Maggie the gentle horse.
Last weekend I visited some devotee friends in Big Sur, a very natural, scenic area along the coast of California. My hosts, Yamuna Dasi and Todd, who are local residents, took me for a walk one day up a hillside trail. Along the way, a friendly and gentle horse named, Maggie, joined us.
Maggie lives in a stable nearby Yamuna and Todd’s home; but during the day, she wanders about the wide-open countryside, grazing.
After meeting up with us, Maggie followed us wherever we went.
During our walk, we stopped outside a house to talk to some friendly neighbors. However, when Maggie saw that the gate to their yard was open, she bolted into their garden and began eating their flowers.
The neighbor, concerned about her garden, asked Yamuna, who knows Maggie well, how she could coax the horse away from the flowers and back out of her yard.
Yamuna told her to drape a simple scarf, or even a thin thread, around Maggie’s neck, and she would follow her anywhere she wanted her to go. It worked!
Yamuna explained that from a young age, Maggie had been trained to follow when a rope was around her neck. Now she’s so used to following when there’s something around her neck, it doesn’t even have to be a rope.
Maggie is a very big horse now and it would be impossible to move her without her cooperation.
Through gentle, yet persistent training over time, Maggie has become easy to handle.
In a similar way, we must also train our minds to cooperate with us if we are to advance in the process of bhakti yoga.
In fact, in Srimad-bhagavatam, Krsna compares the process of controlling the mind to taming a horse, thus:
“An expert horseman, desiring to tame a headstrong horse, first lets the horse have his way for a moment and then, pulling the reins, gradually places the horse on the desired path. Similarly, the supreme yoga process is that by which one carefully observes the movements and desires of the mind and gradually brings them under full control.” (Bhag. 11.20.21)
The materially conditioned mind drags one disastrously toward sense gratification and is very strong and difficult to manage.
However, by “constant practice and detachment,” Krsna tells us in the Gita, we can subdue our minds. He says that our mind can even become our best friend.
The best training for the mind is fixing it on the sound of the Hare Krsna maha-mantra.
Everyday, as you chant japa, practice putting the reigns of strict attention on the headstrong mind, pulling it gently back to the sound of the holy names whenever it veers off course.
Just as Maggie has become a friendly and cooperative horse – even though she’s so big and powerful – so too will one’s mighty and unruly mind become pacified through daily, attentive chanting of japa.
Vaisesika Das