MISSING PUPPY – Manoj wrote to the Manasa FB group on Aug 17

Namaste all

Since I have been getting lot of concerned goodwill mail for the lost puppy which made studio2’s stairway its temporary home, Iam sending you thisupdate.
The same day the mail was sent to you, I met a tearful Penny at studio 2 entrance who told me that the puppy was missing. Though at first we thought it might be a good thing if somebody adopted the puppy, later we were all disturbed with a few findings.
One is that the puppy was still there at 12.30 midnight as witnessed by the boy who cleans our studio in the night. Then early morning, at 7 am, Yoke lan was at the studio for her class. At that time the puppy was not there. So whoever took the puppy took it between 12.30 am and 7 am, and that is an odd time to come and adopt a dog. And the person did not take any of the dog food, but left it neatly wrapped at our doorstep.
All these plus a few possibilities thrown in by other equally sad students such as ‘some people eat puppy meat’ etc, brought about a rather sombre mood in the studio.
That morning’s class I did my best not to mention up-‘dog’ and down ‘dog’, and instead went about it anatomically, saying inhale lift up into the arch and exhaling push hips back and up.

In the last mail, I did say that the lost puppy helped students to connect to maitri (a sense of friendship), karuna (compassion) and mudita (goodwill). But with its sudden missing, it also reminded us of the fourth quality as taught by Patanjali, which is upekshanam (equanimity in the face of virtuous and non virtuous).
This is a great quality in itself as well as one which fortifies the other three qualities. Upekshanam is a technique by which we train our minds to be open to life’s experiences and accepting it as it is, and not getting lost to various reactivities of the mind, such as anger and aversion. So right now, our maitri quality might be ebbing a bit low to our friends who occupy the upper storey (above studio 2), as circumstantially it can only be them who took the puppy away. But upekshanam can act as the special eye wear, ala Cyclops in X-men, which can restrain us from optically blazing them whenever they come in our visionfield.
Also, we can see whether the manasa charity fund, with all your support, can also support some animal orphanage in the future. Then atleast some good can come out of all this.
Pondering on the difficult quality of upekshanam,
Manoj