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| AHYMSIN NEWSLETTER, ISSUE - February 2021 | ||||||||
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Dear Yoga Mentor, My Question Is…Sometimes students have written to or asked Swami Veda Bharati, Swami Ritavan Bharati, and other senior teachers in our tradition questions about practice. This is one such “Question and Answer,” or Q&A. Question:I am stuck with my thoughts. Please help me. Answer:Stephen Parker (Stoma) and Michael Smith have responded to this question. From Stephen Parker (Stoma): The thinking mind will always have thoughts. So peace is never a matter of trying to stop the thoughts of your mind. But thoughts are something you have; they are not who you are. You can just watch them and then gradually develop the choice not to watch them. Fortunately the mind has an inborn drive to cleanse itself. So when one sits for meditation, all the thoughts you have pushed aside come rushing forward. One approach is just to wait it out. Often you will find that, after a while, the mind quiets down. In terms of neuroscience, when you activate mindful awareness by attending to the sensation of breath in the nostrils, you also activate the medial pre-frontal cortex, the part of the brain that integrates everything. At the same time, the Default Mode Network, a network of neural structures that contains all your habits and conditionings, including the critical voice in which your mind comments continually on your experience, goes dark. This part is essentially “your brain on autopilot.” When you practice mindful awareness you have the choice not to attend to the noise and the volume of the noise goes way down. So the peace of silence is not an absence but a fullness of presence. From Michael Smith: You are not alone. Everyone needs peace and everybody has disturbing thoughts. I came to Swami Rama once and was crying. I said to him, “I can’t stop my mind.” He smiled said, “Don’t worry. That is nothing.” And he gave me Gayatri mantra. (All the quotations below are from The Art of Joyful Living (1989) by Swami Rama) Our mind is going to continue to produce thoughts – from our sense impressions, from our memories, and from the collective turmoil in the world. That is what our mind does. “The whole secret of learning is not to fight with yourself, but to allow yourself to know.” (p. 115) In Yoga-sutra I.2 – Yogaśh chitta vṛtti nirodhaḥ – “nirodhaḥ” means control. “Control does not mean suppression, but channeling or regulating.” (p. 10) Be grateful for your keen observation. A shift has taken place: you as the witness! The awareness of your thoughts is a blessing because it puts you outside your thinking process. “Let everything come before you for a decision — just watch.” “Do not allow yourself to suppress them by reacting. ‘Oh, what I am thinking! I should not think like that!’ That is not helpful: instead, let the thought come before you and become a sort of observer. Start observing your own mind.” “Why should a thought that merely comes and goes disturb your life?” “If these thoughts are not fulfilled, they lose their power and die. This is the practice of self-psychiatry.” “If one particular thought comes and goes, again and again, and you do not take any action, then it will eventually not continue to come back, because you are not paying it any interest.” “In my practice, when all the thoughts have gone through the mind, then I sit down and start to remember my mantra.” (pp. 120-125) When you are aware of your thoughts, you are free of them, and that awareness is itself a meditation. You also have four powerful tools to REPLACE random thoughts:
Continue to calmly watch . . . and gradually the duration of your thoughts will shorten, thoughts will come less frequently, and their intensity will diminish. In that stillness, miraculous things can happen! Editor’s Note:If you have a question about spiritual practice, you can use the "Contact the Spiritual Committee" link on the AHYMSIN website to ask it. Previous columns can be read at “Dear Yoga Mentor, My Question Is…” |
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