Today I was thinking about what does it mean to practically reconnect to the sense of the sacred? The following mantra popped up in my heart - "Remember to take care of those who take care of you." This simple idea seems so revolutionary if we stop to remember it: take of our body, take care of our parents and relatives, take of our friends, take care of our employees, take care of our employers, take care of mentees, take care of our mentors, take care of the local rivers and water bodies, take care of forests, take care of the soils, take care of the animals, take care of the refugees and the migrants, take care of the farmers and the earthworms, bees and butterflies, take care of all the invisible beings who sustain our lives. We dont need to do this with the burden of paying things back in some linear tit-for-tat accounting. Rather, it is with the spirit of joy, gratitude, love and seva that we pay things forward. This is what our indigenous wisdom teaches us about how life flourishes. It is the ethos of indigenous creativity.
Our conventional education system, focuses on rewarding the opposite by telling us that it is a dog-eat-dog world, survival of the fittest, national identities, short terms profits and individual marks which only matter, etc. Exploitation, extraction, competition, hierarchy are the dominant values in the school which must be unlearned. Imagine how different the world would look if we and our students learned to live with this mantra again.
What are the mantras you would offer to reconnect to the sense of the sacred in life?
