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.
