Sutra 1.33: Developing Our Attitudes: Greet Happy with Friendliness

Sutra 1.33: maitri karuna muditopeksanam sukha duhkha punyapunya visayanam bhavanatas citta prasadanam

By learning how to be with ourselves and others in a way that promotes peace is beneficial to all. We can greet happy with friendly, unhappy with compassion, virtuous with delight, and non-virtuous with disregard.

Sukha: happy

Maitri: friendliness

Our life will be filled with obstacles along our spiritual path, it’s pretty much a given. We can pony up and use these obstacles to hone our awareness, sharpen our discernment, and rise like the sun, or, we can hover in our ignorance, become a sharpshooter of blame, and swim endless laps in a pool of shame and regret.

Sutra 1.32 armed us with one-pointed focus as a means to overcome obstacles and sutra 1.33 goes on to add even more colors of problem solving paint to our palette. From head to heart we journey. This sutra is like the ultimate attitude adjustment, in essence we move from learning how to train the mind to learning how to hear the heart.

Patanjali categorizes us humans into four ways of being: happy, unhappy, virtuous, and not-virtuous. We are not either or, we are all of these, sometimes overlapping, and we tend to ping pong our potential around, all day, everyday, just depends on which wolf we are consciously or unconsciously feeding. Regardless, the advice is to cultivate supportive attitudes for all, wether this is how you tend to you, or to others, when they are in a state of happy or sad, right or wrong.

How do you feel about you when you are happy, do you allow yourself to be so or do you tend to tame it, time it, or try to top it? How do you feel about others when you witness their happy? Do you want it for yourself, wish it would go away, or welcome it with open arms?

Happy is here to be celebrated, even if it happens to be someone else’s happy. Let us all hold happy in the highest of regards for it is happy that gives us hope in human kind.

Gracias mi Amigos,

So very grateful for your time and your attention and your desire to learn and grow with me using the sutras as our guide. Sure does make me feel happy! Won’t you celebrate with me and go do something that makes you feel your happy!

All my love,

Andrea Dawn