It is time to let go, to clean house both inside and out. Aparigraha is about letting go of our most cherished pain-producing beliefs. It is about the end of all attachment: letting go of our fears, letting go of our desires, becoming free. Rolf Gates
A note from Rebecca at SOYA:
We are excited to welcome Rolf Gates as the special guest teacher leading the 2025 SOYA Annual Retreat! His inspiration: Awaken in truth. Seek refuge in the practices of yoga. These together will make possible for us to embody wise effort, wise concentration, wise mindfulness and loving kindness. The weekend with Rolf will be themed “Trust the River”: Are you holding tightly onto the shore, desperately trying to maintain control and fighting the currents that are pulling at you? Maybe it is this very resistance that holds us in suffering. Maybe the the river is actually carrying you where you need to go. Learn more about the SOYA Annual Retreat here.
Excerpt from his book, Meditations from the Mat: Daily Reflections on the Path of Yoga
By Rolf Gates
Meditations from the Mat: Daily Reflections on the Path of Yoga, author Rolf Gates, Anchor Books, ISBN 0-385-72154-4
Aparigraha advises us to travel light while on the spiritual path.
We must let go of the old to make room for the new; we must grieve our dead and then let go in order to love the living. Much of the work we do with aparigraha concerns the obvious. We can’t use a closet if it is stuffed full of worn-out clothing. We don’t like the new office staff because we have not said goodbye to the old staff. As difficult as these passings are, they have the advantage of being directly in front of us. All that is required is yet another level of surrender, a leap of faith.
More difficult is the aspect of aparigraha that concerns worn-out beliefs. Many of the basic assumptions that guide our daily choices are unconscious, unseen. We have assimilated Uncle Ted’s advice on tire purchases, Aunt Liv’s guidance on the color red, the sixth-grade bully’s contempt Red Sox, an entire lifetime of half-heard conversations and misinterpreted advice – and it all figures somehow into our daily decision making
My mother told me over and over again, “We come from a house of manners.” In fact, this was not true, but I hear her words in my mind to this day. The point is, we have all been programmed, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, to an extent that most of us are only vaguely aware of. Of equal power are our own beliefs, carried over from previous periods of our lives, previous life situations. Collectively, these old thoughts and ideas are an energy in our lives that rob us of the moment. Aparigraha invites us to walk away from yesterday’s outdated beliefs. Just as we take boxes of our old clothing to the Salvation Army, we can begin shedding our old ideas. Yesterday’s definition of a man or a woman, a race or a religion, a blessing or a curse no longer has any power over us. We can begin to trust our perceptions of the truth in the moment. There is a power in this process, an unfettering of the mind and the spirit. We can begin to wear our beliefs like a loose garment.
We can experience the lightness that comes from freedom from our own ideas.
Learn more about Rolf Gates at rolfgates.com and at kripalu.org
Save the dates May 30-June 1, 2025 for the SOYA Annual Retreat in Sorrento, BC, Canada. Learn more here.
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