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July 27 - September 2, 2023
Bhai Ghanaiya said: You taught us that we all share the same light. I don’t see enemies among those who are injured. I just see people who need our help. So that’s what I’m doing.
Guru Gobind Singh praised him: Ghanaiya, you have learned the true meaning of ik oankar. Please go back into the battlefield and continue your good work. And everyone else here—please learn from the example of your brother Ghanaiya.
Bhai Ghanaiya shows us how we can maintain our convictions and stay connected with humanity without becoming blinded by the identity politics that dominate our landscape.
the power of radical connectedness is not just in the idea, or even the feeling it inspires. Believing in oneness is not enough on its own. Bhai Ghanaiya had put the idea of radical connectedness into practice. He truly lived it.
The hardest step, and i would love to see bow the author addrresses fear
Once we experience the world as being inextricably connected, compassion will become our natural state.
it really is possible to see the humanity of those who annoy us, those who dislike us, and even those who try to hurt us.
I still felt overwhelmed, unsure of how to achieve this state. The ideal still felt far from where I was spiritually and emotionally.
Aug 2023, still feel this
I decided to start at a more basic level by asking two fundamental questions: What is my goal in this moment? And what is my first step toward that goal?
In reflecting on the account of Bhai Ghanaiya and my own feelings for Wade Michael Page, I determined that my goal was to find more compassion within my own life.
In one interaction each day, I would try to see and connect with the shared humanity of another person.
Superficial commonalities don’t count. It isn’t enough to notice someone wearing the same brand of shoes as me or someone who follows the same sports team I do. To see someone’s light means making an intentional and meaningful connection with them.
Interactions can’t be repeated. I have to go beyond deepening my connections with my best friends. I’m challenging myself to find a new person to connect with every single day.
because I had been working on connecting with the people around me—including those I didn’t know—and because the person yelling at me looked about the same age as the students I taught every day, I couldn’t help but see him as one of my own. In the same moment that he denigrated me, I felt compassion and saw his humanity.
“You ever think the stuff you learn about in school is not just history? Slavery. Internment. The Holocaust. You know that stuff comes from this same kind of hate, right?” Now his eyes widened as he connected the dots. This wasn’t about me versus him. This was about me and him together. It was about us.
My compassionate response took us down a different path entirely, one that broke the cycle of hate and took us both in the direction of happiness, healing, and humanity.
Sometime along my path i forgot how to do this
I thought that understanding Page’s life and psychological makeup might bring me more clarity about who he was as a person, which in turn would help me see his humanity.
Looking deeper, he told me, would help us overcome our judgments of difference and help us focus instead on what we share.
His words sounded familiar. This is what Guru Nanak meant by ik oankar; that while we divide ourselves up on the basis of different aspects that make up who we are—ethnicities, nationalities, religions, genders, sexual orientations—we are still all pots of the same divine potter. We may each be molded differently, but the clay is still the same.
We can hold enough complexity to see one another’s humanity without erasing one another’s cultures and histories.
In 2013, researchers at Harvard completed a seventy-five-year study on happiness, one of the longest and most comprehensive studies of human development. The study found overwhelmingly that loving relationships were the largest single determinant for health and happiness later in life.
I decided to take the first step prescribed in Sikh wisdom: traditional meditative practices, most commonly known as “nam japna” or “simran”
They are at the core of Sikh teachings and some of the earliest lessons I received from my parents, grandparents, and other elders in our community.
“The meaning is for you to discover for yourself. You’ll figure it out when you’re ready.”
To the thought of prayer's effectiveness
Reflecting on how meditation transformed my life revealed the answer to a question I had sought desperately years ago but had abandoned as a lost cause.
Meditation and prayer are not about changing God or directing certain outcomes; they are channels for transforming ourselves.
Before, I felt overwhelmed by how much more powerful it was than me. Now, I felt joy in realizing that the world was no different from me. For the first time, I was truly feeling connected with the world around me. This must be how Guru Nanak felt when he looked at the beauty of the creation and saw it all as an offering to the Creator; this must be what Guru Arjan felt when he said it all seems so sweet to him.
In the same way that workshops have helped shed light on my underlying biases, practicing mindfulness has inspired me to seek wholeness again.
So long as we limit our love to objects and experiences that bring us pleasure, how will we ever go beyond our own self-centeredness?
Audre Lorde’s 1988 essay “A Burst of Light,” in which she writes: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
If seeking love for ourselves through gratification becomes the only form of love we engage in, then we will quickly lose all perspective and fall into the trap of superficiality and self-centeredness—just
Honoring the idea of ik oankar is not just about seeing everyone around us as equal—we must also be kinder to ourselves and recognize that we are equally deserving.
James Baldwin: “If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”
My self-consciousness around speaking and sharing was rooted in my own self-centeredness. I was afraid of what people would think about me, so I tried to protect myself from their opinions.
We spend so much of our lives trying to control and plan every detail that we sometimes forget how much we actually can control.
The problem is that we don’t realize our daily decisions can make the difference between a life of joy and a life of shame. Every decision matters because every decision shapes who we are and who we become.
Our daily actions are seeds that grow into our habits and, ultimately, our character.
The real power of what we do is that our behavior will either take us toward happiness or away from it. This is why we must stop measuring what we do exclusively on the basis of tangible outcomes; what we do matters first and foremost because our actions and behaviors shape who we become.
Integrity is about oneness—or in the words of Guru Nanak, ik oankar.
When we are unaware of how our choices affect us, we tend to choose without intention. Our decisions become a randomized series—some may make us feel proud, others may make us feel regret.
This form of ethical living entails two key components: Clearly identifying, articulating, and understanding our values. Putting our values into practice. It is only when we know our values and practice them daily—so that they are ingrained in our hearts and minds—that we will be prepared to respond with them even in the toughest of situations.
When we were in middle school, my parents brought home The Book of Virtues, a large anthology of poems, parables, and stories from Western traditions.
It sat on top of the living room mantel, and every day, after reciting the Sikh evening prayer, Rahiras, we would take turns reading a selection from the book.
When we got to high school, my parents began organizing quarterly family meetings. To our chagrin and in spite of our protests, we were expected to block off an entire Saturday once every three months just for these meetings. My parents would arrive at them with a glimmer in their eyes, excited to share their latest wisdom from leadership trainings they had undergone themselves. My three brothers and I would complain through it all, even when we were secretly appreciating what we learned.
Check this chapter for practice we want to adopt in our family
He announced that our plan for the weekend was to develop a document that articulated our family’s mission statement, vision statement, and a set of shared values.
Undergoing this exercise is useful because the values are specific and tailored enough to offer us real guidance based on what we feel matters most and who we aspire to become. At the same time, it’s nimble enough to be broadly applicable in a variety of life situations—personal, professional, social, and so on.
It took me some time to understand that honoring the diversity of our experiences also means honoring that diversity within ourselves.
What is your personal mission statement? What are your core values? When push comes to shove and there’s no easy answer for how to respond, what would you use as a guide so that you feel proud of your actions rather than ashamed?
I scrolled right past our family values document, and something told me to go back and read through it for the millionth time. Reading it, I could start feeling my power return.
Values-based living is life-giving because it releases us from the bondage of other people’s hate.
Where my focus was once on responding to what happened to me, this document has given me a way to act with clarity and purpose.
