I used to be a member of my college NSS back then, and our coordinator’s way of “motivating” us was by guilt-tripping us. Though that didn’t resonate with me at all, it seemed to me like JK was on the other end, discouraging this young person from doing social work. I located myself as being somewhere in the middle of the spectrum convinced that my middle path was the right choice! I never visited JK for many years after that. In the midst of my strong disapproval and disgust for what I had read, a seed had thankfully quietly slipped through and seated itself within and had begun its work.
Since then, during my twenty-five years of being engaged in social work, I have been through a few cycles of burnout and complete crashing down of my mental constructs related to it. Each time, turning to the words of mystics like JK has helped me heal and renew myself, and resume my journey on a new bhoomi.
As a restless wanderer of many years, I have had the privilege of closely observing hundreds of activists and always being curious “What drives them? What energizes them? What makes them go on?” And in observing them, asking myself the same questions. Many years passed when I mistook ‘adrenaline highs’ for ‘energy’. Each time, these highs came crashing down leaving me burnt out, it had a lesson to teach me pushing me to look deeper.
After many years of this practice and taking baby steps, which has been particularly growing in its pronouncement ever since I began my inner work through Yoga Sutra, the distilled essence of which I now realise JK was incessantly pointing at, I can now confidently say this: most people engaged in ‘social work’, including myself when I’m not aware, largely (not entirely) do so in order to compensate for a lack within. I say ‘largely’ because the seed and intention for seeing positive change is real too and cannot be dismissed. But that intention remains a mere intention, when not anchored in the right energy and can be swept away by impulses of our lower selves, which show up as dysfunctions and lack of integrity in many social organizations, and burning out of activists.
I have seen many activists from up-close who have such dysfunctional family lives, themselves with broken insides with very little joy, weary minds with rigid ideas and plenty of cynicism, inner desert landscapes with a very few oases… who then turn to social work to find meaning, to fill up those gaps in their lives, find those other lives to “fix”, find the oases outside. I now realize that if one doesn’t turn inwards and ask the quintessential questions that our culture has always pointed at “Who am I? Who is doing? Whose work is getting done? What am I getting from the doing? In doing what I am doing, what am I really doing?” and so on, one is only moving towards further desertification of the inner world projecting it onto the outside world, creating the same drama wherever we go. The NGO world is sadly fraught with so much of this unconscious drama and dysfunctionality!
I am still very drawn to and am actively engaged in the world of form. But my idea of Change has shifted significantly over the years. I realize that form cannot be the source of real Change. It can ‘merely visibilise Change, whose source is in the very subtle energetic realm we may call Consciousness’.
As I continue to be baffled by form, as Wendell Berry puts it, I am slowly learning to go back and stay with this conversation with JK, which I now think is among the most critical reflections for any activist to engage in.
And finding deep joy is perhaps the most important and primary responsibility of anyone who truly wants to be an activist!
No comments:
Post a Comment