Tag Archives: anxiety

The Role of Fear in Yoga

You are being challenged by our environment to adapt. You are being asked to grow your sixth sense– your intuition. But, when you try to listen to your intuition, you notice that you are being bombarded with messages from an overly anxious friend– your mind.

Most of these messages are junk, repetitive cautions. So, how do you know what is just habitual mental noise and what is intuition? You have to start challenging the noise.

When you begin carefully examining your mental noise, you notice that most of the noise is just the mind’s way of protecting you from either real, potential, or least likely dangers.

The real and potential may be valid. It is the least likely that you must challenge. Because, as you challenge the least likely messages, they lose their power. The mind simply (albeit slowly) learns that these messages are pointless, so it stops producing them.

As with any case, when the noise lessens, the silence heightens. In that silence, you begin discerning intuition from mind. Hence, becoming silent enough to listen is key.

This is what we are doing in yoga through meditation. You are intuition, your mind is, well…the mind. As you practice watching the mind, you are separating yourself from the mind. How? By not responding to everything it says.

You are allowing the mind to speak, but you are not doing as it commands (unless it’s cautioning about real danger in the moment). Instead, you are just watching.

As soon as you do as it says, you become one again. The more you let it speak without reacting, the more you become aware of your separation from your mind. Your ability to act autonomously from the mind increases.

So far, you had done what the mind had said to do. Now, you are doing different from the mind’s command. You are separating the servant (yourself) from the old master (mind). You become aware of yourself as the new master and the mind as your servant.

You Believe Only What You Already Believe, but You Can Be Smarter Than That

When we watch a program or read something, we are empathetic to it. So we empathize with the narrator. That is how we enjoy a program or book. If we can’t relate, we won’t be pulled in: WE WON’T BELIEVE. The brains behind the media know this. It’s how they get you to buy shit you don’t need. According to them, the empaths are called “the persuadables.” We’ve all had some friends who take advantage of this too. Empathy is a great evolutionary stepping stone, but in the Information Age it’s very vulnerable to exploitation.

What is empathy? We imagine being in another’s shoes and feel another’s pain. We visualize the story. We create an experience within ourselves. On a subconscious level, we think it happened to us. Even though we’ve never actually experienced it. We make beliefs out of it. Even though we never experienced it ourselves. We become more susceptible to believe more information that aligns with the same belief that was fed to us. We believe according to our beliefs.

When we realize the power of our beliefs, it becomes apparent how easy it is for us to fool ourselves. One path from this knowledge about ourselves is to create more beliefs out of our beliefs. As someone said, you must believe it to see it. This is in a very twisted way, correct. We will see according to our beliefs. However, blindly drowning out beliefs with more beliefs, in my opinion, is just creating a lot of noise with no voice. Clarity is key. Instead of continuing to be fooled and swayed by ourselves/others, I think it’s much better to find a way out of the mess.

The most efficient way out of a maze is to rise above it. There are many ancient practices for this. I’ll share them in a future post. Becoming aware of the problem is the first step towards a solution. These are a couple things that  you can do in your daily life to become aware. 

  • Instead of fooling yourself by believing everything you think, cross-examine the crap out of it and still leave room for being wrong. 
  • Watch or read (or listen to a friend in misery) without getting pulled into it. Notice how you can feel emotions for things that aren’t even happening to you.

You’ve got to get to a point where you can watch your mind work your body so that you can rise above it. Conquer your mind and you’ll conquer the world, as you see it!

There is an Answer Waiting For You

You can kill yourself but that’s gonna happen one day anyways. Today you have the choice to see what happens if you live. Today you have the choice to see what happens if you trust life. Today you have the choice to stop judging yourself. Today you have the choice to get curious about life. Today you have the choice to explore life from a different angle. You don’t have to follow the crowd. You don’t need anyone’s acceptance of you to live as you are. Today you have the choice to go beyond the fear of not being like others. Forget what you’ve been told, and get to know who you truly are. Forget what they’ve told you, and get busy exploring why you are truly here. There is an answer waiting for you in your heart.