What's Your Dharma?

A shocking amount of students seem stunned when asked such a stark (yet obvious) question:

What is your greatest desire? Your life purpose? What do you want more than anything in this lifetime?

One of my favorite quotes: You can’t hit a target you can’t clearly see.

If we have no idea what we are chasing, or rather are bumbling around aimlessly wondering why we are not happy without ever stopping to ask the simple question: what makes me happy? What results can we expect to get?

April 1, 2016

Dharma

I have begun and deleted a vignette like this many times before.

Where does one begin when preparing to lay it all out there, to publicly place very real words into an environment accessible to millions of real people? 

My name is Kelli Schaffter and I am a certified yoga teacher living my life in Columbus, Ohio.

I exist in real-time, teaching classes around the city, marketing for several amazing small businesses, and spending many hours of my days trying to find a way to best live my Dharma.

In yoga-speak, Dharma roughly translates to mean "life's purpose."

I have known mine since I was little: I wanted to be an artist, teacher, and writer who made the world a better place. 

I have since spent many years exploring various paths physically, academically, and spiritually.

I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from The Ohio State University, with a concentration in Narrative, Culture, and Representation.

Passionate about creative writing, literature, and photography, I have minors in Studio Art and English.

A few years ago, as a wanna-be writer and scholar, I was madly writing, reading, and preparing to apply for my M.F.A. in Creative Non-Fiction, that oxymoronic genre of writing that creatively tells the truth.

But as many bookworms are well aware, we are often floating around in our thoughts, walking heads with no connection to the rest of our living, breathing bodies.

My head was swirling with ideas of the stories I wanted to share, but I soon became full of self-doubt. I feared being rejected at the one thing I had always wanted most: to be a writer and celebrated scholar.

Pressing pause on my deepest desire and taking a several year detour to study and become a professional yoga teacher brought about what I’d hoped it would: a more holistic understanding of myself physically, emotionally, and spiritually, a more unified sense of self, a greater ability to be vulnerable and develop my voice as a teacher.

Learning more about my body and mind allowed me the space to observe what mattered most to me, and allowed my Dharma to simmer to an obvious answer: I still want to be an artist, teacher, and writer who makes the world a better place.

I now find myself here—as always—in the present moment.

Eager to blend the many elements of my life into something cohesive and helpful to other people, I am embarking on an experimental journey of publishing simple vignettes in a public sphere.

My greatest mission is to help people heal, to help people find self-love, compassion for themselves and others, and to blossom into the best they can be.

I believe it is fundamental for as many of us as possible to learn techniques to thrive, to connect with each other in a spiritual and emotional language that makes sense to each of us as extraordinarily unique human beings, to find points of connection with one another.

I believe that we all have a large impact on those around us, and the wiser, happier and more successful each of us is leads to the greater functionality of society.

We all matter. We all make a difference. We all are in it—this life—together. 

I long to blend extremism, and have forever found myself fascinated with juxtaposition and high contrast, in hovering between the opposites, ah—in striking balance.

My greatest passions in life have long been literature, history, social studies, activism, the arts. That which is creative, colorful, full of life. That which is brave and resilient and powerful. That which is daring and bold and different. Those who are still remembered today for being one of the Greats.

(Ultimately, this is my largest Dharma, though I am pitifully afraid to admit this. As I learn to better love myself and also attempt to not be an overly egotistical douche bag, I struggle into stepping into what I believe my greatest role on this earth really is, to be one of the Greats. An individual who goes down in history for bringing people together in a way that is legendary, who continues to positively shape culture many centuries after they have lived their meaningful life.)

Several of the real-life people that I place on a pedestal, a few of my greatest inspirations: Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln.

Brave and ambitious, killed in cold-blooded murder.

In order to put myself out here completely, I had to face my deep-seated fear I hadn’t been able to shake, the idea that if I chased my Dharma to my greatest potential, I would die quite violently.

A longtime fan of dystopian novels, I found myself inside my mind, faced with a few of my greatest fears: being so impactful that you step on the toes of a larger institution not intended to be stepped on. Black bags, torture, murder.

My fear of failure was in fact a much greater fear of success. In a twisted way, I believed that my success would lead to something horrific.

I temporarily stopped my pursuits of writing with a purpose to actually publish.

Up until now, I have avoided publishing authentic words where the masses could read them.

The media often wants us to believe that we live in a scary world, and arguably, we do.

By publishing my words on the World Wide Web, I am willingly exposing myself, taunting a stalker to come to my classes. Keep track of my geo tags.

We live in a weird world these days, and there is no hiding in the twenty-first century. (Shout-out to you, Big Brother.)

Many of my greatest heroes have been peace activists that have been assassinated for sharing their beliefs.

I was too afraid of exposing the people I loved in my life, of libel suits, or complete and creepy strangers knowing much too much about my personal life.

But I now find myself here—as always—in the present moment.

My Dharma is to make a difference, and to do this, I must let go of my fear.

I write to uplift, to inspire, and create community.

I write to tell stories, to entertain, and to promote what I genuinely believe in.

My goal is to forge a path in the present moment that is as authentic as possible, bearing the risks, but believing that the benefits of spreading positivity and connection to other individuals in the here and now is more important. 

If you’ve made it this far, thank you kindly. You are probably a friend, follower, or my mother.

You are probably somebody incredibly complex and wonderful, but I don’t yet know who you are, reading these words.

This is an experiment after all, an attempt to connect to those living in the here and now.

The best is yet to come.

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

— Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

Your path, your dharma, your purpose in this life is illuminated.

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