There was a story of Vishakha in Buddhist literature. One day while she was busy grinding some spices her bangles were making noise and bothering her. As she couldn’t concentrate on the job, she removed a few of them, but still those bangles were a distraction. So she removed them one by one and at the end when only one was left, there was no more noise.
If we try to find inner meaning, those bangles are comparable to various impurities that are there in our mind, which hampers our spiritual thoughts. As ordinary human beings in our material world, we lack tolerance, compassion, peace, and get driven by greed, desire, pride, lust, envy, etc. These blind us in our actions. As we walk the path of material achievement, we find that to be endless as we can’t satiate any of our desires. In the end, we are bereft of peace end up becoming restless. But if we know how to walk the path of renunciation and withdraw each of our negative emotions we will only be left with awareness which will help us in uplifting our soul.
If we carefully notice throughout our life since our childhood somewhere somehow we had learned to differentiate between good and bad. If we sit back, lose the veil of our ego and reflect, we can clearly identify our deeds of what is good and what could have been done differently, yet while we are in motion or action, we tend to go with the flow as our perspective gets clouded by our emotions/ impurities. A spiritual awakening will only happen if we reflect and start becoming aware of our actions and thoughts.
Here in the story Vishakha, we can see a very important character of a human being which is being tolerant. In life, it is hard to avoid negative circumstances around us like criticism, quarrel, jealousy is very much part of our life and surroundings, but we can avoid reacting to them, rather try to avoid by removing them one by one.
When Vishakha was removing her bangles one by one she was withdrawing each obstacle that created noise and bereft her peace. In the end, only one remained left which is awareness then there was no more distraction.
In the field of Yoga, Japa is considered as an effective way to invoke the state of concentration of our restless mind by subduing the power of sense organs. Japa helps in shutting our mind down from all those external influences and helps in finding inner peace.
It’s nothing but practicing repetition of a sacred word or a verse or a mystic syllable or mantra, remembering the name of any deity and those repetition helps in bringing the mind to a state of absorption. One who finds the meditation is difficult Japa is advisable to them as it does not require any posture, time, place, and formalities. It requires the only effort and can be done at any circumstances.
One can begin with repeating Om or any scared word mentally with every breath and that can be done even while someone is busy in his or her daily chores. That itself will align the mind and prepare him for meditation.
‘If meditation is not possible, do Japa. Realisation will come through Japa.’
Holy Mother Sri Sarada Devi