So small, but this small bacterium can pull down or throw down a mighty elephant. There is one bacterium you need to see with a magnifying glass, and there is an elephant you can touch and see with closed eyes. So how can this very tiny bacteria pull down the elephant to the ground? Your love is like a mighty mountain or elephant. But your negative thinking, your questioning of why and how and when, and "if not, then finished"—these are our negative questions. That is why it is very important to have a continuity of our sādhanā. There was one yogī like you, sitting under a tree and meditating, with a mālā in his hand. After two hours of meditation, he suddenly got inside restlessness, disappointment—a spiritual midlife crisis. "Oh God, now I have been practicing for forty years. I didn't get even one little spark of light, enlightenment. I didn't even see the small toes of God. I think everything is senseless. Oh, I wish I could at least have enjoyed the material life. No, follow Yama and Niyama. Don't do this, don't do that. I did my mālā and I am sitting here without anything." This is a thought which comes. Many people then give up meditation and practicing mantras. They begin with alcohol. They begin to eat meat again. They begin to quarrel with family members, which is not good. So that man who was sitting near the tree said, "More than half of my life is gone, and I didn't achieve anything." He finished practice, put the mālā down, and began to think, "How many years I lost! But even if I give up, I can't become young again. You can't go back, and it has no sense to practice anymore if I didn't achieve anything in forty years of practice. I began when I was thirty. Now I'm seventy, and in forty years I didn't realize... How long will I live now? Ten years? Five years? Maximum twenty years. Do you think I will achieve in these twenty years what I couldn't achieve in forty years?" Doubt, despair, anger—even towards his master, luckily the master was not there nearby. And what does he see? Suddenly, an ant is climbing the tree with a rice corn in its mouth. After climbing half a meter, the ant lost the corn. The ant went down, searched, found the corn, and again began to climb thirty centimeters and lost the corn. Again, she began to climb up and climbed one meter—that was a very high achievement—and again lost the corn. She went down searching, found it, and the ant began to climb again. Three meters—again lost. Again, the ant went down and found the corn. This time, this man tried to put the corn a little nearer to the tree to help her. She found the corn and finally climbed between two branches. There was a small hole, and the ant walked backwards into the hole and pulled the corn inside. The yogī who was sitting there, desperate, said, "That's it. That's it. My God. This ant is my guru now. Never give up. Try. Practice, practice... Never give up, and finally you will be able to bring your corn to the nest there." So finally, you will come to your aim. The biggest obstacle is our motivation. If we don't have motivation, then we go towards worldly thinking, and be sure, this worldly thinking will not help you achieve your goals. This does not mean that you don't work. It does not mean that you don't create a family. It does not mean that you are not staying with your family. It means that you lead your normal life and practice. Don't stop practicing. Yesterday, we came from—I came from Prague—and I was a little bit tired and went to sleep. There was a constant noise, a humming sound. This morning we found it was a water pump running. We turned it off; it was peaceful, but there was no water. We started the pump again, and there was noise, but water was there. So it doesn't matter how it is. If you want to have water, there is noise. If you don't want noise, there's no water. This is like the story of that horseman. Now, in this civilization where people have many, many cars, many have never even seen a horse in reality, so you don't know what it means that the horse is thirsty. So now, this sound of the pump is a good example. The problem is there. The problem is life. Without problems, life is 85% boring. The best university, the school of life, is the problem. And problems are there to solve. Since humanity was created, problems began to exist. Every human is very busy, working day and night. Some people have no time to eat, but still the problems of the world are not solved. How many wars were in the past? How many humans were killed cruelly? Humans were thrown to the tigers and the lions alive. You know that? Many things remain. Unfortunately, religion was involved in it. The politicians, the kings, for their selfishness, they involved religion in it. And if your belief is different, it means you don't follow my politics, and they killed very cruelly. And it's still happening, and this is not good. So many wars to correct something, to protect something, but still they are not successful. Problems are like bacteria, and you can't block the bacteria. There is one man with the bacteria who has some influence, an influencer. This influencer went to the airport to go to Singapore. He took a flight from Prague to London, and from London it flew to India, and from India to Singapore. When he came to Singapore, the bacteria was already there greeting him. How? Because when he came to the airport, he brought the bacteria at the airport with his breath. And the person who got this took a flight directly to Singapore. The person who had the bacteria, the influencer, went to London, to India, and then to Singapore. So the bacteria were seven hours earlier than him in Singapore. You see, the most intelligent creatures are the bacteria. They know how to maintain. Therefore, the problems of life will never be solved. Given this, you should find time to have your sādhanā and have this love. Love is lost; everything is lost. Then you have no motivation. Okay, you practice mantra because you came here and everyone is doing it, but you are making one try and looking at your watch. It means I see there is no motivation. So we need love. Then you will see that everything is changed in your life. A dry plant gets regularly watered, and after a few weeks, there are new branches growing. New leaves are growing. A new life is coming out of the dying plant because of the water, light, and fertilizer. So you need this insight: the water, light, and fertilizer—the water of love, the fertilizer of care, and the light of wisdom. This is very important for your happy life. That is why we say yoga is harmony for body, mind, and soul, and that is possible if you do it.

This text is transcribed and grammar corrected by AI. If in doubt what was actually said in the recording, use the transcript to double click the desired cue. This will position the recording in most cases just before the sentence is uttered.

The text contains hyperlinks in bold to three authoritative books on yoga, written by humans, to clarify the context of the lecture:

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