This past year, with the pandemic forcing us to isolate, and with so many lives being shortened by COVID, we have had a greater opportunity and motivation to consider these questions: Why am I here? What did I come here to accomplish? What is the best I can do with the time I have left in my life?
Swami Nirmalananda’s teaching article for February addresses all these questions. In the first paragraph she lays it all out very clearly: “You were born to know your Self. You came here for this purpose. Even when you apply yourself to other things, life itself funnels you toward the discovery of your innermost essence. Without this inner knowing, you feel incomplete. Only when you know your own Divinity will you feel you’ve accomplished what you came here for. We call this “spirituality” but it is more. It is about you understanding life itself. You came here to get enlightened. And to give back.”
Coincidentally, this past Sunday I read a wonderful article in the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine about the great cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Written by the Globe’s classicahttps://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/l music critic Jeremy Eichler, much of the article describes Yo-Yo Ma’s own reckoning about the same basic questions. What is his calling in life? For what purpose can he focus his passion and talent for music? While at Harvard, Yo-Yo Ma began that process of introspection, prodded in part by his mentor at Harvard, the composer Leon Kirchner. In the magazine article, Kirchner recalls, “I was always telling Yo-Yo that he didn’t have the true center of his tone yet, meaning there was something more spiritual, the center of his person, of his being, that was not coming through yet.”
For that center to come through in his music playing, Yo-Yo Ma knew he had to dive deeper within himself to find it. Fortunately, his whole life has been, to paraphrase Swami Nirmalananda’s words, funnelling him toward the discovery of his innermost essence. And once he found it, he began to channel it through his music.
While locked down in his home in Cambridge at the onset of the pandemic, his first response was to share his heartfelt concern, through his music, for those in need of comfort. He set up his cello and used a smartphone to record a video of him playing “Going Home,” a song based on a melody from Dvorak’s New World symphony. The video was posted on YouTube and as of this writing (February 3rd), it has been viewed over 452,000 times. Since then, he has included many other recordings in his #Songs of Comfort social media project, which has spanned six continents, inspiring many other musicians around the world to post their own offerings of comfort. (You can hear Yo-Yo Ma on PBS News Hour discussing what he found to be his purpose in life and the #Songs of Comfort project. He then plays the “Going Home” theme.)
What touches me most about Yo-Yo Ma is his sincere desire to be authentic (true to his Self). For the first thirty years of his life, he was just doing music (and as well as anyone could, from the age of 4). He did it to meet the expectations of his father and teachers. He didn’t feel he was living his own life but rather someone else’s. Then he broke out of the mold. He looked inward to understand himself better and began looking outward to understand the needs of others better. Integrating both vantage points, he finally found a life of meaning in the music he so much loved. He said in an NPR interview, “My voice is in finding the needs of others and then representing them.”
Today, Yo-Yo Ma’s drive is accelerated by his concern for his grandchildren and future generations. Here is how Yo-Yo Ma conveys his sentiments, as quoted in the Globe article:
“I’m about to become a grandfather for the third time,” Ma says, his face widening into that smile that routinely warms the chilliest of concert halls. “And I know that while I’m not going to see the year 2100,” he continues, “someone very close to me probably will. But what is that world going to be like? What is my part in handing them whatever I’ve been responsible for…? These are not abstract questions to me anymore. They’re real questions. Pre-pandemic, the big frustration was that we were spending the great majority of our time producing things,” he adds. “Now I think so much more about meaning and purpose.”
Why are you here? What is the best you can offer? You don’t have to be the best cellist in the world to share it and make a difference. What matters is what you find in your innermost essence – your heart – and letting that propel you forward. Take inspiration from Mother Teresa:
“We cannot all do great things, but we can all do small things with great love.”
And to find your meaning in life, know your Self. Take inspiration from doing more yoga. Knowing your Self is the specialty of yoga. As Swami Nirmalananda says, “Only when you know your own Divinity will you feel you’ve accomplished what you have come here for… You came here to get enlightened. And to give back.”