Do Yoga, Do Good

Karma yoga, the practice of serving others, isn't just the right thing to do; it's also a path to self-realization.

By Alan Reder

In the West's never-ending quest for high-speed, user-friendly spiritual growth, an ancient solution to the problem, karma yoga, is usually overlooked. The Bhagavad Gita touts karma yoga—the Hindu path of service to others—as the fast lane to spiritual fulfillment. So comprehensive are its benefits that one of India's most widely respected gurus, Neem Karoli Baba, gave just one instruction to his devotees: "Love everyone, serve everyone, remember God"—six words that encompass the whole tradition. "Everything he said to us was focused on loving and serving," says Mirabai Bush, one of his best-known American followers. "He said if you want to meditate or do asanas, fine, but he never really taught us those things."

These ideas are much on my mind as I sit in a small apartment in Phoenix, Oregon, watching hospice volunteer—and novice karma yogi—Stephanie Harrison with her patient, Dorothy Armstrong. Harrison has seated herself on the carpet at Armstrong's feet, a calming hand embracing the 73-year-old woman's ankle. Slumped in a brown recliner, Armstrong suffers from congestive heart failure and advanced diabetes. At her request, her doctors have ended aggressive treatment and are just trying to make her final months more comfortable. But even that is becoming difficult: Liquid morphine no longer does the trick, the stout, white-haired woman says, and the pain rarely quits.

Harrison has stepped into the breach, having been paired with Armstrong by a local hospice agency. A pert 55-year-old brunette, Harrison visits at least weekly. Often, the two women just chat, like girlfriends. But Harrison also helps out by doing light housework, running errands, and tending to Armstrong's Lhasa Apso, Pokita. In addition, Harrison has insisted that Armstrong phone her at any hour if she feels the need. Recently, Armstrong was jarred awake in the middle of the night by intense pain that overwhelmed and terrified her. Harrison rushed over from nearby Ashland to stay with Armstrong and hold her hand. "There's no feeling like knowing that someone cares about you like that," Armstrong says, her voice breaking. "She's a very special person."

Serve Somebody

All major religious traditions stress the importance of service to others: being a companion to the sick and dying, cooking hot meals for the hungry, collecting warm clothes for the poor, and so on. But that doesn't make karma yoga a universal spiritual practice. In yoga, service is not just a spiritual obligation or the righteous thing to do, as it's promoted in many churches and synagogues. It is also a path to self-realization, making it a supercharged version of the adage that when you give, you also receive.

So does that mean you're guaranteed enlightenment for doing some volunteer work? Can anyone sign up for this amazing program? How else will your life change if you do? You won't find pat answers to these questions—because, as described in the Gita, karma yoga is a mysterious process that reveals its true nature only to those who pursue it.

The first mystery comes wrapped in the definition of karma yoga, which doesn't, strictly speaking, mean "service" (often referred to in yogic circles by its Sanskrit name, seva). Instead, the desire to do service is part of what's revealed on the karma yoga path. Karma yoga is usually translated as "the yoga of action"—that is, using the ordinary actions of your life as a means of "waking up." Essentially, everything you do—from household chores, like washing the dishes, to "important" duties, like your job—becomes a way of nourishing the universe that nourishes you.

At some point, however, the distinction between ordinary actions and service, or actions to relieve the suffering of others, disappears. Yoga teaches that as we develop spiritually, our awareness and compassion grow, making us more alert to suffering around us and less able to turn away from it. In essence, the pain of others becomes our own, and we feel driven to relieve it, much as we'd instinctively act to end pain in our own body or heart.

But karma yoga doesn't always begin so deliberately—in fact, another of its mysteries is that it's as likely to choose you as vice versa. Meredith Gould, former director of marketing at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, Massachusetts, and author of Deliberate Acts of Kindness: Service as a Spiritual Practice (Image, 2002), believes that for many, karma yoga starts as a sort of inner tug. For Ram Dass, whom many consider America's preeminent karma yogi—he has written and lectured widely on the subject and helped launch several key dharma-related service nonprofits—the call came person-to-person. In 1967, while searching the Himalayan foothills for holy men, the former Harvard psychology professor, then called Richard Alpert, was introduced to a small bearded man wrapped in a blanket, who turned out to be Neem Karoli Baba. Just one day later, Maharajji, as his followers called Baba, "assigned" Ram Dass the task that has dominated his life ever since.

"[He] said to me, 'Do you know Gandhi?'" Ram Dass says haltingly. (His speech is still affected by a stroke he suffered in 1997.) "I said, 'I don't know him, I know of him.' He said, 'You—be like Gandhi.' I got the little glasses first. That didn't do it. And then I found a quote that said, 'My life is my message.' If I can be like Gandhi with that message, that makes my whole incarnation a service." Which, of course, it has been, especially to the millions who first took an interest in Eastern spirituality thanks to Ram Dass's books and lectures in the '60s and '70s; the countless folks who've benefited from his work with the Prison-Ashram Project, the Dying Project, the Seva Foundation, and other such efforts; and the graying legions inspired by his work on conscious aging.

Serve the Soul

Not being a membership organization, karma yoga also taps the shoulders of those outside the fold, like Stephanie Harrison. Having grown up watching her parents assist needy families who patronized their grocery store in Houston, Harrison began volunteering when her children were young. At first, she assisted at her firstborn's day-care center. Later, she led tours for children and adults with disabilities at a local museum. "Starting when I was young, I had a sense that we needed one another, that we couldn't make it by ourselves," she recalls.

In her mid-40s, Harrison began exploring contemplative spirituality, and her volunteering changed in kind. A Methodist by birth, she started practicing Thomas Keating's "centering prayer," which resembles Eastern-style meditation, after hearing the noted monk and author speak in Houston. She also simplified her life, minimized her creature comforts, and began attending retreats at convents and monasteries. Eventually, she adopted the church's Rule of Benedict, a comprehensive approach to spiritual living in which service plays a key role. After moving to Ashland, her involvement with the hospice exposed her to the Buddhist perspective on living and dying. The teachings rang in her like a bell, and she soon integrated them into her daily practice.

Harrison's volunteering now drives her spiritual development as much as formal doctrines do. In the cozy front room of her home, Harrison talks about how observing people die has altered her view of the living. Her voice is hushed with wonder as she describes one patient's passing. A Hispanic man separated from his wife, the patient was just "skin and bones," Harrison says. He never had visitors and rarely spoke.

"One day, he opened his arms and began to pray in Spanish," she recalls. "His whole face changed—there was a light in it that came from inside out. His body heated up. And there was such joy and peace and glory that he radiated. It was probably less than 24 hours later that he died. But there was some connection he made that really pulled him out of this world into the next, gave him courage and almost took him by the hand.

"I'm so clear after seeing people dying that we are all the same," she continues. "There's a part that sheds and a part that's there after the shedding. In my interactions with others now, I'm able to see beyond their superficiality and respond to that deeper part of a person, which often transforms the whole communication."

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