SADHANA

In its simplest definition, Sadhana is dedication to a pursuit or a goal, e.g. a student trying to excel in studies, a mother trying to give the best upbringing to her child, a seeker trying to know God.

When applied to spiritual pursuits, this dedication is of the highest order, and the person practicing it is called a Sadhak. Here, we will confine this article to Sadhana as related to spirituality.

In trying to keep it simple, I will keep defining below any new words as we come across them.

For a seeker, Sadhana itself becomes a journey, for, barring highly evolved people, we have to train ourselves on how to be dedicated. Here evolved means, those who  are well on their path to realize the Truth. The Truth means ... realizing our real nature i.e. that we are one with God.

Speaking of 'journey', it is important to remember that different people may be at a different point in their journey ( i.e. ahead of us ,or behind us), they may have different kind of obstacles, depending on their experiences of life, and for us to not look at any one with disdain or jealousy. Here, disdain refers to those who are behind us, and jealousy towards those who are ahead of us, and we need to refrain from both tendencies. It is not only important that we not criticize, but it is also good to have compassion, in stead. This kind of self-training helps us on our own path by guarding us against ego.

I said above that most of us have to train ourselves, like a good student, on how to be dedicated. The key to this training is नियम,  i.e. we have to have a set place, a set amount of time each day, and a set time on the clock to pursue our dedicated goal. In spiritual pursuit, this can mean doing formal prayer at a set time every morning and/or evening; allowing a set amount of time for spiritual reading each day; a set time for doing reflection on what we read i.e. मनन; and similarly, time  for meditation.

Typically, Sadhana requires of us, (a) giving up what is obstacle to our goal, and (b) focusing on the means to the goal.

The practice of Sadhana becomes like a building block. We succeed in achieving smaller goals through Sadhana, we get encouraged, and then we feel ready to pursue more difficult, or higher goals.

It is just like graduating from the kindergarten to primary school, then from middle school to the high school, and moving on to excel in college. 

Any Sadhana needs to be done in a spirit of worship, or in a spirit of service, for in that case our actions do not lead to bondage. Bondage, here, means any action that binds us to the repeated cycle of birth and death.

Vedanta, our Hindu philosophy, integrates duty, service and worship. We can convert any of our actions/tasks to service or worship by dedicating it to God, i.e. doing it as if what we are doing is our service to God, or our worship towards God. This is expounded by Lord Krishna in His discourse to Arjuna in Bhagwad Gita as well.

Here, we need to talk a little more about duty, for too often, we err in our definition of duty. For example, a mother's sadhana towards her child... is she doing it as a duty, as service to the child, as service to God, or as worship to God ? If she is doing it as a duty, she needs to discriminate between duty and attachment, for often we start rationalizing "attachment" by truly feeling within us that it is a "duty", e.g. I know some mothers serving/catering to their grown up sons forty or even fifty years of age, and calling it their duty, not realizing that it really is their attachment to their children. Any work, any duty, any action can be turned higher by performing it as a service/worship to God, through devotion to God and by truly offering the results to God.

Spiritual Sadhana leads to God Consciousness, i.e. knowing oneself, our true nature that we are Divine.

Upon accomplishing the goal of Sadhana we gain self-confidence and self-esteem. However, Spiritual Sadhana is the most difficult of all Sadhanas, for here the results are slow for most of us, the results are not immediate, and often they are not measurable in terms of how much progress we have made.

-- Vijay Nikore

(original and unpublished)