Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Stephen Cope. Stephen Cope is the scholar emeritus at Kripalu Yoga Center and the director of the Kripalu Institute for Extraordinary Living, the largest yoga research institute in the Western world. He’s the author of four best-selling books, including Yoga and the Quest for the True Self, The Wisdom of Yoga, and The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling. With Sounds True, Stephen has released a new audio book of The Great Work of Your Life and also a new eight-week online course on Your True Calling, where he teaches that the secrets to unlocking the mystery of your life’s purpose can be found in the spiritual classic, the Bhagavad Gita.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Stephen and I spoke about the four pillars of discerning and living your unique dharma. We talked about how missing by an inch is the same as missing by a mile and how we can go about sharpening and clarifying our aim.
We talked about how important it is to decide what we’re not going to do in order to focus on bringing our idiosyncratic gifts to life. And we talked about what it means, in Gandhi’s phrase, “to take ourselves to zero in the spirit of selfless service.” Here’s my very helpful and timely conversation with Stephen Cope.
Stephen, your new online course is on finding one’s true calling. And I wanted to begin our conversation by talking about something I see in the culture at large right now, which is more and more people feeling a sense of real despair and anguish, feeling overwhelm about the state of the world and a sense of social disruption, and how this has put a certain pressure on people to say to themselves, “How am I contributing? What’s my true calling? How am I making a difference in the world?” And I wanted to begin there and hear what you have to say about this current moment of time we’re in, and this new sense of pressure that I think many people feel.
Stephen Cope: Tami, that’s a great question. So the book that we’re talking about, The Great Work of Your Life, is really a study of the Bhagavad Gita, which is arguably the most important treatise in the yoga tradition. It’s the treatise that every villager in India knows. And part of that is because there’s such great storytelling—everybody can relate to it. But it’s a treatise primarily about the path of action in the world. And so there’s just copious amounts of wisdom about action. That is to say, “How do I decide, in this moment, what actions to take?” And the view is that actions taken from a discerning mind have a mystical quality. They have a mystic effect on the field. So right now, we’re facing a situation where people are profoundly pushed to ask in the face of, for example—and this is going to be a little time bound because we’re right in the middle of it—the splitting up of parents and children along the southern border of the United States. So there’s a massive question in America right now that you and I are asking. In the face of this, how do I act? That is to say, what is my responsibility to action?
This is the same kind of question, for example, that Thoreau had to ask during the Mexican War and before the Civil War when he wrote his treatise on “Civil Disobedience.” What is my responsibility, in the face of this difficulty, to act in the world? Of course, he decided that he was complicit in the actions of his government, so he was called upon to act. So of course, he refused to pay his poll tax and he spent a night in jail. Thoreau was, of course, one of our greatest amateur philosophers, and he was all about the question of, “How do I act in the world in a way that is aligned with my true purpose?”
So the Gita has a number of responses to this and in a way, this is kind of starting in the middle of the book and of the Gita, because the Bhagavad Gita is basically divided into three sections. The first section is about action in the world. The second section, which is the second six chapters, is really about something we call jnana yoga, which is the yoga of wisdom, the yoga of the mind, the yoga of discerning intellect. And then the final six chapters are really about the wisdom of the heart. In yoga this is called bhakti.
So the very first thing, and of course, as you know, the two main protagonists in this ancient treatise are Krishna, who’s actually an avatar of Vishnu. In other words, he’s God. And Arjuna, who’s kind of this neurotic dude we’re all meant to really identify with, because this whole scene is set at the beginning of a huge battle. Krishna, God, and Arjuna are having a dialogue on the field of Kurukshetra, where in the morning, at first light, a huge battle will commence.
And Arjuna’s question to Krishna is, “I don’t know how to act. How do I decide how to act?” And Arjuna falls to the floor of the chariot, Krishna is his charioteer—he doesn’t know until the middle of the book, by the way, that Krishna is God. Arjuna, at the beginning, is paralyzed by doubt. Just as maybe you and I and many other people watching this are paralyzed by doubt. How do I act? So Krishna falls to the floor of his chariot, or Arjuna does, rather. And Krishna pulls him back up, that first chapter is called “The Depression of Arjuna.” It’s the paralysis of action. Doubt paralyzes us from action because we have one foot on one side of a dilemma and another foot on the other side. Krishna pulls him up and says, “I am now going to instruct you in the path of action in the world—how you decide how to act.” And of course, Arjuna’s facing the most difficult of all possible actions. He’s going to go into battle, where he might kill somebody or he might actually be killed.
So this whole dialogue takes place at the edge of the most difficult social event of the epic, which is the battle of Kurukshetra. So this whole teaching, in a way, is geared to help us figure out this whole question of action. What am I called upon to do? The answers aren’t easy. Krishna gives Arjuna, at the beginning of the book, basically a four-stage path of action. First of all, discern your true calling in the world. What are you called to do? That is to say, you are a person with idiosyncratic gifts and possibilities that nobody else has. Given that, what are you called on to do? What’s the special offering that you can make into the current difficulty that nobody else can make? That’s what you’re called to do.
And on the second pillar of that path is, once you figured out what you’re called on to do, then you do it, full-out. This is called the doctrine of unified action. That is to say, once you’re clear about what you’re called to do, you bring everything you’ve got to the table. Don’t leave anything on the table: unified action.
The third point is: let go of the fruit. That is to say, Krishna actually says to Arjuna, “Whether you are successful or whether you’re a failure, whether you achieve your particular goal in this action is none of your business. You have to let go of the outcome. Your only business is what are you called to do and are you doing it?” Now let go of the fruit, let go of the outcome, this is called relinquishment of the fruit.
“And finally,” says Krishna to Arjuna, “turn the whole thing over to me.” Turn the whole thing over to God. That is to say, this particular kind of enlightened action that Krishna’s calling Arjuna to lives on the stream of love that flows between the illumined mind, the divine mind, and the individual self, if you will. Or the soul and God, depending on how you want to talk about these things.
So you raise the question of the fact that we’re in a difficult moment. We’re in a moment when perhaps our government, which represents us, is acting in ways with which we profoundly disagree. What are we called on to do?
The very first thing that Krishna says is the first thing you’re called on to do is to dive deep into your connection with the divine mind—with the awake mind, with soul, whatever you want to call it, whatever is “source” for you. The very first thing you have to do when you meet a challenging time is to dive, to take a deep dive—whether it’s your own spiritual tradition or a new one that’s calling to you—and listen carefully.
An example of this is Gandhi. Gandhi, of course, went to South Africa. He spent almost 20 years in South Africa, where he developed satyagraha, or the force of truth. Then 20 years in, after really refining and mastering some of the techniques of civil disobedience in satyagraha in South Africa, he comes back to India and people see him as a kind of savior, because India is suffering under the British Raj at that point. What does Gandhi do? So interesting. The first thing he does is he takes a massive, month-long trip around Mother India and all he sees is suffering everywhere. And he’s pissed off and he’s angry.
But rather than go right into action, what does he do? He goes into retreat. He goes into seven months of retreat, when he meditates, he prays, he spins—which was, for Gandhi, a form of meditation. Gandhi, as you know, prescribed for every Indian adult the art of spinning; because it was meditative, it was a way to calm the mind, it was a way to dive deep. So Gandhi doesn’t go straight into action. Gandhi goes into meditation. It was out of that choice that emerged the great decision on Gandhi’s part to make his first act to be the march to the sea to make salt. It was out of that deep dive inside—to God, to spirit, to soul—that Gandhi comes back up with, “This is the most discerning idea that I have about how to move forward, about how to act.”
So Krishna says to Arjuna, the very first thing to do is, essentially, pray, meditate, and allow the mud to settle. The great Dao De Jing says, “Before you act, let the mud settle.” Let the mud of your mind settle, and in Gandhi’s case, for example, this was the mud of anger, of rage, of aversion. He didn’t want to act out of that. He wanted to act out of clear mind. So he dropped down. [His] mind got clear enough so that he could act. So that’s a very long-winded beginning answer to your question, Tami.
TS: I want to talk, Stephen, about all four of the pillars that you’ve mentioned here that are elucidated in the Bhagavad Gita, but to begin with, this very first one, this discerning of, “What is my unique dharma?” I think for many people, that’s the hardest part of all four of what you’ve described. Once that is on track and there’s a sense of alignment, yes, I’ll give it my all. I’ll let go of the fruit. Yes, but I need to get this, the train has to get on the track first.
SC: That’s right. Exactly.
TS: And so what are the obstacles? OK, somebody says, “I’ve been meditating. I’ve been praying. There must be some unconscious obstacles at work in my life, because I’m not achieving clarity.”
SC: Yes. Absolutely. So this is so interesting, Tami, because in the day that the Bhagavad Gita was written, about probably 200 or 300 BCE, you actually, in India, were born into your dharma. You were born into your calling. Arjuna was born as a warrior and it was his calling to be a warrior, no matter what. You couldn’t get out of your dharma. You could’ve been born to be a priest or a shopkeeper or an untouchable even, or the many, many sub-castes. And this is actually quite common in traditional societies, where the idea is that you are born into a certain role and a certain caste. The idea is that if everybody plays the function that they were born into, then the whole thing hangs together.
So from the very beginning of the Gita, we have this really interesting notion of the connection between individual fulfillment and the common good. But that’s all based on this idea that a certain number of people are born as warriors, shopkeepers, priests, et cetera. That’s common in traditional societies. But now we have a situation where we’re not born into our dharma. How do we know what our calling is? How do we know what our true calling is in any moment? And this is a much more precarious situation for most people than actually even being born into their dharma. So when I’m teaching a course on finding your calling, 60 or 70 percent of the time is spent helping people look for their dharma.
Now it’s not a science, but I have three particular areas in which I point people to look for their dharma. The first one is, I often ask people a question—and I’ll do this in the course that I taught for you guys—”What’s lighting you up?” This is an energetic response. What is it in your life right now that’s most lighting you up? And I ask people to just jot it down without censoring. So you may have a list of, OK, what’s lighting me up? I’m not censoring. I just had chocolate that was fabulous. I love my dog. I’m writing a new book. That’s fantastic. Right now I’m watching the really cool series on TV. For whatever reason, I’m lit up by the British royal family. Oh, my meditation group. You ask people to download what’s lighting them up and you get this really interesting list. And you discover that everything on that list—like for example, I’ll give you a mundane example.
For some reason, this dude has been lit up by the British royal family for years. Now if I dig down into that, I discover that my mother looked exactly like Queen Elizabeth II. In old age, these two dames look exactly alike—it’s really remarkable—and act alike, because my mother had a certain magisterial quality. So this question, which may seem sophomoric, about what’s lighting you up, is very important to know. What it is out there in the world—this is kind of like a Rorschach test—what it is out there that fascinates you? Even if we’re talking about a TV series. Right now I’m watching that series called The Staircase. It’s totally fascinating me. Why? There’s something in there that’s about me. So the very first thing I do, and this is not unlike Joseph Campbell who said “follow your bliss,” right? The very first thing I do is get people tuned in to what’s lighting you up right now. That’s just one finger pointing toward dharma. That’s not dharma, but it’s information.
The second, what I call, very fruitful hunting ground for dharma is this very different question. So we have first, “What’s lighting you up?” Second, “What do you feel is your deepest duty in your life right now?” Now, the color of the water in the room changes when you ask people about their duty. What’s your duty? I have a duty to my family. Do I have a duty to my country? Interesting. Duty. What is duty? All of a sudden, it raises all these questions. But in the Bhagavad Gita, the word dharma, or “calling” also means “sacred duty.” My own definition of duty is not externally imposed but internally imposed. And the question I always ask is, “What is it that, if you do not do it in this life, you will feel a profound sense of self-betrayal?” Self-betrayal.
So for example, there are things that I see as duties for myself. Like, on her death bed, my mom asked me to be the curator of the family archives and to digitize it and to bring it into a position where all my nieces and nephews could see it. I get that that’s a duty. Very often when somebody asks you something on their death bed, it’s something you take in. So I took that in. If I don’t do that before I die, I will feel a sense of having betrayed myself and my mom. I feel a duty to Kripalu. I’ve been here at Kripalu for 30 years. At some point, we all—and you know this—we all have to put our flag in the ground somewhere. Wherever we do that, it’s going to be limited. There are going to be problems. It’s going to be real life. I just happened to do it at Kripalu here when I was 40 years old. And I’ve been here for 30 years now. So I feel a profound sense of duty to this organization and its thriving. So that’s the second question I ask. First, “What lights you up?” Second, duty. Sometimes they’re the same list. Not often. Sometimes the same things show up.
There’s a third really interesting hunting ground for dharma that I point people to. And that’s the one that you began this interview with, which is, “What are the challenges that you’re facing right now in your life?” Is there a marital challenge? Is there a health challenge? Is there a challenge with your country, the way your country’s acting? What are the challenges and difficulties that are showing up right now? And do you think that those also are dharma for you?
So in the book that we’ve referenced, The Great Work of Your Life, I use the story of my great teacher Marion Woodman, who was, of course, one of the great feminist union analysts of the 20th century. She studied in Switzerland with the disciples of Jung. She became a wonderful teacher. She and I taught together a lot, and Robert Bly, and then in the middle of this great career, she developed bone cancer. And her question then was, “What’s my dharma now?” She decided that her dharma was to take on the difficulty and reframe that as her dharma. So what’s my dharma now, for Marion? Now my dharma is to bring everything I’ve got to solve the question of this bone cancer. Maybe it means learning how to die. Maybe it means learning how to live with limitations. But Marion decided to take that as her dharma. You could choose not to. You could say, “No. My dharma is still doing psychoanalytic treatment of my patients.” She closed her practice. She took it as her dharma. She wrote a book called Bone, which is about her experience with bone cancer. And of course, we all know, she was healed in spite of the fact that the doctors said no way. I think that was partly because she decided fearlessly to take that on.
So those are the three areas that I find extremely productive for people looking for their dharma. And you know this as well as anybody in contemplative practice, a lot of the first task is usually naming something, like for example, I’m being roiled by emotions. Is it grasping? Is it aversion? What’s going on in there? And actually naming it is an incredibly powerful tool. So naming what’s lighting you up. Naming your duties. Naming the challenges that might be dharma. First step. Really powerful.
TS: Stephen, there’s a great quote—many great quotes—from The Great Work of Your Life, but this one especially caught my attention. “Missing by an inch is as good as missing by a mile.” And in the book, you talked about how for many of us—our dharma, our unique calling and function and purpose in the world—we’re actually kind of doing it, sort of, maybe, kind of. It’s hidden in plain sight. It may not be that we have to go on a three-year meditation retreat to discover what it is. It’s kind of right here, but we might be missing by an inch. Why is that as good as missing by a mile?
SC: Such a great point. There are certain misapprehensions people have about dharma and one of them is what I call “the romance of dharma.” The romance of dharma goes like this. In order to find my dharma, I have to leave my job in the insurance industry and go to Paris and paint. Now, that might be true, but as you just said, for most of us, we’ve already bumbled and stumbled into the general area of our dharma. I really think most people have. They already have some connection with it, some knowledge about it. But the second noble pillar of dharma, called the doctrine of unified action, is all about the fact that dharma you need to aim at precisely. It’s only when you’re aiming precisely and have a precise definition and understanding of what you’re aiming at that you’re actually going to hit the target.
In that particular chapter, I use Susan B. Anthony as an example. Because here you have a great American story of this woman who, of course, started out in the temperance movement. She was a young Quaker girl. She started out in the temperance movement. She kind of knew that she wanted to be a teacher or have social impact and then you watch as Susan B. Anthony slowly, slowly trues-up her calling. She goes through many chapters until finally in her 40s, she realizes, “My calling is suffrage.” It’s all about women’s suffrage. Until women have the vote, they don’t have any power. And women were so disempowered in her day. And so she took upon herself the task of mastering everything she needed to in order to aim squarely at suffrage. She said to her lieutenant, “This will happen eventually. It’s only a matter of time. But it will only happen if all of us get super clear and pare away everything that’s excess baggage here and go right to the point of suffrage.”
I liken it [to] when you have a hose, and the hose has a number of tributaries coming off of it. What that means is that the power coming out of the end of the hose is much less than it would be if you cut off those other outlets—those other tributaries, if you will. All of a sudden, you have the power of everything moving through that central hose. So when you look at great dharma stories like Susan B. Anthony’s, you see that truing-up dharma is a systematic process of paring away everything that isn’t dharma.
I also tell the story of Robert Frost. His whole story is a story of somebody who, at 18 years old, Tami, knew that he wanted to be a great poet. His family was totally against it. But you see in Robert Frost a guy who slowly peels away in his life everything that is not his dharma. For a while, he was a teacher and writing poetry. He taught at Amherst, which is where I went, so I know a lot about Robert Frost. There was a huge dharma moment—I call this a “crossroads moment”—when he had to decide to give up teaching. He gave up teaching and what did he do? He bought that crazy farm in Dairy, New Hampshire. He had no intention of farming it. He said he bought it in order to farm poetry.
So he gave up teaching. He makes this huge empty canvas of his life, goes up to New Hampshire, and basically he farms poetry. It’s only after Robert Frost makes those choices—and each one of those is a kind of jumping off a cliff, because you never really know when you give up teaching for poetry. Really? Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind? A paying job for poetry? There is something about that moment, about taking that risk, where the universe starts to support you in ways you never could’ve imagined would happen. There’s something absolutely essential about the commitment of paring away what is not dharma. And I will tell you this: usually, what you end up paring away is stuff that scares the bejesus out of you, because it’s about security.
Gandhi did this. Gandhi’s life, too, is the story of his increasing simplification on his dharma. And if you look at what he pared away, it turned out to be all of the supports that most of us need just to feel secure in the world—that “oh, we’ve got a good job and we’ve got plenty of money.” And you may not need to make that leap but, for example, I did. So my life turned around when at 40, I decided I was going to give up my job for a year—I had a very thriving psychotherapy practice in Boston—and go to spend a year in an ashram.
Nobody thought that was a good idea, but it turned out to be the best career move I’ve ever made. [By] making that leap and when I made it, all kinds of things came together. I’m very interested. I’m glad you brought it up, in that moment of making that leap, you make it with discernment. You check it out. You try it out. I came to Kripalu many, many times before I decided to leave my home and practice behind. But then there was the moment where I actually had to leap, and that’s a powerful moment.
TS: Stephen, I noticed as you’re telling stories to illustrate the points you’re making, you’re using these examples of great heroes and heroines: Gandhi, Susan B. Anthony. And I’m imagining someone who says, “Good on them, these great beings. Those are the butterflies of our culture. There’s only however many of them.” You know? “I’m an ordinary person trying to figure out my ordinary life purpose. These examples leave me feeling less-than.”
SC: It’s such a great point and I hear that all the time. In the book, I actually do ordinary people in each chapter, as well. But what’s really interesting to notice, Tami, is that most of the people I profile, in their lifetime, were never seen as great. So Thoreau, for example, whose life I document, he was seen as a total loser in Concord. His father owned a pencil factory where he worked occasionally. He was just seen as a complete ne’er do well. Walden, his greatest book, never sold more than 800 copies during his life. He was a loser.
The same thing with so many of the other greats. Robert Frost never published a poem until he was 40, or 38, I believe. But that said, yes, to your question. I see, now that I’m teaching this material, I see such cool people living such great, ordinary lives all the time, making the same kinds of decisions to jump off those cliffs.
I’ll give you an example. We do these things called Jeffersonian dinners. You might know Jeff Walker. I don’t know if you know Jeff, but he’s been a real proponent of Jeffersonian dinners, where you sit around and you talk about one topic. And so we were talking about dharma with a group of high-finance people from New York—hedge-fund traders and ordinary schmoes who work on Wall Street. And there was this one really lovely guy who said after the crisis of 2008—when everything fell apart and we know that there were a lot of ethical violations up in the higher realms of finance in America—this guy said he went through a crisis of conscience, and really what we then described as a dharma crisis. He said, “This profession sucks. So many people in this profession are guilty of bringing down the economy of America out of greed. I don’t think I can do this anymore. What’s my dharma now?” Talk about difficulty.
He sat with this and he checked it out and he thought about it and he decided, “My dharma now is to stay in this industry and transform it from the inside.” So he put together a study group of other hedge-fund guys, stock brokers and stuff, who were down on Wall Street to begin sharing their stories and talking about actually what they can do from the grassroots level to begin to change the situation.
Now I hear dharma stories like that every single day. And I’m so into it. You should try this sometime, if you’re meeting somebody new and you’re at lunch or dinner or something. Ask them their dharma story. “What’s your purpose right now and what are you called to and how’s it going?” People have amazing stories. And they’re all just ordinary people like you and me.
TS: So we’ve talked about the first pillar, discern what is your dharma. Now for the person who’s listening to this, Stephen, who says “This is an unusual use of the word dharma. I’m not sure I’m 100% following it. I want to be able to talk to people—‘What’s your dharma?’—and they’re going to say, ‘What do you mean by that word?'” Could you give us a brief definition?
SC: Yes. So dharma is one of those fabulous Sanskrit words that actually has many layers that usually, because you and I’ve been in Buddhist circles, usually dharma means “path” or “law” or “teaching.” The root of dharma is the syllable dhr, which literally means to hold together. And in the Bhagavad Gita, which is the main scripture of karma yoga or the yoga of action in the world, that word dharma always means “sacred duty” or “true calling.” At the same time, it also means truth, path, law. But in the Bhagavad Gita, dharma means sacred calling, true calling, vocation.
And the idea there again … It goes back to one of the ancient teaching stories about dharma—the story of Indra’s net. So Indra was one of the greatest gods of the Ayurvedic pantheon, which goes all the way back to 2,000 BCE and before. And Indra, like most of these gods, lived on top of Mount Meru. It was said that Indra, who was the fiercest and most powerful of all the gods of the vedic dispensation, Indra had cast a vast net over the entire universe. And at the vertex of each warp and woof strand was a gem. And it was said that that gem was an individual soul. And it was that soul’s job to hold together that part of the web. If they did their dharma, they were holding together—again, dhr, hold together—that part of the web. If they didn’t, the whole thing begins to unravel from their spot.
So again, we’re back to this really very interesting connection between individual fulfillment and the common good. So if you’re doing your dharma, it holds together the whole thing. This word dharma, it does tend to have many meanings, but they all converge around dhr, to hold together: the law, the truth, the path. There’s a certain quality of that “holding us together.”
TS: OK. So I’m a jewel in the net and I’m going to discern the function I have in that specific location in the net and I’m going to do it. Pillar number two full-out. And there’s an aspect of this second part that really struck me, which is this clarity about, as you teach it, what I’m not going to do, and how important that is. You know, it’s something I’ve seen in business, too. That as we define in every division of Sounds True what we’re not going to do, that is so helpful in terms of helping us figure out what we are going to do. So speak a little bit about answering that question. Figuring out what you’re not going to do so that you can be full-out in what you are going to do.
SC: Absolutely essential. It’s one of the tasks that I give people at the end of any seminar that I run about finding your true calling. Usually, I ask them to list five words, “What do you know?” Give me five words that you know about your dharma for sure. Most of us, many of us could do that. Then I give them the instruction to notice, what are the things that support their dharma, the actions taken in the world that, moving forward, they want to actually enhance and do a little bit more of? And what are the things that are extraneous that are unnecessary, that don’t feed the dharma, that maybe work against the dharma—and what are the things there that you actually want to start snipping away piece-by-piece? That can be hard. That can really be hard. Because people get attached to some of those pieces of life. It’s just happening with me right now.
I’m actually personally going through this dharma moment. As I think I said to you earlier, I’ve just relinquished all of the administrative tasks that I have had for many, many years at Kripalu and I discovered what I didn’t know: that there was a tremendous amount of grasping and clinging on to the little shards of power and control that I had in this big, fascinating, really cool organization. And it took me … Right now, I’m at the end of my first six months of having relinquished that and wow. Was that ever hard to give up. But I’m discovering underneath that this whole new connection with my spiritual life, with my dharma, with my meditation practice. I’m investigating new stuff. I’m really coming back to life. I didn’t even know that that was a whole bunch of stuff that I needed to let go of.
TS: And I think there can be quite a grief, sometimes, in that—in letting certain things go.
SC: Yes. I see this very often. I work with a lot of great musicians and ordinary musicians and musicians and I see people clinging on to dharmas way long past the point where they should’ve let them go. I actually tell a story of an ordinary person in the book, Catherine, my friend who was head of the English department at a local school. She and I became friends and we talked a lot about dharma. And I saw Catherine clinging desperately to her status as the head of the English department in this school. To the money. To the prestige. To the admiration that she got. All the while, knowing that oops, that dharma had expired a couple years ago. And I saw her become more and more empty as she clung to this empty vessel of what used to be, because she didn’t want to take a risk. She didn’t want to do what she had to do, which was to let go of that so that the new dharma could come in.
Here’s another—I talked about the romance of dharma. Here’s another dharma thing, which is that we only have one dharma in our life. It’s just not true. Dharmas develop, they mature, they come to fruition and then new dharmas arise. And we have so many ideas in this country about what you should be doing and how your job and role and all should look. People just cling to that for dear life. Whereas, if they could let go of it, if they could identify that grasping as a source of suffering—let it go, get out from under that. I’m a perfect example. In comes all this new stuff. I’m a classical pianist. As a kid and way through college, I studied classical piano. I thought OK, that’s over. That’ll never happen again. All of a sudden, I have this passion. It’s back. And it’s only because I let go of this big chunk of other stuff. So it’s huge.
TS: Now, Stephen, moving on to pillar number three: relinquishing the fruits of our actions. Now one of the questions I have for you is, let’s say somebody says, “You know, I’ve been giving everything I have and I’ve been getting some difficult feedback. It’s not working.” You told the story of people who, in their lifetime, weren’t recognized. So it’s not working. Maybe that means it’s not my dharma. Because I’m not getting positive feedback. Oh, but I’m supposed to let go of the fruits. How do I know when I’m getting important feedback from the world? “This actually isn’t working” versus “I just need to persevere because it’s my dharma.”
SC: I love the way you just articulated that. This is a very complex issue. Letting go of the fruits, letting go of the outcome—none of your business. For example, I often use on this pillar, Emily Dickinson, who is widely seen as either the greatest or one of the greatest poets in America, who never had her work praised or even acknowledged. She [only] had eight poems published in her life. She was seen as a little crazy crank who lived down the street. And again, I went to Amherst, so I lived down the street from her home. And yet, it was simply the deep knowledge that she lived for poetry and she wrote poetry every day. That was her dharma that allowed her to achieve this profound fulfillment that had nothing to do with recognition in the world.
So she says, and I think I have this in the book—her great poem about writing poetry is this: she says, “I fit for them—I seek the dark till I am thorough fit.” And what that means is she went into her darkened room and meditated for a while before she wrote.
I fit for them,
I seek the dark till I am thorough fit.
The labor is a solemn one,
With this sufficient sweet—
That abstinence as mine produce
A purer good for them,
If I succeed,—
If not, I had
The transport of the Aim.
Someday I’m going to write a book called “The Transport of the Aim,” because she was true to her dharma. She was doing it full-out and she was filled up with the transport of doing her dharma. So having said that, there’s the other situation where all of a sudden, the doors are closing all around you. This isn’t working. I’m not being successful. I’m not even feeling that much fruition of fulfillment in my own life. I haven’t refined this yet, Tami, but I have the beginning of a certain teaching about not going through closed doors.
Here’s a personal example. I think I can give this. I’ve been here at Kripalu for 30 years. I tell you, I took that leap 30 years ago. Everything went really well here for me. Books came out, they did well, dah dah dah. All of a sudden, for the first time in my 28, 29 year stint here, there came a moment, a year and a half ago, when nothing was working. I wasn’t being seen. I wasn’t being acknowledged. My work wasn’t coming to fruition. And I kept hammering on that door. Now, this is what I’m supposed to do. I just know it. I’ve been here for 30 years. Let me in. Finally, I realized and the Dao De Jing is brilliant on this. The Dao De Jing is like, don’t try to make things happen, let things happen. Don’t try to go through doors that are closed and locked. Go through open doors. Look for the open doors. Maybe there’s just a crack, but look for the open doors.
So there’s more I want to say, though, about the third pillar. People always say—I work with young musicians in the summer, brilliant young musicians, some of the most brilliant in the world at the Tanglewood Music Center across the street—and they say, “How can I master my art unless I’m grasping for the outcome of perfection?” I talked to that group of financiers. They said the same thing: “What do you mean, ‘Let go of the fruit’? Our whole thing is holding onto the outcome. We want to be successful. We want it to be successful.” Well, there’s this really brilliant distinction that the contemplative traditions make between grasping and aspiration. So grasping, craving, clinging, holding on is a kind of greed that’s driven by the lymbic system. As you know, grasping, greed, holding on, it’s driven by the most primitive part of the brain. That kind of grasping, craving and clinging does not actually help to cultivate mastery in any way.
So when I see my young students, my piano students, grasping the outcome. I’m playing with Yo-Yo Ma tonight and I’ve got to get this perfect. It turns out that grasping, that primitive grasping from the primitive part of the brain actually interferes with performance. What does help really excellent performance is what we call aspiration, which comes from a very different part of the brain. Aspiration means that rather than grasping and clinging and holding on, these young musicians are doing their practice deliberately like a craftsman. You know all about the research on deliberate practice. It’s got to be systematic. It’s all about improving, improving the way a craftsman improves, systematically, slowly. So now there’s a new part of the brain, which is the engine of excellence and mastery, and it’s aspiration. You see the difference there between those two?
TS: Yes.
SC: The kids get this right away; and they realize that they’ve been terrorized by perfectionism their whole life. They begin to see—because I teach them the story of Krishna and Arjuna—they begin to see that when they let go of their grasping and turn to aspiration, which requires them to organize their whole life around the development of mastery, all of a sudden there’s this new freedom. They’re having more fun. They’re playing better. They’re not completely devastated when they make a mistake. So it’s really important to have a little dialogue about this distinction.
TS: Now, Stephen, there’s obviously a lot to be said and to be unpacked about each of these four pillars, but I’m happy in this conversation just to have this chance to touch upon them with you. And I want to get to the fourth pillar of finding our true calling and expressing it in the world, which is to turn our work over, just turn it over to God. In the book The Great Work of Your Life, you have this phrase, “take ourselves to zero.” I love that phrase. Tell me what you mean. I like it, I think, just because the shape of the zero, the empty hole. Tell me what you mean by taking ourselves to zero.
SC: Well, that was Gandhi’s phrase. And Gandhi is perhaps the person in whom you can see, writ in his life, the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita. In this man’s life you can see what it would be like if you found your dharma, did it full-out, let go of the actions, and turned it over to God. And he discovered along the way that if his own ego, if his own actions were driven by grasping, aversion, and delusion, he would be in the way of some bigger outcome that he didn’t even understand. Because this path that I’m describing, these four pillars, are the path of what’s called “inaction in action.” The idea is that every human being … Action is the nature of human beings. We’re always acting, whether it’s body, speech, or mind. But there is something called inaction in action. What is that?
That’s when your actions are profoundly guided by some higher power, by some higher consciousness, by discerning mind. And the view is that when you’re acting in the world based on that, you’re essentially channeling something higher than limited human understanding, and you’re all of a sudden part of this much bigger tapestry. You may not understand the whole tapestry, you may not get it, but you’re part of it. Gandhi discovered it, because he lived his whole life this way. He discovered that if he got out of the way, really got out of the way—this was a guy who was willing to fast unto death—and this is where … We’re not Gandhi.
Gandhi was probably, next to Buddha, one of the most enlightened beings we’ve had on earth. But he was willing to let go of his very life. He saw his body as [if] he was simply the guardian of this body for this lifetime. As long as he had it, he would use it. And by the way, he took incredible care of his body. He was always concerned with diet and exercise. And even when he lived in London, he would walk vigorously through London. But he saw his body as [though] he was simply the steward of the body for this lifetime, so he had to get any self-interest, any small self-interest out of the way in order to actually achieve what he called, and what the Gita calls, inaction in action. That is, achieve being a channel for higher consciousness. He discovered that when you do that, your actions in the world change the whole field.
Another example of this is Harriet Tubman, whom I used in the book. Harriet Tubman was a fugitive slave. I think she was 19 when she ran away from the plantation. She got to Philadelphia, which was a safe haven in those days, and she intended to stay in Philadelphia. She had no interest in going back to South Carolina where the rest of her family was enslaved. She basically had a profound spiritual life because the slaves on the plantations did have profound spiritual lives. They knew the Bible, though not from reading it, from chanting it and singing it. She had this profound connection with God. She gets to Philadelphia and basically God says, “You have to go back and help free other slaves.” And she’s like, “No. Not me. I’m not doing that.” Like the Old Testament prophets of old, the very first thing they did when they got their assignment, when they got their dharma was: “I’m out of town.” You know, like Job—out on the first boat. Not Job but Jonah, who got swallowed by the whale. He got the first boat out of town.
Harriet Tubman says, “Not me, God. I cannot do that.” He finally keeps knocking. God keeps knocking at the door and finally she says, “OK, I can do this. You will have to guide me every step of the way. I’m willing to try it, but you have to guide me.” This is in her deep relationship with higher power, God. So she undertakes this not as herself but—again, taking yourself to zero—taking herself out of the way, trusting profoundly in this guidance that she had. And it’s funny, because she was well-known among the slaves that she was bringing to freedom that she had some kind of second sense. If Harriet Tubman said duck or stop or be silent or get behind that bush, you did it, because she knew that was the thing to do. So she actually guided hundreds and hundreds of fugitive slaves to freedom; and she didn’t take them just to Philadelphia. She took them all the way over the bridge into Canada. And at the end of her life she would say—and again, this gets back to ‘take it to zero’—”It wasn’t me. I was simply doing what I was told. I was channeling this divine guidance.”
Now, we all have different experiences of that kind of guidance, and in my tradition, in the yoga tradition, much of the mental, physical, and spiritual practice is about refining our, what I would call our knowing or vidya, or our perceptual bandwidth, so that we can actually perceive that guidance. Whether you think it’s coming from out there or in here, the microphone, the bandwidth gets wider so you actually begin to perceive the guidance in the way that Harriet Tubman did. So that’s available to all of us, but it requires getting out of the way.
TS: Stephen, this body of work—digging deeply into the Bhagavad Gita and helping people understand its core insights so that they can find their true calling—this body of work really was a great investigation for you while you were making a midlife passage in your life. And one of the things you write in the book is, “Deep in midlife, I had begun to feel the awful burden of wanting to be special.”
SC: Oh, God. Yes.
TS: I wanted to talk about this point as a final conversation point about how we find, I think you called it “our idiosyncratic genius.” How do we find our unique calling without this burden of needing to be as special as all the famous people you’re talking about. Just being our old self.
SC: Yes, yes. It’s a great point and you know, my friends will tell you, for years, I founded and directed the Institute for Extraordinary Living here at Kripalu, which is our research institute. But at home, I live with my dear friend Susie and we’re not sexual or romantic partners, we’re just besties and we live together and share a house, but we call our house the Institute for Ordinary Living as opposed to the Institute for Extraordinary Living. Because it’s actually the ordinary miracles that make life incredibly sweet and exciting.
The special thing—to give it a clinical name, it’s narcissism. I grew up being told that I was special. I went to really good schools and it was a practice—it’s been a practice for a lot of my friends and buddies who went to some of the same kinds of schools—to let that go. Because it’s completely separative. If you’re special, then you’re what? You’re separate. No. The core of the yoga tradition and one of the pinnacles of practice is the discovery that—this is called samāpatti—all human beings are made of the same stuff. I’m the same in every way that’s really important as you are inside. We’re human beings.
And this idea of being special, which our culture so enshrines, is utterly separative. What we’re aiming for is to completely come into living a sense that you and I, every human being watching this—we’re alike in every way that counts, which is how I know you, which is how I know that I don’t want to hurt you, because we’re family. In Buddhism, it’s called the practice of metta and in yoga it’s called maitri, which means friendliness toward all beings. And that friendliness emerges inexorably when you discover that all beings are family. Our great swami, Swami Kripalu, said the whole world is one family.
So yes, we are all special in our own unique, idiosyncratic way, but in a way that makes us one and not divided.
TS: Finally, Stephen, the hero of the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna, is a warrior and there’s a battlefield in front of him. And I’d love to know, as a final statement, what do you think is the kind of warriorship that’s needed to find our true calling today?
SC: And warriorship is the word. That’s why I’m convinced that they made him a warrior. And Gandhi, who wrote one of the most comprehensive commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita, said the battlefield in the Gita is actually the battlefield of life. It’s the battlefield of the afflictions, which in the yoga world, as well as the Buddhist world, are greed, hatred, and delusion. It’s the battlefield of separation. And I’ve really come to believe that every human being does have a calling to be someone. But that calling means that they’re going to be themselves: utterly and uniquely and idiosyncratically themselves. That means that you and I each have our own particular stew of gifts that we’re responsible to. I am responsible to my gifts, such as they are, as a writer. You’re responsible to your gifts, such as they are, as the head of a studio and as a highly creative person. And part of warriorship is owning that responsibility.
This brings us full circle, because what’s my responsibility to how my country is acting right now? I’m part of that, so warriorship is required—a certain amount of resilience and toughness and steadiness—all the attributes that Arjuna has at his best.
Keep in mind, though, Arjuna’s also a super-neurotic dude. And that’s what makes us love him. He’s just like we are in the sense that he’s split and doesn’t know himself and he’s full of doubt and he’s carping and complaining the whole way through the book, but eventually he finds his center. He finds himself and he steps up to his own dharma.
TS: Idiosyncratic, ordinary warriors are we. Stephen, it’s been great to talk to you and share this time. Thank you so much.
SC: My pleasure.
TS: Stephen Cope has created with Sounds True, a new eight-week online course called Your True Calling: the Central Teachings of Yoga to Find Your Path in the World. It’s an eight-week course that begins on August 27th of 2018. Please join us here at soundstrue.com. And he’s the author of the book The Great Work of Your Life and also the classic book Yoga and the Quest for the True Self. And also a new book on Soul Friends.
Stephen, thank you so much for this time together and for your just straightforward vulnerability and your storytelling. It’s been a delight to be with you. Thank you.
SC: Thanks, Tami. Always a pleasure. Really enjoyed it.
TS: Soundstrue.com: waking up the world. Thanks for being with us.
