Insights from the CHYK West Seva Retreat

On October 1, 2011, the CHYK West Seva Retreat organized by CHYK Austin. In this unique retreat, CHYKs participated in a community service project as part of Be The Change, an initiative by SAALT, where 1000s of people around the country came together on Gandhiji's birthday to do community service. At the retreat, CHYKs participated in seva for the first half of the day, and then reflected on the service in an afternoon workshop conducted by Brahmachari Girish Chaitanya.

The service project our group volunteered for was the Montopolis Greenbelt clean up. Volunteers were requested to remove trash and invasive species of plants from the park, which was to be donate to the City of Austin. Over 30 youth worked together to remove trash, and it was truly eye-opening about what had been dumped on the trails. I found beer cans, prescription bottles, paint cans, dolls, toys, food wrappers etc. Some of the more surprising finds were mattresses, tables, a tricycle and tires. Some of this trash had been around for so long, they were deeply embedded into the ground, wrapped around by vines and tree roots. This made it very difficult to pull out of the ground.

As I tried to extricate a rotting tricycle from the grasp of undergrowth, it suddenly struck me: how often do we clean our inner mental landscape of negative thoughts, limiting assumptions, dashed expectations, and painful memories? Some of these thoughts are harder to remove than others because we have been clinging to them for so long... The longer they have been there, the harder they are to root out. If we consciously dropped the negativity from our minds on a more regular basis, it would become easier to purify, and we could get rid of our limiting thoughts more quickly before they became deeply rooted in our Ego.

I remembered that in the book, the Manual of Self-Unfoldment, Swami Chinmayananda discusses the process of daily self-analysis:
1. Introspect - our actions, thoughts
2. Detect - discover your weaknesses
3. Negate - become truly conscious of these self-limiting thoughts
4. Substitute - replace this negative thought with a positive one

What if we practiced this more regularly? We would be free of the baggage of negative thoughts!

I resolved to make introspection a more regular practice. Service proved to be a great teacher - just as in the material world, regular cleaning of the landscape results in a prettier, safer park, in the same way, our inner landscape can also benefit from the regular practice of introspection.