We Are All Flowers in One Garden

by guest blogger, Randall Krause

It is common to think of ourselves as different from others, and, all too often, religion becomes one more way to separate ourselves from others rather than bringing us together. Yet, it doesn’t have to be this way. Our religion, our spirituality, can be a unifying force that helps us include others and celebrate the diversity of all people. It just takes a change of perspective.

Underneath all of our beliefs, cultural differences and identities, we all share the same humanity, the same love, and the same being. When we connect from these more essential aspects of ourselves, we connect with all people.

So how do we do this? It’s easy. All we have to do is what is natural for us. Perhaps not natural for our egos, but rather for what’s more essential within us.

Recently, Swami Veda Bharati, a teacher in the Himalayan Yoga Meditation Tradition, wrote that "applied spirituality is to feel all hungry children’s hunger and loneliness of the bereft; to fill these empty spaces with selfless action." In this brief statement, Swami Veda captures the unifying force of acting from the heart: We open our heart; we feel the needs and pain of others; and act from love to ease their pain. Doing so is as natural as breathing. We know what to do without a lot of thinking and analysis.

This heart driven loving action can take many forms: Feeding the hungry; educating those whom education would lift; helping and serving our elders; visiting the sick; and so on.

This loving action is a form of worship, and it brings us together.

Love underlies all of our religions. Though the words may differ in our prayer books, all true religions exalt love, and when we are motivated by this essential force, we come together, grow spiritually, and make the world better.

Besides connecting with the love within us, we can also unify ourselves with others by connecting with our essential being through contemplative practices.

Modern life is so busy and it’s easy to get caught up in all of the doing. We rush around so much that our actions almost seem to define us, as if we were human-doings. However, we are called human beings for a reason: We exist, we be, and this being aspect of ourselves is perhaps the most essential part of ourselves.

The great contemplative traditions of all times have pointed to this being part of ourselves and guided us to experience it. When we do so, we find an identity for ourselves that is more central to us than the usual body-centered ego-identity, and we also find our oneness with all people and all life.

To experience our being, we quiet the mind and become aware. This sort of contemplative practice is common in all spiritual paths, and has been refined to an art in the meditative traditions. The following is a simple practice from the Himalayan Tradition that can be practiced by anyone. It’s called a “Two-Minute Meditation”. Here’s how you do it:

Sit with your spine erect and head, neck and hips aligned. You can sit on the front edge of a chair with feet on the floor and hands on your thighs. This makes it easy to have your spine erect. Relax any muscles not needed to maintain this sitting posture, and breathe deeply and smoothly. Let the body relax, letting go of any tension.

Close your eyes, turn you attention to the breath, and strive to breathe smoothly and continuously, minimizing (and with practice eliminating) any pauses that might appear in the breath.

As you exhale and inhale, be aware of the breath flowing out of and into your body. Sense the feeling of the breath as it leaves and as it enters your nostrils, and observe how your belly contracts as you exhale and expands as you inhale.

Let your attention remain on these sensations of breathing, allowing your body and mind to relax. When thoughts come into your mind, briefly notice their presence and quickly return your attention to the sensations of breathing.

After two minutes, you may choose to extend the meditation longer, or you may open your eyes and take a few moments to remain still and notice how you feel.

Try this brief meditation and notice your experience. This is a first step toward communing with your being. You may find it very relaxing.

There are many ways to feel our oneness with all people, all beings. These are two examples, both emphasizing experiences common to all religions. We humans truly are all flowers in one garden.

Randall Krause is Director of the Himalayan Yoga Meditation Society of Los Angeles. Please see our website www.hymla.com for articles and information. Also, if you’d enjoy Yoga and Hiking in Switzerland in July, 2011, please see our site: www.yogahiking.info and join us in the Alps!

My Ignorance

by guest blogger, Tim Brauhn

I grew up rural. That’s the important part of this story. I lived in a farming community about two hours west of Chicago. I was a Catholic; Catholicism was my received faith. Some of my friends were Catholics. The rest were from various Christian denominations. We didn’t talk about religion.

When I went to college in the suburbs, I fell away from the faith (I imagine that this happens to LOTS of college students) and continued on my way. Since I was finally in a place with a diversity of religious expression, I quickly realized that my views of other religions (especially Islam) were informed largely by my friends’ parents and their favored false information outlet: FOX News. The realization of my own ignorance pushed me to do some learning on my own.

So despite not being a “member” of any religions, I began spending an abnormal amount of time reading about them. Holy texts, histories, modern epigrams, condemnations, praises, and all other bits and bobs were devoured, and I worked both in class and out of class to connect them to the world around me. I could tell you (almost) anything you’d care to know about the world’s faiths. But I was only creating stale, two-dimensional constructs of religions, completely lacking in movement and life.

My roommate, himself an atheist and a recent graduate of my university, had been hired on in a resident fellowship position with our interfaith center. One day, he convinced me to come along with him as he led a group of students to the local mosque. Up to this point, I’d barely been in other Christian churches, let alone something totally out of the ordinary. I went along, curious as ever. I saw Muslims praying, saying the Arabic words that I had come to know in my studies. Afterwards, a whole slew of people came up to us and welcomed us to the mosque, smiled, asked if we had any questions, and for some strange reason, gave us a bag full of bagels.

I recalled how I used to think Muslims acted and looked – again, think FOX News. Furthermore, and the thing that really set me down the path to interfaith work, was the stunning realization that, far from being stale, two-dimensional constructs, religions were, in fact, full of religious people. These were strangers with hopes and families and fears and joys all intricately bound up in their ideations of God and their ultimate visions of human existence.

I had spent so much time learning the ins and outs of these religions (including the one that I had been born into), I’d forgotten that belief systems are nothing without the people of faith that compose them. I immediately involved myself with a few interfaith dialogue groups and returned to regular church attendance, although now I also made it a point to visit my local synagogue, mosque, both of the city’s Hindu temples, and many non-Catholic Christian churches. I was fed by the Hindus, honored as a guest by the Muslims, asked to turn up the heat by the Jews (it was Shabbat), and had my legs danced off by the African-American Baptists. I joined in prayer with them all.

I was spending my days with other people of faith, widely divergent and historically dissimilar to my own, but with strong points of connection around shared values of service, compassion, and justice. I loved every minute of it. During intense interfaith dialogue sessions, I came to see in greater detail how my own faith-life fit into theirs, and into the world as a whole.

After graduating, I joined the university staff in the role that my former roommate had held. I was a liaison to the faith communities that I had become great friends with, and I worked with them to involve students in dialogue and exchange events. I became convinced of the linkage between personal devotion and action across faith lines. This work led me to graduate studies in international relations, where I investigated the not-always-positive role that faith plays in global politics.

From there it was a short skip and a jump into the Faiths Act Fellowship, an elite program that brings together young people of faith across the world to promote the Millennium Development Goals and the great work that faith-based organizations are doing to “fix” things. The Fellowship is run by the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and the Interfaith Youth Core, two groups doing cutting-edge work in the multifaith realm. I traveled to Africa and saw church-run hospitals and malaria education classes at the local mosque. We asked, “What would happen if, in the developing world especially, these groups were to work together?”

This was the message that we carried back to our home countries. Here in the First World and in the Third World, people of faith do an enormous amount of charitable and earth-saving work. And that’s what drives me today. Interfaith dialogue made me a better Catholic (and a partial Hindu) and interfaith action showed me the power of personal conviction in solving the world’s injustices.

I’ve been blessed to live in a country where religious freedom is of utmost importance to almost everybody, and to meet people from dozens of different traditions. We might disagree on what happens or where we go after death, but we can certainly work together here and now to alleviate suffering, protect our environment, and promote justice.

Tim Brauhn is an interfaith activist commonly found at the intersection of social media and international development. He holds a BA in English from Aurora University, where he represented the university to area religious groups and civic associations. He received his Master of Arts degree in International Studies from the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School of International Studies. Tim was an inaugural member of the Faiths Act Fellowship. He is the Director of Operations for The 1010 Project, a Denver agency that provides business and entrepreneurial training in Kenya. Tim is also a consultant for humanitarian, social innovation, and general saving-the-world type programs.

Isrealities: Perspectives from Israel #3

A blog series by Project Interfaith's International Blogger, Emily Muskin

If you are a child being raised Jewish in the United States, you will inevitably contribute to the planting of countless trees in Israel. This is not merely an account from my childhood but a proven fact – the Jewish National Fund has planted over 250 million trees in Israel since 1901. To say that trees are important in Judaism would be an understatement.

My father recently recounted the story of his childhood tree contributions. As a 22-year-old, he ventured across the world to Israel to work on a Moshav – an Israeli village – for two months. After his 14 hour flight, all he wanted was to do was find “his tree.” As an adult, he realized it was less about personally identifying his tree, and instead something bigger. A little over a week ago, I had the opportunity to celebrate the Jewish version of Arbor Day, Tu B’Shevat. This was my first acknowledgement of this holiday since my tree planting experiences as a child.

The Tu B’Shevat Seder was created in Safed, Israel by the Kabbalah movement in the 16th century. The festival marks the beginning of the spring season in Israel. The Seder was created to celebrate the spiritual significance of the fruit of the trees and vines. During the Seder that I attended, we drank four glasses of wine accompanied by dry fruits and nuts. Each glass represents a different realm of creation in the Kabbalist understanding of the universe. Additionally, our Seder invoked some unique interpretations of the holiday of the trees.

I am currently living on a reform Jewish Kibbutz that is making some enormous strides in the ecological field, and these concepts were cleverly interwoven throughout the Seder service. As a result of my naivety, I thought that the emphasis on ecology during the Seder was an original idea; however, there is evidence of ecological awareness throughout the Torah. This may seem like a trendy idea to some, but our ancestors were greatly aware of the connections between spirituality, nature and environmentalism.

Among other ecological mandates, the Torah outlines laws that tell us “to neither destroy wantonly, nor waste resources unnecessarily.” One is prohibited from cutting down fruit trees when surrounding an enemy city in wartime. There are laws for covering excrement, removing debris from public places, etc.

The Torah attributed importance to each element in nature, and we can learn a lot from these teachings in our modern society. Though the aforementioned concepts seem like common sense, in our world today, we have ignored much of this wisdom. I have now been studying at the kibbutz for over five weeks, and much of what we have learned with respect to ecological awareness and gardening practices can trace its roots to the writings of the Torah.

One of the participants in my program cleverly explained the connection among the spring Jewish holidays, Tu B’Shevat, Purim and Passover. As he put it, “Tu B’Shevat is the planting of the seed or idea, Purim is putting on the costume without commitment or experimenting with that seed or concept in your life, and Passover is the time for implementation.”

Similar to the planting of a new tree or the start of a new year, these fundamental holidays are a catalyst for change and reinvention of thought. Can we learn to grow from a lone tree to a forest? Can we be something bigger? It starts with a seed.