yesterday i filmed a three minute dharma talk on the overall message of the bhagavad gita for a yoga teacher training assignment. while that might sound like a moderately remarkable achievement which could take your average bear a few days to do, for me, it was a months-long challenge.
you see, once i cracked open and delved into the gita and began soaking in its history. metaphor, and meaning, i found it nearly impossible to distill its centuries-old vastness into one-hundred-eighty seconds. so i continued to study. i read and listened and read more. i noticed moments in my real life when the lessons were applicable. i wrote notes here and there, key words i wanted to communicate through the lens of the gita: awareness, curiosity, service, presence, authenticity, integration. i tried to choose just one as a focus in order to pare down the talk but discovered that the unpacking of one depended on all the others to stand along side it. one by itself felt incomplete and hollow.
weeks went by and still i could not imagine how i was going to deliver the assignment in a meaningful way. and then yesterday, i tired of the struggle. i tired of my insistence on being the slow and steady tortoise, of trusting she would always be more valuable than the race-to-finish-first hare. i tired of my need to avoid half-assness, or the ghastly fake-it-til-you-make-it mentality.
and i sat down and i did it.
and it wasn't half-ass. or fake. or choppy or incomplete. it was pretty good.
it was as if krishna himself whispered to my inner arjuna, "both parts are necessary, the knowing and the doing. and because you know, because you didn't skimp on learning or attempt to hotwire expertise, because the knowing was lived and is part of you, the doing flowed from your heart with ease. you only had to decide to do it and sit your ass in the chair."
