When you don't need it...

You let it go, of course. It's 1:45am and I feel like I'm nowhere near sleep. Thinking too much and feeling too much. Naturally, I need to process everything that I'm feeling, taking it all in and then compartmentalizing it so I know how to separate my Self from the self that suffers from mind pollution. The yogic term for this is viveka, which means discrimination. It means knowing when to pause and actually look at an emotion, an action, or a situation from all angles. Perspective. Spaciousness.

We deal with attachment all the time--to everything that we can possibly be attached to. We know it well. Attachment gone out of whack turns into a kind of addiction to most anything: a feeling, a memory, a person, an object. This attachment, whether you know it or not, begins to run the show of your life. You know, the life you want to enjoy and find happiness in. This attachment is married to every fear and doubt that you have come into this world with and every fear and doubt that you have come to experience --samskaras: thoughts and impressions embedded in all of your layers of consciousness. 

What do you do when you know a samskara has been running your show for as long as you can remember? Just shows up in different costumes, but makes you feel that same ball and chain of every limiting feeling you could think of. You can be aware, and not know what to do. You can be aware and recognize that you have tools to fend off those limiting beliefs about who you are and where your life is going. Then comes the real task, the practice, the tapas--where you are in a constant state of observing yourself. So much that you can catch yourself on the precipice of Self-denial and Truth. Catch yourself in that moment and talk yourself down from the figurative ledge and say to yourself, Nah, I'm not gonna go down that road right now...I don't need this. That's literally the practice. Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. It never stops. And the nature of the mind is to be in that constant state of flux. 

A change in orientation is needed. Maybe it's just breathing into the lower back ribs, the collarbones, the sides of the neck, softening the knots in the abdomen--wherever the body is responding with tension. There's a beautiful quote from The Bhagavad Gita that says, "What you are unwilling to feel remains as tension, becomes gnawing, grows into addiction. Restore the capacity to feel fully, to allow the experience without flinching, and the addiction, the gnawing, the tension dissolve." This is a conversation between teacher and student, who are really one in the same since all are born with truth and bliss at their very core. What it comes down to is when we're suffering, we have a choice. We can let it run our lives or we can actually work to remedy the situation piece by piece. Dismantling the walls built over our own hearts, revealing more and more brightness every day. And that brightness, my Friends, is what lights up the world.

Om shanti shanti shanti