Understanding the Prayer

Understanding takes its own sweet time, and it's an ongoing process. I had a profound moment, while wearing a hairnet and singing along to the Beatles. Here is what happened.

I fell in love with yoga from pretty much the first class I ever took, years ago. I had no intellectual knowledge of the philosophy of yoga, but it felt right. So right. I remember walking down the street after my second ever class, trying not to laugh out loud because I felt so delighted and free!

Sure enough, I became more aware of the disciplines and values of this ancient spiritual system, and some of these made good sense in my head; intellectually, I got it and thought it was a good idea, though I didn’t wholly feel it in my body.

If you’ve taken a few yoga classes, you’ve more than likely heard or chanted the prayer Lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu. This is a prayer that’s often recited in Hindu practices, and it can be translated as, “May all beings be happy and free, and may I in some way be able to contribute to that happiness and freedom.” Of course we wish that for each other, right?

In reality, it has taken me years of practice to begin to really experience that prayer and understand it in myself.

At the weekend, I went to help out at a monthly soup kitchen at a church here in NYC, for the first time. It’s called Mother’s Kitchen, and it was founded my teacher, Mata Amritanandamayi as a place where homeless people can get a good meal in a welcoming environment.

When I walked in, I was happy to see quite a few people I recognized from satsangs (community gatherings) around town; I put on an apron and hairnet, started chopping up fruit, and felt very lucky to be able to help in this way while having a friendly time with all these nice people. There was even a guy plonking away on a piano in the corner while we worked. My friend Sanjoy said, “Wait til people start arriving—that’s when the magic happens.” I didn’t know quite what he meant, but took his word for it.

As I stood at the serving tables collecting seating tokens and chatting to folks who had come for the day, I looked around me—at all these people who had come together, all the good will that was going on, all the food that had been prepared with love, human beings being decent to each other. I was moved to my very core and had to stop myself from welling up. There was nowhere else I’d rather be than right there, and I had the thought-feeling: “This is what it means. This is being inside Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu.”

Maybe it has not taken you six years of yoga practice, trainings, study and so on to arrive at understanding prayers like this in your heart. Maybe you don’t practice yoga at all and you got it from the get-go? Maybe you’re somewhere in-between.

I wanted to share it with you, though, because quite often on our respective journeys there are ideas which seem to make good sense to our brains, but don’t really chime with us on a deep level. It is so, so, so very okay if and when we feel that way! Understanding, on any level, happens in its own time; whether it’s related to an immediate personal relationship or something you’ve read in a poem, whatever it might be. And understanding is fluid, not static; it moves with us. There is no end-point to understanding, it just gets deeper, wider.

These practices that we have—like yoga, or giving up our seat on the train, or trying not to interrupt people, or being patient, or formal prayer—are all part of the same thing, all part of our reaching an understanding that doesn’t need to be explained. The kind of understanding that very simply brings peace to our hearts.

Lokah samasta sukhino bhavantu.

लोकाः समस्ताः सुखिनो भवन्तु