A few weekends ago, I surprised our family with tickets to a live play adaptation of Charles Dickens’, A Christmas Carol.
I love this play!
It’s got everything: ghosts, redemption, humor, and above all an enduring message of how our greatest purpose is to love and serve one another.
If you’ve ever been to my live, online Yoga Nidra class, you can attest that I can’t stop talking about A Christmas Carol all year round, in particular because the primary character in this story, Ebenezer Scrooge, has nothing short of a spiritual awakening. It really is THE perfect narrative to illustrate not only the spiritual path toward compassion and Oneness we tread in yoga and mindfulness in general but so closely resembles the unique mode of transformation that can happen in a Yoga Nidra experience that it makes me wonder whether or not old Chuck Dickens was in fact a Yoga Nidra practitioner.
At very least, exploring A Christmas Carol through the filter of Yoga Nidra may help us to appreciate this story anew and add a deeper insight and meaning into this well-worn story. It may help us to reflect upon our own awakening that can happen at any time of the year. And I think what I’m really angling at here is that this story illuminates so perfectly how the altered state of sleep can catalyze a massive change in spirit which can lift us from our habitual, broken way of being and help us wake up to the truth that we are all One, that veritably we are each other’s business.
Ghosts, Greed, And Graves
I know you know the story but stay with me …
It’s Christmas eve, mid-1800s, London. Ebenezer Scrooge is a rich, stingy old codger who only sees the world through the myopic and miserly lens of selfishness and greed. Despite being Christmas Eve, Scrooge is constantly berating his poor employee at the counting house, Bob Cratchit, whom he pays barely enough to care for his large family, including providing for his weak and infirm son, Tiny Tim.
Throughout the day people are constantly dropping by and asking him to open his heart for both his own and others’ benefit. Despite Scrooge’s unrelenting crotchetiness, his good-natured nephew invites him to Christmas dinner, but Scrooge rejects this warm invitation with a malicious, “Bah humbug!” Also, two men stop by asking for donations for the sick and poor and Scrooge feigns dismay wondering what ever happened to the workhouses and prisons that his taxes pay for. The charity collectors say that the workhouses and prisons are truly horrible places and that many people would rather die than to go there at which point Scrooges very callously declares “Well, if they would rather die they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.” This heartless comment shocks the charity collectors and sends them packing.
But that night as Ebeneezer Scrooge is alone and grumpy in his old, cold house, busy not celebrating the season, as he’s getting ready to slip into bed, to his great shock, he’s visited by the ghost of his former business partner, Jacob Marley, who died 7 years previous and who has returned looking like Pee Wee Herman’s bike wrapped and padlocked in about 40 feet of chains, moaning and groaning a warning to Ebenezer. The ghost says that he has been wandering the spirit world for 7 long, miserable years, carrying the heavy chains of regret and misery that he forged link by link as the result of all the selfish and greedy deeds he performed in life.
Trying to stroke the ghost’s ego and perhaps win some sympathy from this terrifying apparition, Scrooge affirms weakly to the ghost that in life, Jacob was an excellent businessman. The ghost rejects this comment outright, shrieking, “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
The ghost tells Scrooge that in truth, he’s doing him a real solid by visiting him with this brash warning and that if he wants to avoid the same fate or worse, he’d better change his selfish ways. He says that Scrooge will be visited by 3 more ghosts and that he’d better listen to what they say.
Photo by Kevin Berne. Source: https://www.ctinsider.com/performance/article/A-Christmas-Carol-Ruta-back-as-Marley-s-ghost-5055905.php
After the ghost disappears, quite shaken by the experience, Scrooge justifies this otherworldly visitation as merely a trick of the senses, “more gravy than grave,” he says about the ghost and decides to forget the whole ordeal and go to sleep.
Soon, Scrooge is woken abruptly by the chiming of the clock and the coming of another specter, this time the first of the three remaining ghosts. It’s The Ghost of Christmas Past who tells Ebenezer to hold onto her robe as they teleport back in time so she can show him vivid scenes from his past. These scenes help to remind Scrooge that he hasn’t always been such a crusty old curmudgeon, that once he had a great and warm capacity for love and compassion, even if it was rubbed out of him by a callous father and his own misguided emphasis on pursuing a name for himself rather than pursuing his true love, Belle. Sad trombone. This blast to the past reopens wounds long closed and eventually, the ghost returns him to his bed and to sleep.
Again, he is reawakened, this time by The Ghost of Christmas Present, a larger-than-life character who is big, jolly, and whose entire affect is one of abundance and joy. The messenger here IS the message, right, and it couldn’t be more clear if it were surrounded by blinking Christmas lights. Message is: The real party is happening not in the past or the future but right here, right now, in the present moment. I mean, this knowledge nugget could be a page ripped straight out of the Yoga Sutras.
Scrooge is skeptical of the over-the-top optimism and joy thrown in his face by the Ghost of Christmas Present and even cops a touch of snarky attitude to the whole scene. This ticks off The Ghost of Christmas Present so he shows Scrooge what’s true and real about Bob’s family, how they aren’t well off, and really struggling even to provide the bare necessities for Tiny Tim to survive. He’s shown how his nephew stands up for Scrooge even though his nephew’s wife and their friends think Scrooge is a rotten human being.
Scrooge still doesn’t get the point, doesn’t follow the how he’s in any way to blame for what he’s seeing, so in a moment of righteous indignation The Ghost of Christmas Present drops his forever toothy grin and pulls back his cloak to reveal to old Ebenezer two pathetic creatures hiding beneath. They are two sickly, emaciated young street children who represent Ignorance and Want, the product of the selfishness that Ebenezer possesses.
The nightmarish image of these two wasted children stun Scrooge and pierces his steely heart. With an expression that conveys both pity and disgust, he asks the disdainful ghost if there’s anything to be done about such horrors. And with a mirthless laugh, the Ghost of Christmas Present glowers down at Scrooge and quotes Scrooge’s own vile comments back to him about how perhaps the poor and destitute ought to just die and “reduce the surplus population.” Condemned by his own venom, like a letter with a searing “Return To Sender'' scrawled across the front, Ebenezer is returned to his bed and left to wallow in his despair, fully aware of his guilt.
After these two ghosts, Scrooge’s feeling like trash. He is at his lowest point. It couldn’t possibly get worse.
Then it does.
Again the clock chimes the hour and again he’s awoken, this time by the Ghost of Christmas Future, a horrific figure, a dead ringer for the grim reaper. Using only gestures, this specter points his bony finger to the theater of a bleak future, dark scenes of what will happen if he doesn’t change his ways. He shows both the death of little Tiny Tim as well as Scrooge’s own pathetic, lonely and forgetful death, mourned by none and even celebrated by some.
Terrified, Scrooge pleads to the ghost and asks if this is what will surely be or only what will happen if he doesn’t change his ways. But the ghost gestures that it’s too late and points him to his own gravestone. Scrooge is dead. Wallowing in the horror of his dim demise and the torture of seeing how he could have helped so many but didn’t, he’s left alone in a dark corner of the cemetery, weeping and wailing at the foot of his own cold and miserable grave.
Eventually, Scrooge opens his eyes and to his utter astonishment sees that he’s no longer in the cemetery weeping at the foot of his own grave. By some miracle, he’s alive. It’s morning and he’s been delivered from his destitute darkness.
He’s been reborn.
With this glorious realization, he leaps from his bed rejoicing, not only is he elated at being alive but he realizes that he has a second chance to fulfill his purpose for living—to make people’s wellbeing his business.
Adding to his joy, it’s Christmas, a realization that makes him dance around the room even more. His smile fades only momentarily as he stands and solemnly promises to himself, God, and all of humanity that even in his old age, he is born anew and will commit his new life to the benefit and wellbeing of others. He proclaims that for him, everyday forever more will be Christmas Day.
Ebenezer Scrooge rushes to the window, throws open the shutters, and looks out into the world. The cataracts of his selfishness and greed have been excised from his eyes. He can never see the world in his old, limited way again. This is his awakening moment. He looks out at the exact same scene as every day before, but now, he sees every object, indeed life itself, with beauty and possibilities—the miracle of it all. He is overcome with happiness and joy as if this miracle of life was born in that moment. Looking out upon the world below, he sees the entire world through the bright and clear lens of love.
Scrooge wastes no time making good on his promise and employing his new love for the world. While still in his nightclothes, he calls out the window to a young person in the street below and tells them that he will pay them handsomely to rush and buy the largest goose in the shop down the road and to deliver it to the home of his poor employee, Bob Cratchit for Christmas dinner.
Next, he gets dressed and leaves the house to begin amending the damage that his selfishness and greed has caused over the years. He finds the two men who came by his counting shop the previous day asking for donations, the same guys he chased away with his contempt for Christmas. At first these men angle to avoid Scrooge, wishing to preclude further abuse and tirades about “reducing the surplus populations.” But to their great surprise, Scrooge addresses them squarely and apologizes to them saying that he has changed his mind and would like to offer a donation after all. He leans in close to whisper what he’d like to offer as a donation, an amount so large that it causes both their jaws to drop and starts them jigging in the street with joy. As the three men are laughing and shaking hands vigorously, Scrooge assures them that this is just the beginning, that there are many years of back donations that he must make up for.
Next, he finds his nephew to ask his sincere forgiveness for being such a cantankerous old coot and asks that if the invitation for Christmas dinner is still open, he’d be honored and humbled to join them.
The following day, Scrooge gets to work early eager to see Bob Cratchit who he guesses will come in late for work after a day of merriment. Sure enough Bob is a few minutes late and Scrooge begins to lay into Bob, acting out a false but unfortunately all too familiar air of anger and scolding, berating him for being tardy. Scrooge’s rage crescendos to a roar and just as it seems that he’s on the brink of making some dire pronouncement like docking Bob’s wages or even firing him, Scrooge declares, “I’m going to … going to… double your wages!” This declaration stupefies Bob Cratchet long enough for Scrooge to tell him how grateful he is and how he wishes him to be able to better care for his family. They both laugh with happiness and celebrate together this generosity and goodwill for all at which point Tiny Tim appears and bestows his blessing to all of us, “Merry Christmas and God bless us, everyone.”
Curtain drops.
Actors take a bow.
Sanding applause with everyone in the house smiling and misty-eyed.
Loving Is Our Purpose
Admittedly, to some this tale might be a tad tired. Not for me. I’ve rediscovered it in the last few years as a beautiful, fun, and heart-warming invitation for us all to simply learn to wake up from the illusion of separateness and learn to love and serve each other.
A Christmas Carol is like a playful sermon from Jesus, The Buddha, or Krishna, or any other enlightened master for that matter. I mean, it’s the story of Ebenezer Scrooge’s awakening, waking up to the fullness of his being by realizing that his purpose of life is to love and serve others. This story gives us a tacit invitation for us to do likewise. Though this simple message to love one another is not new to Jesus and is likely as old as humankind itself, it’s nonetheless a fun and seasonal interpretation of that essential message, one that bears repeating until it truly sinks in.
What is art and the humanities but an expression of what it means to be human? At our deepest level, humans are love and compassion and no pathway to self-discovery can omit this truth. Is this not the epitome of Christ’s message and isn’t it fitting that A Christmas Carol is set on the eve of the coming of one of the world’s greatest bearers of that message?
But simply loving each other never seems that simple, right? Just like Scrooge, we are conditioned with our own history and programming that makes simply loving one another a more difficult task than it may appear, especially during the holidays when expectations are high and times are stressful. We need ways to practice revealing, understanding, and remembering this fundamental core of compassion that is inside of us.
Enter Yoga Nidra.
Yoga Nidra is one of the most effective, quickest, and accessible methods of practicing experiencing our true beingness, the part that’s inextricably tied to compassion. This simple but nourishing practice gives us a tangible relationship with our compassionate beingness and an invitation to marry our beingness to the humanness of our lives and live in a quality of compassionate responsiveness rather than fearful reactivity. Truly it’s the practice of self-discovery that lands squarely at the intersection of human and being.
Even though its benefits are so grand, so important to the journey of self-discovery, practicing Yoga Nidra couldn’t be simpler—literally, you just lie down and rest while listening to a facilitator lead you into deeper layers of relaxation and awareness.
A Christmas Carol and Yoga Nidra share at their core a message of understanding our being through and as compassion. They also share many other parallel principles such as: the dream state as a catalyst to spiritual awakening, momentarily altering mental states can help us upgrade to higher stages of consciousness, and the concept of death and resurrection into higher stages of consciousness.
Waking UP
In the novel, Ebenezer Scrooge needed an abrupt wake up from the illusion of separateness and he received just that by getting the bejesus scared out of him by a few seasoned ghosts.
In truth, most of us are more like Scrooge than we’d like to admit. Like Scrooge, we are the slaves of our own programming, thinking we are autonomous beings making independent choices but in truth most of us are going about each day following the same tired thought scripts, stories, the rutted emotional pathways laid down by years of flawed interpretations, experiences, and thinking. Like Scrooge, we tend to see the world through the limited lens of selfishness. In the book, The Little Prince, the wise fox imparts great wisdom when he says, “One only sees correctly with the heart.” In this light, Scrooge certainly was blinded with a chronic heart disease.
Yes, many may say that it’s simply human nature to act, at least in part, like the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge. And like Ebenezer Scrooge, it’s also the destiny of each human being to wake up to the greater truth of who they are through love and compassion. Truly our greatest task in life is to heal our own hearts and learn to live compassionately as we travel on life’s journey of self-discovery.
I call my Yoga Nidra program Waking Up with the Yoga of Sleep because it helps people to do just that, to wake up from the illusion of separateness and wake up to the truth that we are compassionate at our core, and that somehow despite our apparent separateness, we exist as One large organism.
Each of life’s experiences is a cairn along our journey of self-realization. In A Christmas Carol, ghosts appeared like cairns along Ebenezer’s journey to help wake him (rather rudely) to the truth of his compassionate being with a mission to care and share. Yoga Nidra functions much like the ghosts in the story and has the same power to help us gain massive clarity for our own purpose. Through much more gentle means than ghosts and graves, it interrupts our old, tired and limited ways of being and helps to wake us up with astounding clarity to what’s most essential in life. In fact, Yoga Nidra is so good at interrupting old patterns that it can even help to remap our brains to cure rutted, old, and tired ways of thinking and acting.
Yoga Nidra’s method is to first relax our body and mind so we can observe with more objectivity the objects in our life such as body, history, emotions, etc., then learn to see those objects for what they are, the cairns that dot our personal pathway of self-discovery, that open us to love. Yoga Nidra often leaves practitioners feeling just as joyful and reborn as Ebenezer dancing around on Christmas Day.
Sleep, A Massive Shift In Mind State
Because Ebenezer’s habits of selfishness were so engrained, because he was so set in his ways of greed, he required a dramatic and massive mental shift to rewire his mind and heart. Far from taking any substance to alter his mental state, the secret passageway that led Ebenezer to his great awakening was found in the relatively ordinary realm between waking and dreaming, known in yoga as the Nidra state.
Whether intentional or not, being in this mental state was indispensable for Scrooge’s awakening because where else but in a dream state could he escape the limited and flawed realm of his rational, waking consciousness to experience the catalysts for his awakening such as seeing spirits, flying between past, present, and future, and experiencing his own death? It was only in his altered state, his Nidra state, that Ebenezer found the truth that what matters most in this world is love and service to one another, and that we are all each other’s most important business.
If Scrooge’s waking consciousness was trapping him in the illusion of separateness and selfishness, then being in his dream state actually woke him up to a greater reality about himself, his purpose, and humankind. Truly the line is blurred between which state is the dream and which is reality.
States and Stages of Consciousness
My Yoga Nidra program provides a simple, effective, and relaxing method to momentarily change a person’s mind state through small, regular doses of systematized relaxation and layered awareness. As a person practices regularly, the compounded effect of Yoga Nidra has the power to change not only the temporary experience of a person’s state of consciousness from stressed to calm, confused to clarity, but also their overall stage of consciousness, a quality of deeper and complete awareness and understanding about themselves and the world that does not regress.
With Scrooge as a model of this truth, I firmly believe that to save ourselves and our planet both as individuals and collectively we must fundamentally change our state of mind then stage of consciousness. We must learn to see beyond our flawed, reactive, and selfish thinking. We must learn to somehow break the bonds of the habitual. We must learn to see the core of our own goodness and then learn to see it in others, that compassion is our true human nature. We must learn to wake up to the beauty of the world and the miracle of every moment. Then we must learn to respond compassionately to the wild ride that is our life.
As a person comes to know themselves much deeper through this process of Yoga Nidra, they no longer identify as the limited parts of being such as their history, body, thoughts, or emotions. They experience themselves instead as Awareness itself, trying on each of these limited parts of being like a costume—a pointer to Awareness—to come to know and illuminate what they truly are Awareness itself, Source, which expresses itself as unbounded compassion.
Yoga Nidra isn’t about escaping the woes and challenges of everyday life. Just like Ebenezer Scrooge, it’s about discovering who we truly are and then bravely living the beautiful life that was meant for us to live, with all of its problems and difficulties. It’s about living our messy lives with perspective. And by regularly changing our mental state of consciousness through gentle and rejuvenating means of deepened relaxation and awareness, we gradually uplevel our stage of consciousness for lasting personal and global change.
Compassion At Our Core
As a person comes to know themselves deeper and discovers their innate compassion within, and since life’s purpose is to illuminate this truth through its vicissitudes, as people gain greater Awareness, they tend to live their life more compassionately. Like the old Ebenezer, they give up being reactive, selfish, and fearful, and instead choose to respond compassionately to life’s circumstances, like the new Ebenezer.
A New Life
Having gone through his dark night of the soul, having had his life flash before his eyes, having merged past, present and future, and even experienced his own death, Ebenezer Scrooge woke up resurrected as a new person on Christmas day to his more enlightened Christ Nature. The story of Christ is one of God incarnate, living a selfless, human life, teaching, dying, and then becoming resurrected as an even more perfect being. His greatest and enduring teaching was to simply love and serve one another. Ebenezer Scrooge emerged from his old life as the living embodiment of Christ’s teachings and it’s fitting that Ebenezer was reborn or resurrected into his Christ Nature on Christmas day. To awaken is to fully realize the teaching from this master or those of any other enlightened master and Ebenezer’s experience is as pure of an awakening or enlightenment as could ever be hoped for, no matter the religion, contemplative, or spiritual tradition.
In Yoga Nidra we get to have the same experience as Ebenezer Scrooge. Each time we practice Yoga Nidra, we lie down in savasana, or corpse pose. Effectively, we practice dying and moving into the realm beyond for instruction and alignment—even if that comes in the form of a solid nap. Remember that even if you sleep in Yoga Nidra, the part of you that never sleeps is nonetheless paying attention. It doesn’t need to appeal to our waking or rational mind to be beneficial. After all, our rational mind, the part of ourselves that identifies itself with the need to make sense of everything, is a useful part of our being but still is not our “true” being. It’s still part of the illusion.
Each time we rise from a Yoga Nidra experience, we’ve allowed some modicum of our past selves to pass away and have updated our spiritual operating system to slowly but continually work out any glitches of flawed programming. In time, our old operating systems will be completely incompatible with our new way of being. By regularly practicing Awareness practices like Yoga Nidra, we soon begin to witness and participate in the continual spiral of our conscious evolution.
Truly, with Yoga Nidra we are napping our way to enlightenment!
Curtain Drops
In summary, A Christmas Carol is a heart-warming tale that reminds us that love is our purpose. It gives a fun illustration of what it looks like to wake up to the truth that we are compassion at our core. It offers a provocative but real solution of waking from the illusion of individualism to the truth of togetherness by changing our mind state as we progress, upleveling our stage of consciousness. It shows us that we may all be reborn through the process of discovering who we truly are and understand our purpose to simply love and serve each other.
It’s no surprise that this cheery tale of self-discovery shares many elements of other self-discovery practices, specifically Yoga Nidra, a gentle practice of awakening that we can practice all year long.
Whether or not you celebrate Christmas it’s my prayer that stories like A Christmas Carol may remind us of our core being of compassion. May tales like this guide us to seek for our own awakening moments and to remember that Christ Nature, or the quality of any other model for our infinite being, exists within all of us.
Especially in this time of year when we are all so busy, may we all remember that our greatest business is to care for, look after, and love one another.
Namaste, and may God bless us, everyone!
