One day a friend came to visit from Virginia, and I wanted to spend time with her. I canceled my shift that day and was told that I’d need a doctor’s note to return to work. I had no note, so it was essentially like quitting. To celebrate, I grew a big beard that would have made Dr. Andrew Weil, Oskar from Georgetown, and even Zach Galifianakis proud.
I have since found that feeling good about my work is absolutely crucial to my happiness. When I work a job that is out of line with my values, I become depressed, and when I am in dharma, following my heart, doing what I believe in and what feels right, I am filled with energy.
The Buddha called this “right livelihood.” He taught that one who seeks liberation cannot hope to find freedom on the backs of others. Right livelihood is critical to the spiritual path; often when people are out of line with their values they have to numb out or shut down, not only because they are bored and uninterested but also because the pain of being outside their morals or their heart’s call is too much to bear. Interestingly, yoga brings these issues to the surface. Many times I have seen students of yoga realize that their job is hurting them. Sometimes making a change is too much to face. In these cases, people usually stop practicing yoga, and the revelation fades.
One time I was in a new relationship and had moved far away from New Jersey to be with my girlfriend. I had been practicing yoga consistently for years, but without even noticing, I gave it up. A month later, browsing in a bookstore, I stumbled onto a quote from yoga teacher Dr. Jeff Migdow: “When people do yoga consistently they’re much more open to change. That’s the key: If I’m not open to making changes, then I won’t let myself be aware.”
The quote was a slap in the face. As if waking from a daze, I realized that I had not done postures in a month. And I saw that I had avoided yoga because it sharpened my awareness and showed me that I was unhappy. But because I had been unwilling to make a change — to move and leave the relationship — I had stopped doing the thing that increased my awareness. In this way, yoga is a catalyst that demands truth.
This truth includes, but is also subtler than, simply doing what is right or wrong, ethical or moral. It means listening to your heart’s call.
I love to share this with my tutoring students. I remember a student, Aidan, was considering college majors and said, “I’d love to be an architect, but the world needs environmental activists, so that’s what I’ll do.”
Aidan is correct. We do need environmental activists. But I believe that even more, we need people who are passionate about what they do, living from their heart. I don’t think one can actually serve the world best by assessing what the world needs. I think, instead, we serve the world best by responding to our heart’s call. Not our ego’s call, mind you, but our heart’s.
As an environmental activist, Aidan might make a difference. That’s true. But as an architect, Aidan will be following his bliss. He’ll be fulfilled and happy. He’ll be lit up and creative. He’ll be a beacon of light and energy. And, I trust, his environmental concerns will still find a very effective, perhaps more effective, medium — maybe he’ll design green buildings or discover environmentally sustainable building materials.
Joseph Campbell told his students, “If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living…Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.”
And so, in our spiritual Easter egg hunt for the Keys to Happiness, we come to key number two:
Follow your heart.
Notice what gives you a feeling of rightness, ignites your creativity and passion, and makes you feel most alive, and pursue that.
Before every major decision, ask yourself, “Which choice feels right, is in line with my values, ignites my creativity and passion, and is an expression of my true self?”
And by the way, following your bliss does not automatically mean giving up your nine-to-five job at the insurance company to dust off your old Fender Stratocaster and get the college funk band back together. Sometimes the boring job at the insurance company is just right. Your bliss might be the paycheck that feeds your family and allows you to spend happy evenings and weekends together. Or not. Following your bliss only means tuning in to and following not your ego, not your mind, but your heart. Put another way, it means setting aside what you want and doing what God* wants for you. And God, I believe, communicates through our hearts and through a feeling of passion, vitality, and rightness.
* When I say God, I’m referring to my belief in an intelligent, benevolent energy that permeates, sustains, and guides reality. If, for you, this definition rings a bit too close to the Shit New Age Guys Say YouTube videos, you can swap in the words love, goddess, prana, Jesus, Tim Tebow, or Ralph Nader. Whatever floats your boat.
Take the attitude that what you are thinking and feeling is valuable stuff.
— ANNE LAMOTT, Bird by Bird
Different types of people, with different constitutions and dispositions, can find what they need in one of the various yoga styles. Power yoga makes you feel more, well, powerful and gives you a heck of a workout. Iyengar yoga makes you feel embodied and correct. And Kripalu yoga makes you feel, well, you’ll see.
I don’t think there’s a formula for which style will speak to a practitioner any more than there is a formula for who will fall in love. Match.com can put you in touch with people who share your interests, but you have to date to see if there’s chemistry. We can say, “Aha, you like a vigorous workout, try Power yoga,” but ultimately you have to date a few styles to see which one ignites your passion. And that passion, just like the chemistry of love, is quite magical and special and transformational.
In Hoboken I stumbled onto that kind of chemistry with a style of yoga being offered around the corner from my apartment in the attic of a natural foods market. Shopping at the store on a Saturday, I spotted a flyer for “Yoga with Yolanthe.”
The Hoboken Harvest was an old-school health food store — the only kind of health food store in 1994 — the kind that existed before Whole Foods Market introduced Newman-O’s to mainstream Americans. Before Whole Foods propagated the concept of the whole foods supermarket, health food stores were small, purely organic, and dusty. They carried only organic produce, though the produce was kept in substandard conditions, making it either half-frozen or wilty. The stores smelled of the unmistakable combination of patchouli and vitamins, and had small cafés operated by idealist vegans.
The café of the Hoboken Harvest was run by a fellow by the name of Guy. I had a real-life Abbot and Costello conversation when I asked someone at the store, “What’s the name of the guy who runs the café?”
“Guy.”
“Yes, the guy who runs the café.”
“Guy.”
This Guy was a character, a Vietnam War veteran turned vegan who, like every health food store café operator in 1994, was not shy about sharing his political opinions, espousing