Meditation Secrets Revealed

An Interview with Richard Whittaker conducted by Vlad Moskovski

The world is full of restaurants where people come to sit, to enjoy each other’s company, and of course to eat. Karma Kitchen is a little different. As one of the more public projects of Charity Focus, Karma Kitchen is a restaurant that offers individuals the possibility to be a server one day, and a guest the next. In this radical place, there is more laughing, more cheer, and more spontaneity than in most restaurants. Here one can come alone and leave feeling a part of a big family and an even bigger ideal – to live a life based on the generosity and service to others.

Vlad: How did Karma Kitchen begin and what is the basic premise behind it?

Karma Kitchen is an experiment in generosity. On the outside it looks like a regular restaurant, but the atmosphere is different; it’s friendlier, there is more human connection in the air and it leads to an elevated and festive atmosphere. It’s really quite wonderful and no two Sundays are the same. Each week the staff people are all volunteers except the cooks who work for the restaurant and get compensated.

Part of the idea is that this is a special experience for the volunteers. As a volunteer, you are serving the food, but you really want to have the feeling that you are connecting with people. In this attentive openness towards a customer, you might learn that someone has just come to town, or they are on their way somewhere. Maybe someone wants to sing a song, or an anniversary has just happened. There’s any number of things that can be revealed, and if something has been discovered about one of the guests that might be shared with the whole restaurant, the waiter might check with the guest and alert the maitre d’. So there’s this additional dimension where all those who are volunteering are alert to hidden possibilities.

Of course, for the volunteer, there’s also the experience of just trying to meet the basic demands of being a good waiter or dishwasher. It just so happens that at the restaurant [Taste of Himalayas], which is where Karma Kitchen is now, there’s a fellow named Juan who is the most extraordinary dishwasher. One time, as a volunteer, I was assigned that task. I was muddling along as best I could wrestling the dirty dishes, spraying them, and loading them into this commercial machine. There were two of us and sometimes we would fall behind. Then Juan would sweep in. We’d have to get out of his way because Juan is known as “The Hurricane.” Seemingly throwing dishes in every direction and making a big racket, but never breaking anything, he’d just completely take care of the whole mess. In the time that it would take me, or any ordinary person, to do 3 or 4 dishes, he’s done 50. It was really amazing.

Watching Juan showed me how much we miss in this culture by overlooking the maestros that exist in every field of endeavor. We celebrate the maestro who is the conductor of the orchestra, but no one like Juan gets celebrated. I watched Juan wash dishes. I actually watched very carefully, and I saw that he had mastered something to such a degree that it deserved my real feeling of respect and honor. So Karma Kitchen is a place in which one has all kinds of fresh impressions, like my impression of Juan. I think it’s because the basic premise is novel and unexpected. It’s really an exploration of what happens when you actually try to act from generosity and service.

Vlad: Why do you think it’s so popular? There is always a line out the door.

Well, you go there and it’s really fun. It’s really rewarding. I’ve met people and had some astonishing experiences as a guest. For instance, I met this woman, Susan Schaller, and heard her story—which is truly amazing. I could not believe I was sitting across from a person with a story that is the equivalent of the Helen Keller story. That’s my most dramatic experience in meeting someone new there. But people love it because it’s really enlivening.

Vlad: So everything is run by volunteers, what do you think motivates people to volunteer their time on a Sunday afternoon to work in a restaurant serving food and washing dishes?

If your wife has been trying to get you to wash dishes for years, and you’ve been resisting that and now you’re volunteering to wash dishes, that’s strange, isn’t it? [laughs] It seems that people are drawn to the possibility of giving something instead of just concentrating to getting something. And those who already have experienced that shift from “myself and what I want” to a focus on giving and sharing with others know the special feeling that can happen. The thing about Karma Kitchen is that it’s like a little laboratory where people are experimenting and trying to put something new into action. I think that’s what draws people. There may be a few people who just go there to get a meal because they don’t have any money and that’s ok, too, because often they end up coming back to volunteer and serve as well.

Vlad: Is the idea of a pay it forward restaurant spreading? I hear about other locations?

Karma Kitchen has been giving rise to some copies of itself. I think there is one in DC, in Chicago, and another one or two in the process of being born. Charity Focus projects have had a tendency to spread. Karma Kitchen is one of them, and there are several others. I think there’s a widespread interest in service and a feeling among a lot of young people that there has to be a different model from the selfish, capitalistic attitude of “I’m going to get mine and the hell with you.” Many people feel very deeply that something has to change, and that this change has to be in the direction of some kind of service to a greater good.

Charity Focus projects are like pure versions of this. They’re pretty radical about that, about carrying out their experiments without any focus on the bottom line—without counting the pennies. The interest is in a kind of selfless service. In something that is truly generous.

Vlad: So, they don’t worry about the bottom line?

The truth is that there has to be a certain amount of income or such projects would not keep working. It’s not as though money is ignored. But it’s not worried about—and Karma Kitchen has been more than supporting itself. It almost seems as if there’s a law, that if something is given with certain kind of purity—if something is truly generous—it always causes a reaction of gratitude. And when you feel grateful, the impulse is to give back. So the bottom line takes care of itself.

With Karma Kitchen, there’s not going to be a big worry. If in fact, people were not paying it forward, they would just close it. I don’t think there’s a big commitment to, “We’ve got to keep this going.” Instead, the attitude is “Let’s try this and see if it works. Let’s see what happens.” In Charity Focus’ philosophy, there is a willingness to fail.

Vlad: I ask the question about the bottom line, because I see this transition happening from a more capitalist model, at least around here in the Bay Area, to being more gift economy, and of course it brings up concerns in those that don’t have complete faith in generosity or in this law that you speak of.   

I think you have to verify it. If someone gives something to me, and if it’s a real act of generosity, I know how I feel. I know my impulse and response is that of gratitude and the wish to give back and reciprocate. Karma Kitchen is verifiably functioning. The money comes in—although it may fail in the future. The core people in Charity Focus, while they are very upbeat and full of hopefulness, have not abandoned their critical judgment. They are all very bright people, who look very carefully at things. They are going to be realistic, but they’re also capable of making these unusual leaps and trying things out. It’s how things can actually be tested rather than just thought about.

Vlad: For me, it really comes down to having faith in something that is very pure, Charity Focus is very pure around their intentions.

It would seem to me that purity is an ideal. In moments one might experience a pure impulse, and the next moment one may say, “Oh, I see how I could benefit from that, and I want to benefit from that.” There are moments when something actually pure might act through one, but to think that one can be pure—I would be extremely suspicious of that. For a lot of Charity Focus people, Gandhi is a great exemplar. There is a saying of Gandhi’s that, “if you wait until you are pure before you begin to serve, you will never begin to serve.” You have to start wherever you are and then maybe by following the path of service, you will move in the direction of more purity.

For more info visit:
KarmaKitchen (US), CharityFocus (incubator), DailyGood (news), Karma Tube (videos), HelpOthers (kind acts), Conversations (artists), iJourney (wisdom), MovedByLove (India), CFSites (technical)

“Know yourself as the ocean of being, the womb of all existence. You can know it only by being it. Without it all is trouble. If you want to live sanely, creatively and happily and have infinite riches to share, search for what you are!” ~Sri Nasargadatta Maharaj from the book I AM That

An interview with Bidyut Bose, PhD –  Niroga Founder

Interview conducted by Vlad Moskovski

It brings me great pleasure to interview Bidyut Bose, or BK , as many of us know him. He is a leader in the Yoga community inspiring many with his dedication, wisdom, and caring. Bidyut Bose, PhD, is the executive director of Niroga Institute (www.niroga.org), a nonprofit organization that brings Transformative Life Skills (TLS) to students, vulnerable youth, cancer survivors, seniors and people battling addiction. The work of Niroga directly uplifts thousands of people every week in schools, juvenile halls, homeless shelters, cancer hospitals and rehab centers. Niroga also trains minority young adults to become Certified Yoga teachers, prepared to serve their own communities with cultural competence and linguistic sensitivity.

Vlad Moskovski: How did Niroga begin?

While employed in the high tech industry in Silicon Valley, I observed the ravaging effects of chronic stress on my colleagues and the entire organizational culture. Having grown up with yoga and meditation, I knew that there was a solution to this. I essentially became a student of stress and began to look at the impact of chronic stress on society. Feeling the need to give back, to serve selflessly, which was a big part of my growing up, I decided that perhaps this was the time to step back from the high tech world and start to serve my community.

When I learned that one out of every two kids in inner city schools are dropping out, I realized we have to do something about this colossal waste of human potential. When a kid pulls a gun on another kid because they feel ‘dissed’ – in that situation what if we can create a space between stimulus and response? An increase in self-control could be the difference between life and death on the streets.

Even before Niroga was born, we were asked to work with a small group of young women in an alternative high school in Marin. Right after the first session, the teachers came back saying, “The kids took to the breathing and the quiet sitting like fish to water.”  And I thought, “This is great – there is hope!”

Next came an alternative high school in Oakland. There is a video on the website, where the therapists, foster youth services, teachers, and the principal all say that everyone has given up on these kids and that the teaching of Yoga, breathing techniques, and the other tools are making them realize that each one of them has potential. Then, people from probation, healthcare, and education in Alameda County called us together saying – we need this program in Juvenile Hall.

The first thing I asked was, “How long is the average length of stay in juvenile hall?” About 3 weeks, I was told. So I said, “Then we have two conditions.” Here we are – a puny non-profit, and we are setting conditions for these heads of agencies! The first condition is that it has to be a daily program. Five days a week for both boys and girls. The second condition is, we have to have one class a week for staff. The staff need these tools just as much as the youth. My idea was simple: change each individual kid, and along the way, also the very culture of the institution to make a long term impact. We did research, used standardized scales, measuring chronic stress, and self control or emotion regulation. We showed we could get measurable results working with hundreds of youth.

Then we began to look at where are the youth are going once they get out of juvenile hall. We started to go into schools, first providing hour-long yoga classes in after-school programs, and then during school offering a distilled version of the hour-long class. We compacted it into 15 minutes, keeping the same structure and called it Transformative Life Skills (TLS).

When we went into the classroom with the 15 minute interventions, the teachers modeled and worked with the kids. Very naturally, trainings evolved for schools and school administrators. We now have training programs for school teachers and school- based behavioral health providers so they can teach this in their classrooms and not have to rely on us. We are effectively giving them tools to help themselves, as well as enhance their professional practice.

Next we began to look at the social elitism in the practice of yoga. In order to reach those individuals and communities that need these practices the most, we have to change the face and zip code of yoga. The face from white to black and everything in between. And the zip code spanning the hills to the flats. As a social justice part of our movement, we began to train people of color to become certified yoga teachers. And so the Integral Health Fellows program was born. Every year we are training 25 yoga teachers, and about half are people of color. We make it affordable by offering a scholarship, it is a pay-forward model. Upon graduation, we require them to serve their community – to give back two hours a week for the next 50 weeks. That’s 100 hours of volunteer service by each of the graduates. It’s a huge contribution in community capacity building.

Vlad: Are you surprised at how Niroga has grown, did you expect this?

We started just about 6 years ago, in March 2005, and I came into this with the spirit to try not to have any expectations. I was just seeing how it evolved. The first few years our growth was almost exponential, doubling year after year. Then it flattened out with the economic crisis. Now it’s starting to grow very quickly again, the demand is there. But, the resources are not quite there – we are still vulnerable as an organization.

Vlad: What is the biggest challenge that Niroga faces right now?

I think it’s getting the pervasive awareness of the power and potential of these transformative practices. Right now there is a confluence that is making it accessible. Neuroscience is showing that chronic stress really messes up our bodies and our minds, the brain and our behavior. And at the same time there is convincing evidence that mindfulness practices mitigate these effects. Major developments in somatic psychology on optimal treatment of trauma, which is of course the reality of many of the people we serve, speaks to the combination and integration of the kinesthetic, emotional and the cognitive. So yoga, breathing techniques, and meditation fit into this space.

The fact that being able to regulate our emotions affects everything we do, is huge. And yet in a culture that does not know how to do this, it becomes a challenge to not only realize how important it is, but also figure out ways to systematically build these capabilities. This awareness is a really powerful catalyst, this understanding is a game-changer.

When we look at violence prevention, the notion of tough on crime simply is not working. Whether it is a prison or juvenile hall, all of them seem to be running at full capacity. So we know that incarceration is not going to get us out of this mess. You can try to create safe environments, enhance walkability, better lighted streets, clean parks, but you can’t just do that and stop. You have to also change our ability to regulate ourselves and that internal environment is often missed or dismissed.

We need to influence people who are making the decisions. City council members, board of supervisors, the politicians all the way through to Washington. How much importance are they going to give to this powerful catalyst that enables us to make healthy lifestyle choices, that changes our behavior? If we can get them to think along these lines, then the resources will get lined up. This is the biggest challenge, not only for Niroga, but for all mindfulness organizations in this space.

What we are trying to do is transform ourselves so we can change the world around us. Imagine getting to this magical tipping point where most of the people in the community are practicing these skills of self-mastery most of the time. How beautiful that would be!

Vlad: Where do you see yourself and Niroga in 10 years? How will it grow and change?

The big picture dream for me is generational transformation. How do I affect children, their children and their children’s children. In that process, everything we are trying to do is to get these TLS skills to as many people as possible, in as many places as possible. So that they are able to use these skills for themselves and be a lamp unto those around them. One lamp lighting another, there is no other magic to this. We are hoping for that type of exponential, viral effect that seeds the community with peacefulness, joyfulness, and mindfulness. In this way we can counteract the negative spiraling down – the pettiness, smallness, violence, and greed. To pull ourselves back out, so that each one of us can tap into the infinite potential that is within us. That’s the dream!

For this to become a reality it can’t be just Niroga. I think the dream is a shared dream, it’s up to each one of us to play a part in that dream. I have no clue what will happen in 10 years, but I know this much – I am going to keep working at this until my last breath.

Vlad: Is there anything you would like to say, directly to yoga teachers interested in this dream? That are passionate about spreading yoga and working with diverse and disadvantaged populations?

Two things. First – deepen your own practice. Deepen it so you live a life that is aligned with the spirit and essence of yoga. Without that, you will not be able to operate from a position of strength.

And then, grounded in that strength, practice and teach yoga in the spirit of Karma Yoga. The very essence of Karma Yoga is to try to work a little bit more selflessly, so that you really feel like every student is the very embodiment of the divine. So that every act becomes an act of worship. That way we transform everything around us into the sacred, so there is no secular left. And so it becomes all encompassing, it becomes universal, all-accepting.

Like Mother Theresa used to say – I’m serving Christ. Christ in the poor, the destitute, or the one ridden with leprosy. How can I treat every single potential student as my teacher, as the divine embodied in front of me. Strive with every ounce of your strength for self-realization, and then translate that into action. You grow a little bit, and you are able to serve more effectively more selflessly, and through that you grow – elegant positive feedback, reinforcing itself, spiraling upward.

Just start where you are, you don’t have to wait to be highly evolved. A little bit each day, two minutes, five minutes. Work to the best of your ability without caring what comes out of it, without caring what others will think about it. Somebody gives you a dollar for your class or a hundred, you treat them just the same. One person comes to your class or a thousand, you teach the class just the same. That becomes Karma Yoga. We have all of these opportunities to practice. What a blessing! That is how I feel about my life, that every breath, every moment I have to teach is a blessing, an opportunity to grow and propel myself forward.

Once upon a time, in an island there lived six feelings and emotions: Happiness, Knowledge, Love, Sadness, Richness and Vanity. One day they discovered that the island began sinking! So all of them built boats and canoes and left, one by one. Except for Love. Love wanted to delay abandoning her beloved island as long as possible.

When the island had almost sunk, Love decided to ask for help.

Richness was passing by Love in a boat. Love asked, “Richness, can you take me with you?”

Richness answered, “Sorry, Love, I can’t. There is a lot of gold and silver in my boat, so there is no place here for you. With both of us in here we will sink for sure.”

Love next asked Vanity who was also sailing by, but Vanity offered the same answer.

“I can’t help you, Love. You are all wet and might damage my boat,” Vanity answered.

Sadness was close by, so Love asked, “Sadness, take me along with you.”

“Oh . . . Love, I am so sad that I need to be by myself!”, sadness said in a gloomy voice.

Happiness passed by Love, too, but she was so preoccupied with her happiness that she did not even hear when Love called her.

Suddenly, there was a voice, “Come, Love, I will take you.”

It was an elder with a tattered head scarf. An overjoyed Love jumped into the boat. When they arrived at a dry land, the elder went her own way.

Love looked around and saw the Knowledge who was the first to have landed there a while ago.

“Who Helped me?” Love asked.

“It was Time,” Knowledge answered.

“Time? Why time?” Love was surprised.

“Because only Time is capable of understanding how valuable Love is.” The Knowledge smiled.

“Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well form which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.

~Khalil Gibran – The Prophet

An inspiring story and a good lesson on thinking outside the box. A passage from The Element by Ken Robinson

“One of the results of seeing our lives as leaner and unidirectional is that it leads to a culture of segregating people by age. We send the very young to nursery schools and kindergartens as a group. We educate teenagers in batches. We move the elderly into retirement homes. There are some good reasons for all of this. After all, As Gail Sheehy noted decades ago, there are predictable passages in our lives, and it makes some sense to create environments where people can experience those passages in an optimal way.

However, there are also good reasons to challenge the routines of what really amounts to age discrimination. An inspiring example is a unique education program in the Jenks school district of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The state of Oklahoma has a nationally acclaimed early-years reading program, providing reading classes for three-to five-year olds throughout the state. The Jenks district offers a unique version of the program. This came about when the owner of another institution in Jenks – one across the street from one of the elementary schools – approached the superintendent of schools. He’d heard about the reading program and wondered if his institution could offer some help.

The other institution is the Grace Living Center, a retirement home.

Over the next few months, the district established a preschool and kindergarten classroom in the very heart of Grace Living Center. Surrounded by clear glass walls(with a gap at the top to allow the sounds of children to filter out), the classroom sits in the foyer of the main building. The children and their teachers go to school there every day as thought it were any other classroom. Because it’s in the foyer, the residents walk past it at least three times a day to get to their meals.

As soon as the class opened, many of the residents stopped to look through the glass walls at what was going on. The teachers told them that the children were learning to read. One by one, several residents asked if they could help. The teachers were glad to have the assistance, and they quickly set up a program called Book Buddies. The program pairs a member of the retirement home with one of the children. The adults listen to the children read, and they read to them.

The program has had some remarkable results. One is that the majority of the children at the Grace Living Center are outperforming other children in the district on the state’s standardized reading tests. More than 70 percent are leaving the program at age five reading at third-grade level or higher. But the children are learning much more than how to read. As they sit with their book buddies, the kids have rich conversations with the adults about a wide variety of subjects, and especially about the elders’ memories of their childhoods growing up in Oklahoma. The children ask things about how big iPods were when the adults were growing up, and the adults explain that their lives really weren’t like the lives that kids have now. This leads to stories about how they lived and played seventy, eighty, or even ninety years ago. The children are getting a wonderfully textured social history of their hometowns from people who have seen the town evolve over the decades. Parents are so pleased with this extracurricular benefit that a lottery is now required because the demand for sixty available desks is so strong.

Something else has been going on at the Grace Living Center though: medication levels are plummeting. Many of the residents on the program have stopped or cut back on their drugs.

Why is this happening? Because the adult participants in the program have come back to life. Instead of whiling away their days waiting for the inevitable, they have a reason to get up in the morning and a renewed excitement about what the day might bring. Because they are reconnecting with their creative energies, they are literally living longer.

There’s something else the children learn. Every now and then, the teachers have to tell them that one of their book buddies won’t be coming any more’ that this person has passed. So the children come to appreciate at a tender age that life has its rhythms and cycles, and that even the people they become close to are part of that cycle.

In a way, the Grace Living Center has restored an ancient, traditional relationship between the generations. The Book Buddies program shows in a simple yet profound way the enrichment possible when generations come together. It shows too that elderly can revive long-lost energies if the circumstances are right and the inspiration is there.”

Open yourself to wisdom, then you can embody it completely.
Open yourself to insight, then you can use it completely.
Open yourself to loss, then you can accept it completely.
Open yourself and trust you natural responses; then everything will fall into place.

From Stephen Mitchell’s Tao Te Ching