Is new york street drummer practising karma yoga?
Posted on 03. Mar, 2011 by yogi Tobye in Interesting stuff, music, Philosophy, Yoga
What’s that saying about life giving us lemons and making lemonade? You know the one; when things don’t go the way you planned, you’ve got to get down and dirty, find that thing that you can do that makes people happy and do it.
That’s what life is about in reality. If you’re not going out of your way to make people happy, you’re never trully going to be happy yourself!
There’s a type of yoga called Karma yoga. Normally we think of karma as being stuff that happens to us because of what we did in the past. But it’s more than that. At least where yoga is concerned. Karma yoga can be defined as union through action.
Meaning, we come to know ourselves through service, through our actions. When we seek just to serve without looking for payment, reward or something in return, when we act act simply for the joy of the action itself, that’s karma yoga.
In these times of struggle, it would be real easy to sit back, take a welfare cheque and let other people get on with it. Some people do that it’s true. But it’s not possible to get anywhere that way.
Lots of people need a hand-up, definitely. But it’s the people that use the hand-up to propell themselves onwards and upwards that end up somewhere better than where they started.
I like this guy in the video. He’s down-and-out and has obviously had a run of bad luck. But he’s also got talent. Instead of just sitting on the side of the street begging for money, he’s acting. Obviously a drummer that loves to play drums, he’s made himself a drum-set out of what he can find and I would say he’d be playing his drums with passion whether people were walking by or not. And it’s because of that passion he has for the action of playing the drums that makes people smile and want to give him money. So, he’s getting a hand-up because he’s doing something he loves.
He’s practising karma yoga without knowing it I reckon!
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