Yoking Union in the Real World
Why choose this solopreneurship life? Few self-reflective musings.
I was introduced to Yoga when I joined a summer camp in Ramakrishna Mutt at the age of 10. One day, there was a screening of a movie on the life of Swami Vivekananda. After the screening, I went straight to the admin office to enquire about the process to join the mutt as a monk.
Swami Gautamananda, who headed the mutt back then, gave me a bemused look that deflated the seriousness of my intent. Perhaps, to be nice to a 10-year-old, he asked me to approach this topic with my parents first, and when they were ready, I could perhaps come back again. His smile was perhaps an intuition that I would never come back.
This desire resurfaced during my 20s when I decided to be a meditation teacher under a popular spiritual guru. For reasons that barely made sense, this didn't happen, despite my efforts.
Truth be told, for the first two and half decades of my life, I've run behind several gurus, and sooner than later, ran away from them, when I realized that my quest was something else.
Today, as I reflect on my yoga journey, learning Yoga and dharma under Ritamabhara sangha, a community to practice Yoga in everyday life, I realize how much more I've come to cherish the role of a householder in pursuing Yoga as a way of life, beyond binaries of work and life, materiality and spirituality, journey and destination.
On September 3rd, 2019, I wrote my resignation letter to my boss, quitting my full-time job as a product manager in an agritech startup. Quitting my full-time job was the first step of the realization that I could no longer afford to be ‘Homo Economicus’.
After an intense search for more than eight years ever since I became obsessed with questions of meaning and freedom, the portal was finally opening up for me to discover what it really meant to live the hypothesis of a solopreneurship life that sought to embody ‘Homo Dharmicus’.
Why did I choose this solopreneurship life? Solopreneurship gives me the perfect conditions of the real world to practice Yoga and discover Dharma in the truest sense of the word.
Everything I do in these solopreneurship experiments, uncannily enough, is an extension of who I am, practicing and applying Yoga in messy, real-life contexts, discovering the elusive yet essential union that sucks out, in Thoreau's eternal words, all the marrow of life.
Why am I fundamentally wired to
1) bridge culture and agriculture as an expression of the philosophy underpinning my solopreneurship work.
2) bridge nascent agritech and ancient agriculture in the 'agritech analyst' hat I wear at Agribusiness Matters, striving to discover systems thinking in food and agriculture in an age of runaway Climate Change.
3) bridge the Greek of agritech and the Latin of development in my consulting work with agritech startups, agribusinesses, and development organisations who genuinely have the deep intent to do something good for farmers, themselves, and the planet simultaneously?
What is dharma? To put it simply, any action that enlivens me, the other, and the context simultaneously.
4) bridge the possibilities of agritech with the hard realities of food and agriculture systems worldwide, chugging along with a broken system that neither benefits farmers growing food on a warming planet nor customers eating unhealthy food.
5) bridge the possibilities of agritech with the hard realities of food and agriculture systems worldwide, chugging along with a broken system that neither benefits farmers growing food on a warming planet nor customers eating unhealthy food.
Because this bridge is...who I am when I strive to practice Yoga.
“Homo Dharmicus” - I like this term to describe the quest. I might end up using it!