Let Endurance Be Your Watchword in the Yogic Endeavour

Successful people, in whatever field, tend to highlight their ability to keep going. They indicate that no matter how many times one falls, one must get up, or in the local vernacular, ‘keep on keeping on’. Reactiveness, an inability to hold one’s peace under provocation, is considered to be a sign of vital weakness. People who have cultivated vital strength tend to be able to bear much without expressions of anger, without lashing out, without crying or otherwise evidencing signs of distress.

Many people have a habit of complaining, of whining, of expressing how much they have to put up with or how much suffering they are asked to bear. Some people make it a habit to flaunt their weakness with their constant bouts of anger and complaints about how they are a ‘victim’. Much energy is spilled and wasted. These individuals tend to break down easily under pressure.

Spiritual seekers, who are confronted with challenges, both exte
al and internal, on a constant basis, are asked to cultivate not just a stoic ability to bear suffering, but to actually maintain a cheerful attitude of endurance, ‘come what may’. They are preparing the being to receive, bear and hold more energy and thereby to increase their capacity for the yogic force to enter and transform them. Yoga tends to increase the flow of energy and it is part of the seeker’s role to widen themselves and increase their ability to hold and use this energy without wasting it or spilling it.

The Mother observes: “Let endurance be your watchword: teach the lifeforce in you — your vital being — not to complain but to put up with all the conditions necessary for great achievement. The body is a very enduring servant, it bears the stress of circumstance tamely like a beast of burden. It is the vital being that is always grumbling and uneasy. The slavery and torture to which it subjects the physical is almost incalculable. How it twists and deforms the poor body to its own fads and fancies, irrationally demanding that everything should be shaped according to its whimsicality! But the very essence of endurance is that the vital should learn to give up its capricious likes and dislikes and preserve an equanimity in the midst of the most trying conditions. When you are treated roughly by somebody or you lakc something which would relieve your discomfort, you must keep up cheerfully instead of letting yourself be disturbed. Let nothing ruffle you the least bit, and whenver the vital tends to air its petty grievances with pompous exaggeration just stop to consider how very happy you are, compared to so many in the world.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 5, Attitudes on the Path, pg. 140