Rig Veda III: 62.10
Let us meditate on the most excellent Light of Savitri. May she guide our intellect.
My gravatar is an image of a tattoo on my back, done a few years ago. It is an inscription of the Gayatri mantra around a sun.
Lately, the mantra has come up from within. I find myself silently chanting it in my mind while I run at dawn. There was no conscious reason to start doing so. I suppose I just needed to use something to focus my breath on and this just welled up. I usually catch the sun rise on my way back home and it never fails to inspire a sense of awe. It makes me marvel at the intelligence of this celestial body that illumines everything. And I mentally prostrate before the effulgent one.
The mind is so fickle that even though the intent is to chant continuously, I find myself drifting away into other thoughts before I realize it. There is nothing left to do but to come back to it again and again. Sometimes, these thoughts are about the beautiful flowers that are in full bloom now and at others, they are about all the things I need to get done by the end of the day. At other times, it is chewing on some thing that upset me or smiling at something that made me happy. In a nutshell, an incessant thought flow where I am not in the now. I don’t know how many lifetimes it will take before “yogah cittavrtti nirodhah” happens.
anonymous sadhaka 