Fourth Form of Madness

Maybe a year or two ago late one Saturday evening on SBS they showed a very moving documentary about Chiune Sugihara. At the time, I had no idea who he was, and as I sat there half dozing and trying to make my mind up whether I should go to bed or not, a most amazing story began to unfold. Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat who had worked in the Vice-Consulte office for the Japanese Empire in Lithuania during World War II. He was a regular kind of guy, not an extraordinary scholar or talented athlete or displaying any superstar qualities. It was Sugihara’s actions, his courage even in the face of real danger and adversity, that shone a light on his inner talents.

Whilst working at his post in Lithuania between 18 July to 28 August 1940, Sugihara came into contact with thousands of Jewish refugees all wanting to find a way out of the country. He realised that these applicants were in real danger if they were unable to leave Lithuania. Sugihara’s orders were to only grant Japanese visa’s to individuals who had gone through the proper immigration channels, had enough funds to pay for the visas and had a visa to another destination following Japan. Criteria which could not be met by many of the Jewish refugees. Sugihara could not deny the suffering being experienced by the Jewish people and even though he was going in direct violation of his orders, started issue Japanese 10 day transit visas to as many Jewish refugees as he could, often spending 18 to 20 hours a day on this task and often issuing up to a month’s worth of visas in a day. On the last night at his post, there are reports that he stayed up all night with his wife writing out visas and that that he kept writing them right up until the time he was put on a train and threw them out the window to the Jewish refugees all the while asking for forgiveness for not being able to do more. It is estimated that through his courageous actions he saved approximately 6,000 lives, more if you then count the future generations that were able to be born from these saved lives.

There were consequences for Sugihara and his family for his actions. Sugihara was asked to resign from his job at the Japanese foreign office in 1947 under the guise of “downsizing” but Sugihara’s wife insists it was really due to the incident in Lithuania. To make ends meet, Sugihara did a series of menial jobs and then a 16 year stint in the Soviet Union away from his family. Sixteen years of not being involved in the day to day life of your family must indeed be a hard thing to do.

In 1968 a Jewish beneficiary of Sugihara working at the Israeli Embassy in Tokyo finally located SuGgihara and he went to Israel and met with the Israeli government. In 1985 he was granted the honour of Righteous among the Nations and he was given, along with all his descendants, perpetual Israeli citizenship. As Sugihara was to ill to travel to Israel at that time, his wife went in his place to accept the honour. As part of the ceremony, the descendants of those that Sugihara had saved were allowed to express their thanks to Mrs Sugihara. There she sat in a chair in a big room as hundreds of Jewish people one by one emotionally thanked her for her husband’s bravery and courage. It was one of the most moving pieces of television I had ever watched and one of the most powerful.

So why did Sugihara do it? What made him risk hardship and persecution not only for him but his family to save others? What made him go against his specific orders? When asked this question Sugihara replied something along the lines of “…because it was the right thing to do…….it is never a bad thing to save people’s lives”. I agree. But the interesting point here is at the time, it was common society practice to ignore the suffering of the Jewish people and not to help them but Sugihara went against this at his own personal risk and to me, this makes him a hero.

If we look around at the people that have become heroes today we do see an over representation of movie stars, singers and sports people being idolised by press and people. These are talented people, no argument there but often they are not the people that one wants to be modelling their moral code on. Imagine asking for guidance on moral courage from Arnold Schwarzenegger or ethical advice from Donald Trump. These people appeal to the aesthetics and this is important. Those people that appeal to our sense of the ethical are also important but those people that are able to go beyond both and take a leap for something that lies outside what the status quo is saying, appeal to something higher and eternal that exists in all of us. These type of rule breakers, in my way of thinking, are the real heroes that show all of us the way.

Recently as I was flicking through newsfeed on Facebook I saw a posting by one of my friends, Buddhist Boot Camp, that really caught my attention. The entry said “May we close the gap between what we believe and how we act in the world”. Simple yet so effective if put into practice. So for the last few weeks I’ve been trying to at least notice the gap between my beliefs and how I act in the world and boy sometimes that gap is wider than the Grand Canyon!

Take for example my belief that alcohol is detrimental to your wellbeing. I truly believe this, however, give me just a whiff of of a cocktail and it’s goodbye beliefs and hello hangover more times than I care to remember. I’ve realised that my belief that you should cause no harm to any being could also do with a little bit of a workout particularly when I am at work. Let’s face it, work is often frustrating and usually a hotpot of simmering egos but that is no reason to voice your negative opinion about someone’s capabilities no matter how rude or clueless they appear to be. Best to take a breath, delete the career limiting email you are about to send them and go raid the lolly drawer. Okay scrap the last step but the last two suggestions remain solid.

Then there is my belief that relationships are the most important thing in life, the relationship you have with yourself and with others. Truly this has been my favourite mantra since I was about five. Lovely, I should get it on a t-shirt but first perhaps I should start acting like I mean it. There have been times in my life that I have focussed on everything else other than the state of my relationships, particularly the one with myself. This was definitely to my detriment. Even now I catch myself texting when I am talking to people on the phone vaguely managing to say “arh ha” at approximately the right interval without really having a clue what they are talking about (of course any friends or family reading this, I never have done this to “you” – hee hee). In the past, I’ve forgotten birthdays, promises and key events. These have all been because I just genuinely didn’t pay enough attention or care to the people that meant the most to me. And for each and every one of these oversights I sincerely apologise.

Luckily a major step in all behaviour change is awareness, so becoming aware of the gap between your beliefs and your behaviour in the world puts you one step closer to closing the gap. Why bother? What could be better than living authentically! Living your truth via the use of right thought, right words, right action. That is your thoughts, match your words which match your action. Oh the bliss of equilibrium. Look at nature or even your own bodies, everything is seeking a state of equilibrium. Why shouldn’t the natural state, the optimal state, of your beliefs and actions, not be a state of equilibrium?

Anyway that’s some food for thought. May you all enjoy your weeks and remember to “Mind the Gap” 🙂

I have always been a bit of a loner. I guess I have always loved my own space and my own quiet. Then I started yoga and started to really like practicing in a group, a community. To be part of something collectively, even if you don’t know the person next to you or behind you, expands your experience as a being and like any ritual, heightens your consciousnesses. To me, yoga is ritualistic and the world certainly needs a good ritual to link us all with what is important. Just like a call to pray, saying hail mary’s or chanting mantra, yoga focuses our mind, lifts us up out of the mundane (mindlessness) and gently places us at the feet of the sublime. In class you get to go there together, lifting each other up in a supportive network of devotion (and admittedly a little sweat :-)).

When I was practicing ashtanga, I fell head over heels in love with the silence of the practice. There you were surrounded by others a hands reach away as you flowed through your silent practice. There was always the gentle sounds of collective ujjayi breathing, which always lulled me into a state of absolute calm. A whoosh and the occasional swoosh is all that you heard of your fellow yogis as they moved their bodies into the shapes encouraged by an asana. When my shoulder first started hurting, I still attended morning practice for a while and did restorative up the back. One day I was practicing pranayama I just stopped and looked at all the beautiful shapes that were being formed around me by people’s bodies. As I watched it was like the bodies were writing a beautiful poem all around the room and I felt lucky to be living in world that had such beautiful poetry close at hand.

Another group practice that still remains close to my heart I experienced when doing a land crossing between Tibet and Nepal. Now crossing Tibet had been quite the adventure. We had unfortunately or fortunately chosen to travel with two of the angriest tourists ever travelling, not good when you are going to be in a 4wd drive together for 10 days. Anyone that thinks it is okay to spit on, physically fight with and throw money in the face of a Tibetan needs to be doing some serious work on themselves. The whole trip crescendoed with them trying to get our driver sacked because basically they didn’t like him because he wouldn’t do their unreasonable requests. This resulted in him trying to drive off to the border without the two of them in the car. My hubby and I did not speak Tibetan but we did our best to talk him down even though an insy winsy little bit of us kind of wanted him to keep going. In the end, he stopped the car, let the other two back in begrudging and we made our way to the Nepalese border on a wave of high drama.

Once at the border both hubby and I were too frazzled to walk the however many miles it was through the no-man’s land to Nepal, so we decided to catch a ride with the locals in the back of a big bouncy truck with hardly any barrier keeping us in. It was packed with people and I managed to sit fairly close to the edge of the truck. I was a little afraid I was going to bounce right out of the truck but then this amazing thing happened. All the people surrounding me all laid a hand on me and held onto me so I wouldn’t fall out of the truck. I felt their warmth, I felt their support and I felt that I had never been more close to life than at that moment. We rode like that for about 30 minutes, laughing and trying to understand each other with what ever common words we could find. One lady took the opportunity to read my future from my body and told me “You are very, very, very, very, very lucky”!!! More people promptly put their hands on me and started rubbing me for luck. I felt like I had come from such a harsh and argumentative 4wd drive environment to one full of love and support and full of gracious people and at that time it was exactly what I needed. I ended that journey feeling very nurtured and cherished and blessed to have fallen into the hands of such giving and beautiful people.

It’s great to know loneliness and to make it a friend but equally great is being part of a group a community that works towards creating something collectively. The group where each individual is equal and travelling on their own journey yet acknowledges that their journey is for everyone, reaches it pinnacle of existence. This group has the ability to place a hand on each individual and hold them in the truck on the bouncy, unpredictable ride of life. In this balanced state, life is bliss!

Sometimes life seems to be full of questions? From the moment we are born we are set on a path of deciding what to study, what religion to follow, what career to pursue and on and on ad nauseum. Now I am no great scholar but what I have noticed through all the philosophy text I have read, whether it be eastern or western, is that there seems to be a few big questions that are always getting asked and examined. They are essentially;

What am I?
Who am I?
Why am I here?
What’s the bigger picture all about?

Essentially these four questions (albeit slightly differing versions) have been asked for over thousands of years and I believe will continue to get contemplated well into the future as whilst each of us may reach answers to these questions for ourselves, there never will be any confirmation as to whether you are absolutely right (although there will be thousands of people that try and convince you otherwise). It is our birth right to ask these questions and all of us in our own way steps up and accepts this birth right.

I am particularly indebted to questions of this nature because for me they were my safety net when thinks got particularly dark a few years back. For me when I started my yoga journey I immediately fell in love with the Oneness theory. Loved it, embraced it but struggled to really feel it for my fellow beings. As I have learnt on this journey, you can’t force these things, they will come of their own accord every single time. It was through contemplation of these questions that I began to see the true common thread of humanity emerge – we all have these questions to answer, we all have these questions as a common thread running through us and our contemplation and experience of trying to search for the answer to these pivotal questions are what join us. Through this commonality a great compassion can be born and nurtured for all.

So why the most often socially asked questions might be “What do you do for a living?” and “where do you live?”, these will not be the questions that are remembered of you or are important about you. For the important questions are the ones you ask inside yourself and of yourself, even if you never find out if you were right!