My Buddha has Termites...A Lesson in Infinite Joy

Most mornings I sit down to practice yoga and meditate. On these days I sit near a short table, on which sits a lovely wooden Buddha. He sits about 2 feet high, and appears to be hand carved by some underpaid laborer in a foreign and inevitably poorer land than ours. I was happy to buy it at an inflated price at the farmer’s market, for I trusted he’d watch over me as I yoga-ed, meditated, mused, celebrated and went through my daily life.

It was on a recent morning when I noticed my Buddha had some small holes that were not there when I brought him home from the market. On his right, the side where the wood is lighter, there were 6 to 10 small pin-holes and the tiny flakes of wood underneath that result from drilling or burrowing.

Damn.

Could it be??

My Buddha has termites!?!

This cannot bode well for my spirituality.


But maybe, just maybe, I can make lemonade out of this Buddha-lemon.

So this is what I've come to. Just as we can be infiltrated by our own self-doubt and bull-sh1t negative propaganda, The Buddha can be infiltrated too. Heck, he's not even the real Buddha, he's just a symbol of The Buddha... Just as our negative thoughts aren't really us, they're just a symbol of where we might be going astray from our true, joyful selves.

Instead of thinking that my spirituality is in trouble, I'm just going to think that, like me, like all of us, really, my Buddha needs some tender loving care. To help, I devised the H.A.R.P.S. formula:

H.A.R.P.S.

• Humility - knowing that even The Buddha is not immune to insidious infiltration... so why do we expect ourselves to be immune to negative infiltration?
  
• Awareness - to notice the holes, termites or bullsh1t going on so that we can re-establish our joy
  
• Release - to rid The Buddha of termites and ourselves of those things that aren't serving us anymore
  
• Perspective - to learn from and see things anew, and realize that preventative measures are good for us (meditation, yoga, healthy eating, laughter and wood-care)
• Smile - to help us see the humor that is somewhere in almost everything, and to help realize that while nothing is all that serious, everything is important...
  

And here's the kicker that drives home the S in HARPS: Through all of this, the termite infiltration and the treatment to rid my Buddha of termites...
The Buddha just kept on smiling.

Through it all, he maintains infinite joy.

Can you apply HARPS to your insidious infiltrators? Let me know. I'd love to hear from you in the comments.

But if you take nothing else from this, remember to keep on smiling.

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