The Misleading Mind

We may not have the power to change our situations, but we certainly have the freedom to change how we define them. It is our language and consequent emotional states that reinforce fear and self-hatred and make them stronger. The words we use rob us of our own strength and give it to the two dragons.
The first mistake that we make over and over again is to accept whatever the mind tells us as the “truth” instead of calmly evaluating the usefulness of our mind chatter. The sensory mind was never designed to tell us truth, but to provide us with a perspective, a consistent way to interpret our perceptions. Its function is to collect and present sensory data, all of which are organized by the unconscious habits that control our perceiving and thinking. Our unconscious emotional habits can create many disturbing and unproductive lines of thought that have little to do with reality. Our emotions aren’t the only source of misleading information. The mind can offer us completely arbitrary thought, images, and sensations.

Let’s try an exercise:

THE GREEN FROG EXERCISE

Sit-back, close your eyes, and relax. Focus on an even, smooth breath and clear your mind as best as you can. Let your face muscle relax, and follow that relaxation down to your toes, relaxing the whole body. Now imagine yourself as a great green bullfrog, sitting on a lily pad in the middle of a beautiful, small clear pond. Over to the side you can see red-winged blackbird building a nest. Picture a blue sky with puffy white clouds. It’s about ten o’clock in the morning of a beautiful October day. The sun is shining and you feel the heat of the sun on your back. The sunshine feels very warm on your back. Now jump off the pad into the water. Glook! Ahh, the water fells cool and nice on your warm skin. Swim down under the lily pad. You see the stem coming up from the bottom, attached to the lily pad. As you look up to the surface of the water, you see the sunshine filtering through the water. Beautiful sight!
Now come to the surface, swim over to the lily pad, and climb back on. Feel the pad moving underneath you as you climb on. Now the sun feels really good on cool wet skin. Life is wonderful!
Now open your eyes. Do you really believe that you are a large, green bullfrog? If you do then you need more help than this single workshop can give you. Most of us distinguish easily between our imagination and what is real…or do we? These imaginations are all nothing more than mind forms. You determine which ones you will believe and accept, and which you won’t.
You may not be able to stop your mind from telling you things, but no one says you have to believe them! You don’t have to accept everything that the mind chatter says. You probably have some particularly troublesome thought that keeps gnawing at you. You may not feel smart enough, or you may feel that what you accomplish is second rate, or worry that someone will find out just how incompetent you really are.
The same thought pop into our mind day after day and we keep proving ourselves that this is not true. But then very next day the thought is back. Every time we have to prove ourselves, we reinforce the underlying negative thought by paying attention to it. This is the second mistake: trying to use language to control the consequences of language.

THE LIMITS OF POSITIVE THINKING

The sensory mind builds on opposites. In other words, there must be a “right” to have “left” and “good to have “bad.” If we think positively, then somewhere in the mind we have negative thinking. As long as we deal with opposites, we cannot eliminate just one side of them. When we stand in front of a mirror, smile, and say. “Today is going to be a wonderful day in every way,” just guess, what the mind is saying on an unconscious level? Probably something very much like “Wanna bet?” or “Yesterday sure was lousy.”
When we deal only with positive statement, that means we are forcing our negative feelings into the unconscious mind. In fact, the very motivation to think positively comes from a negative condition. Why would you need to think positively unless you had already created a negative state? If you didn’t create any negative feelings about yourself, you wouldn’t have to think positively. Your mind would be free to focus on problem solving. No matter how many times you repeat positive affirmations, they only subtly reinforce the negative, and you never gain freedom.
As we shall see later on, we can access the deeper levels of the mind and neutralize the power of our emotional and language habits when we eliminate the need to be positive, we will find that we already are.

Until now we have been trying to know about Self-knowledge, which is only the first necessary step. Knowledge has power, but without skill, we have nothing. We know where the power lies within the different dimensions of the personality, but unless we know how to use that power, unless we become skilled human beings, nothing happens.

Self Mastery and the Whole Person

We cannot separate ourselves into parts. We come as a complete package. Any action we take involves all dimensions of the personality – physical, mental, and spiritual. Let’s go back to the Travelling Exercise we did earlier and do it again. This time, be aware of the different power functions at each level. Don’t try to change them, or use them I any particular way. Just pay attention and become more familiar with how they operate within your personality.
As you go through the exercise and become more relaxed and focused, feeling of loneliness, anxiety, or self-criticism will disappear. This is because we are most natural when we are relaxed and focused. We were not born fearful, self-critical and lonely. These are products of mind, not innate functions. These dragons are hidden in our habits and strike at the most inconvenient times. In confronting our dragons, we will see how to take their power away, and use it to create harmony, joy, and love in our lives.



OUR HUMAN MIND HOME OF DRAGONS

Mark Twain said, “I am an old man with many troubles. Most of which never happened.” Most of the time the things we worry about never take place. But even knowing that doesn’t stop us from worrying and creating problems for ourselves. Even when our past experience tells us that everything will eventually work out, we spin our wheel, stress our bodies, and become irritable with our friends and family. All for very little reason.
But while you were worrying, it didn’t seem that it was inappropriate. It seemed that like all the hell was going to break loose. Who was telling you to be frightened? Who was telling you that you wouldn’t be able to handle it?



The Chattering Mind (Ashant Mann)

Pay attention to what is happening inside your head at this moment. Notice you are constantly talking to yourself. We give this mental activity a very generous name, “thinking.” But actually most of what goes inside our head is not thoughtful at all, just on idea setting off another, one image leading to other. Mind chatter can be thoughtful, creative and productive. But left unmanaged, it can be endless source of unhappiness, stress and disease.
In fact the first thing you will notice about the mind that it can move in time and space. Your mind can take you anyplace, anytime and in any situation. But the brain and our body stays in present. The brain does not discriminate between thoughts or images of the past, the present and the future. To brain every thought happens in present. To the brain, every thought, every image, is as real as the next one. So every thought is immediately translated into biochemical and neurological events so that the body can respond. When your mind anticipates the future or dwells on the past, your body responds as if the event were happening in the present. Mind and body are no longer coordinated, creating a state of imbalance. This lack of coordination is insignificant if our thoughts are emotionally neutral. If say at this very moment your mind drift and you think about the milk you have to buy before going to home. The moment you have this thought, your body gets programmed to do the task. If you were hooked to sensitive medical instruments, like an EEG (electroencephalograph) to read brain waves, an EKG (electrocardiograph) to measure heart rate, and a GSR (galvanic skin response) detector (such as a lie detector), we would be able to measure subtle changes in your body as it responds to the thought.
Since you were not emotionally involved with the particular thought, you invest little energy in that programming. The changes in your body are subtle. But if the thought would have been, say about losing your job or being in an accident, the emotional energy associated with these thought would dramatically increase and set off an alarm reaction inside your body. When we worry, we constantly create this imbalance between our mind and body. Much of this mental activity is useless – consisting of endless speculations on future events and reconstruction of past events. When we constantly program ourselves with fear and negativity, our bodies have no choice but to respond with tension and stress.
Take a moment to become aware of your chatter. Don’t get involved with it, just be a witness and watch the different thoughts, images, and sensations that arise in your mind. Now let us try this short exercise;

1) Close your eyes and visualize your mind like a room, with thoughts and images coming in one door, passing through the room, and going out the other door. Notice how one thought leads to another in a seemingly endless progressive of thoughts, images, and sensations. As you do this, be aware of how your body feels.
2) Close the door the thoughts are going out, and let the thoughts pile up in one the room for a few moments. Then pay attention to your body. What differences do you notice?
3) Now open the door and let the thought clear from the room. How does your body react as the thoughts depart the room?
4) Then close both doors, and picture an empty room. What do you notice in your body?

Which was most comfortable: watching the thoughts pass through, letting the thoughts pile up, or having just the image of the empty room? How did it feel when you let the thought pile up in the room? Isn’t that very similar to how you feel on a busy, rushed day?


Each and every thought has some direct impact on the body. That is where the dragons live – the uncontrolled thoughts and images of the sensory mind.

Fear: the most dramatic of the dragons is fear. It colors our perceptions, distort our thinking, and destroy us as individuals as well as our families and neighborhood, even our nation. We are not born with fear. We are born with a primitive biological drive for self-preservation. But this biological drive has expanded to include more than just our physical being, it also includes our ego-self, i.e. “mein.”
Many of us have experienced the difference between fear and self-preservation.
Have you ever had a close call in your automobile or faced some other danger or crises. If you recall the instance clearly, you would remember that things began to happen in slow motion. You were relaxed, clear minded, and focused and had time to take small action to protect yourself. It’s not unusual that during a crisis you will act with self-preservation. Then once the crisis is over, all of sudden you feel weak, your heart races, and you become fearful as you realize what might have happened. There was no experience of fear until your mind began to chatter about what might have happened.
We create fear when we speculate about future. We never fear from what is happening, we only fear or worry about what might happen. Fear is a projection of “what if.” We are dealing with a fantasy, an expectation of some future event, not an event that is happening at the moment. The mind perceives possible future harm; the body acts as if it is happening now; and Jhuu Mantar, we have fear reaction.
Fear always involves the ego, our personal sense of identity, which expands to include the people and things with which we are emotionally identified. Instead of simply having a problem to solve, we have a problem that potentially will harm “me.” Listen to and compare the language of someone who worries about a certain event and someone who faces the same event with confidence. Along with pessimistic references to the future, the worrier will also have a number of self-references, all reflecting some kind of pending tragedy or harm that he will suffer. The individual with confidence will speak about the problem that must be solved, and probably already planning some action. His ego is not on the line in any negative way.
We train ourselves to fail by the worries and fear we imagine. The greater the imagined threat, the more energy goes into the imbalance between mind and body, and more diseased we become. Fear has no value other than to create stress, misery and cloud our intellect.

Self-hatred: It isn’t difficult to create a chronic pattern of failure and misery. All you have to do is constantly remind yourself of how awful, weak, or incompetent you are, and brood on your past mistakes, hurts and failures. Just as unmanaged chatter about future creates fear, unmanaged chatter about the past crates self-hatred. But instead of fight-or flight reaction, your body becomes passive and goes into retreat. Again you lose touch with the present, and cannot deal with it effectively and joyfully. The consequences are that you become withdrawn, weaken the immune system, make more mistakes, and feel even more incompetent.

The language of self-hatred is just as destructive as the language of fear, and much varied. In The Quite Mind, Dr. John Harvey identifies several different categories of destructive inner chatter that feed the dragon of self-hatred.

THE FIRST DIMENSION: OUR PHYSICAL BODY

Our health and wellness depend a great deal on how skillfully we care for our body. The relationship between the body and our happiness is simple and direct: when you aren’t healthy you don’t enjoy life and you don’t function well. The body is an extremely sensitive barometer to both the mind and the world around us.
The more sensitive we are to the body’s messages, the easier it is for us to stay healthy. The body always lets us know when we are out of balance. For example, high blood pressure is most often a clear signal that we are not handling pressure well. If we don’t know that we have high blood pressure it can lead to a disaster, such as stroke or heart attack. Once aware of the problem we can easily take steps – deep relaxation, proper breathing, the right kind of exercise, greater emotional control – to correct it.
When we ignore the signs or symptoms of our bodies – or worse, eliminate the symptoms without dealing with the cause – we only create a bigger problem. Taking pain medication for a tension headache relieves the symptoms, but it doesn’t change the underlying cause, the chronic tension in our muscle. As a consequence, we end up taking the pills over and over again because we didn’t solve the real problem of chronic tension.
The main control of our body is our brain and the nervous system. There are two types of nervous system, voluntary nervous system (sensori-motor nervous system), which controls our sense organs and our muscles. The other is called the autonomic nervous system and regulates our internal organ systems, such as cardiovascular functioning and digestion.

The Balancing Act
The autonomic nervous system is made up of two distinct nervous systems called the sympathetic and parasympathetic. Together these two systems regulate the activities of our organs. The sympathetic system creates arousal in the body, while parasympathetic does just the opposite. When we are healthy, these two systems work together like right and left-hand work together to accomplish a task. They balance each other, exchanging dominance as the need requires, and maintaining equilibrium as dominance shifts.

THE SECOND DIMENSION: ENERGY – THE MISSING LINK

When we touch these pages (or whatever), they feel substantial, thing that you can touch and see, even smell, hear and taste. That’s because you are using your body senses. From physics, we know that what appears to our senses as a solid object is really not solid At all, but a complex patterning of atomic and subatomic energy particles. If we put this page under an electron microscope, we would find nothing solid, only pattern of energy. The body is no different from any other physical object. If we could look at our body beneath an electron microscope, we would find only patterns of energy. This energy substructure is the foundation of our material reality, and forms the second dimension of our personality. Western science and medicine approach the body on the physical level, as if the only reality is biochemical. When you go to a doctor, she doesn’t talk about the energy, she prescribes medication to create a biochemical change. Even the physicist whose entire professional career involves studying energy forgets his knowledge when he is sick, and treats his body as if the chemical (physical) level were the only reality.
This life force has been the intense study of our Indian meditative and self-mastery disciplines as well as other eastern yogic traditions like Zen, Reiki and the martial arts. In spite all the differences these tradition universally understand energy to be the connecting link between body and mind. These energy channels are referred as “Nadis” in yogic tradition, as “Chi” in china and are known as “Ki” in Japanese tradition.
We get energy from variety of sources – food, sleep, sunlight. But the most important source of energy is our breath. We can go without food for weeks, without water for days, but we can live only a few moments without breathing. Because of its critical power function, our breathing has become so much a part of us that as long as we aren’t deprived, we pay little attention to it. We don’t realize that the way we breathe plays a critical role in self-mastery. Each tradition has an extensive repertoire of breathing exercises, which are used to develop a sophisticated control over the breathing process and, through these exercises, a high degree of control over what happens in the body.
Elmer green and his wife Alice green in their book “beyond Biofeedback” reported on laboratory research on Swami Rama, the yogic master. In different experiments, he
· Consciously and intentionally stopped his heart from pumping blood by creating arterial fibrillation in which his heart fluttered at 300 beats per minute;
· Lowered the temperature at one point on his hand by 5 degrees Fahrenheit while simultaneously raising the temperature by 5 degrees at another point on his hand only millimeters away;
· Voluntarily controlled the production of different brain waves;
· Was fully conscious of the surrounding while sleeping as was evident by the steady stream of delta brain-wave rhythms.
Whether or not we learn the remarkable control of this great Yoga Master is not the point. The critical issue is whether or not we learn how to use our breathing to gain greater self-mastery. While may not reach the degree of skill demonstrated by a yoga master, we can certainly learn to use the subtle energy dimension to maintain physical and mental balance regardless of the situation in which we find ourselves. Unfortunately, most of us have a habit of breathing that causes more work for our heart, leads to chronic stress, and often causes hypertension.

THE THIRD DIMENSION: THE SENSORY MIND

Don’t confuse the mind with the brain. The brain is the physical organ, part of the body, which serves as the control room for the mind. Brain changes the subtle energy of the mind into biochemical and neurological events that move the body. Of course the quality of the mind’s expression is greatly influenced by the condition of the brain. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated your software program is – if the circuits are damaged that program will not run properly.
We call the third dimension of the personality the sensory mind because it collects, organizes, and interprets sensory data. The sensory mind is a busy, noisy place filled with sensory stimulation, emotions, wants and desires, habits and feelings. Its primary job is to interpret the world around us, and to create a personal sense of reality, the context through which we view the world. The sensory mind makes meaningful patterns from sensory input. It does this through four power functions:

1. Perception –
Two people sitting I the same room, having the same experience, will see and interpret that experience in highly individual ways, and will not always agree as to what really happened. A favorite story of mine:

In the clubhouse, three umpires were discussing the pending World Series game. The youngest, proud of being selected to participate in the World Series, bragged to his colleagues: “ I never worry about mistakes. I call them as I see them.”
The other two umpires started laughing, and the middle-aged umpire retorted: “ Well, you are still a little wet behind your ears. I call them as they are!”
The old umpire smiled and looked out the window.
“What are you smiling at?” the middle aged umpire finally asked his elder.
“Well,” said the old wise one. “It seems as if there are two here who are still little wet behind the ears. They are what I call them.

A particular event in our life can be good or bad, exiting or dull, awful or wonderful. We don’t actually describe the actual event but what that event means to us.

2. Language –
Language is the tool we use to create meaning. Once we use language, we are stuck with the consequences of our interpretations. Much of the unhappiness that we create for ourselves happens because we don’t realize the impact that our language has, nor do we know how to use language as a tool to help ourselves.

3. Emotions –
The interpretations we make determine our emotional reaction. In turn, our emotional reactions distort our perceptions, interfere with thinking, lead to conflicts and create disease. Many of feel victims of our emotions and yet we alone create them. We need emotional energy to succeed in life. Our emotions stimulate, challenge and motivate us to accomplish what we want. But all this depends where we channel our emotions.


4. Habits –
Whether we use our emotions to help or to hurt ourselves depends a great deal on our habits, the fourth function of sensory mind. Habits are the most deep-rooted and pervasive functions of the mind. We express our entire personalities through habits. It’s easy to see the enormous impact habits have in your life. Try shifting a habit when you get dressed tomorrow morning. As you put on your slacks, stop, and put the other leg in first. Most people fall over as they alter this simple, almost meaningless pattern of behavior.
Habits dominate the three outer levels of the personality – sensory mind, energy, and the body. We have habits of driving, eating, walking, and talking. How we react, feel, whether or not keep our muscles tense, even how we think are all regulated by the power of habit. All our skills – typing, playing cricket, managing, building a fire – are determined and controlled by habit. The friends we choose, the work we do, and the clothes we wear are all controlled by habit. Of course there are other factors involved in behavior, such as the power function of the mind, genetics and the environment. But habits provide the structure of what we think, what we do, and how we react. Habits allow us to live skillfully and usefully. Habits can also kill us.
As we shall see later, habits are the power behind our skill. But we didn’t consciously choose most of our habit, and many of them are destructive because they feed the three dragons of the mind. However, if we know how to take control of the powerful function of the mind, we can build habits that help us create a healthy body and mind instead of chronic conditions of stress, unhappiness and disease.

The deeper we go into the personality, the greater the calm and quiet will be regardless of how stormy the sea of life becomes. The three deepest, most subtle levels of the personality are never disturbed no matter how intense the dragons become. If we can access the resources of these deeper levels, and use them skillfully, we maintain control of ourselves no matter what kind of crises we face.

THE FOURTH DIMENSION: DISCRIMATION AND POWER OF INNER WISDOM

Deep within every mind is the capacity to know the truth, to understand reality as it is. This capacity is known as the discriminating mind. Discrimination is the quite realization that, for all the promises and planning, the project you are working on is not going to get off the ground, or that illusive contract will be signed even though it appears unlikely now. This is the power of knowledge, our capacity to know the truth, to understand reality as it really is, not as we have learned to think it is.
The discriminating mind allows us to think things out, to analyze situations effectively, and to make choices. When we don’t use it, we act solely on habit. For instance if we go to a movie every Saturday night, we don’t really make decision, we act of habit. We use our discrimination only to pick the movie. However, if we make conscious decision about where to go – visit friends, go to relative’s place, or take in a movie – then we use our capacity for discrimination. It allows us to make decisions on the basis of information and reasoning rather from habit.
On the deeper level, discrimination provides us with intuition: insight into the real consequences of our actions. Our inner wisdom allows us to make the right kinds of choices, avoiding regret and guilt often created through hasty action. We have all had the experience of taking an action that we are convinced was right. But before we did it, a small, quiet voice inside said, “better not do that.” We pause for a moment, but reassure ourselves that haven’t all been planned and go ahead with the plan. Three days later everything fell apart, which led to the thought, “I knew I shouldn’t have done that.” And we did know. We just didn’t know how to listen to our discriminating mind.
This dimension of the mind is very subtle and quiet. When the sensory mind is noisy and active, it can easily bury the subtle voice of our wisdom. Distracted by our desires and fears, and locked into our habits, it becomes difficult to access and listen to that still, quiet, inner voice. The more disturbances we have, the more difficult it is to think things through, to discern the subtle cause/effect relationships in our choices and actions.
The key to wisdom lies in the ability to create a deeply calm and quiet mind through concentration. In the yogic tradition, as in other tradition of self-mastery, we first learn to bring balance and flexibility to the body, stabilize our energy systems, and calm the noisy sensory mind. Then the emphasize of the training begins to shift as we learn to develop our insight into the nature of things. Variety of techniques and approaches are used to develop the power of this pure intellect. As we become more aware of this power of discrimination, and more skilled in its use, we make better decisions and avoid many of the troubles that we would normally create for ourselves.

THE FIFTH DIMENSION: BALANCE AND CONFIDENCE

At the center of the mind lies the fifth and even more subtle dimension, the balance state. Here, the mind’s energy is in a state of pure harmony and balance, and not yet modified into patterns of thought and knowledge. In this condition of purity, it is beyond the influence of language, emotions, and habits, and totally unaffected by any external disturbances. At this level of the personality, we are at peace with ourselves and the world. This center of tranquillity is the source of genuine self-confidence. Much of the stress that we experience stems from fear and worry. In other words stress is often the result of failure of self-confidence. The less confident we are, the more we worry and berate ourselves. The more worry and failure we create, the less confident we feel and hence get caught up in this vicious circle negative reinforcement. And yet every human being is born with center of self-confidence that lies unaffected by failures and disaster. However, distracted by the noisy sensory mind, we often don’t recognize it, nor do we learn how to tap this enormous resource.
We all have this experience of pure confidence from time to time. Sometime when you are alone, taking a walk. All of a sudden, you felt as “God’s with you – all’s right with the world,’ an overwhelming experience of contentment. The experience is for short time, but for that time you were completely free of any worry and self-doubt. You felt absolutely wonderful and content. This didn’t happened because you won a lottery, or taking some drug. In fact world was same with all the same problems to resolve. The magic was all you. You did it by relaxing, quieting the noisy chatter in your mind, and allowing your mind to focus inwardly. You became conscious of your own calm center, which was always there. What if you could access this strength anytime you needed it? How would the ability effect your stress level and performance?

THE SIXTH DIMENSION: THE SPIRITUAL CENTER 0F CONTROL

The human mind and body are complex instrument with great many resources. But there is a spiritual core beyond the mind and body that we must acknowledge, experience, and learn to use. The mind/body complex has tremendous resources, but the final power lies in Self, the spiritual force which uses the personality as a tool. Depending upon your perspective and belief you may call it the soul, higher power, or center of consciousness. We in this program will mention as the spiritual self. Unless we access and experience this indomitable spiritual core, we cannot gain our final freedom from the dragons of the mind or achieve self-mastery.
When we act in ways that are counter to our own human spirit, we create the most subtle and pervasive kind of suffering. We seldom recognize the price we pay when our actions are inconsistent with our values and beliefs. This inconsistency affects not only the relationship we have with ourselves, but also with others. Our inner strength depends on personal integrity, the ability to be consistent with our own values. When we stand up for what we believe, not only do we strengthen the will, but we also experience self-respect and inner strength. On the other hand, if we act in ways inconsistent with our own humanity and beliefs, we create inconsistencies in the mind that lead to feelings of guilt and weakness.
We all have experiences that allow us to touch this spiritual core in some small way. For some, it happens when they have close brush with death, often referred as “ near death experience,” and have actually experienced dying and being brought back to life. For others, it happens during a religious retreat after long days of silence and prayer. Still others seem to have them by accident, not knowing what precipitated the experience. Probably the most known and famous incident is the experience gained by “Buddha.” When he saw the three stages of life and the never-ending circle of life with all kinds of suffering. After seeing which, Lord Buddha meditated under the Banyan tree. There he was able to gain what we call self-mastery, which lead to enlightenment.
Fortunately, the meditative traditions provide the systematic methodology where anyone who makes the effort can develop the capacity for this experience and the knowledge it brings. The yogic tradition is dedicated to the personal mastery of this spiritual core. Because it is the highest of our human experiences, there are no simple and quick exercises or techniques on the way to enlightenment. But as we gain in self-mastery, as we become more balanced, stronger, and achieve greater insight, we acquire the capacity to experience this powerful spiritual core.

SELF KNOWLEDGE

SELF-KNOWLEDGE

You don’t have to be a genius to develop your power as a human being. Anyone can learn to use all of their inner resources – physical, mental, and spiritual. But is this “Self”? The question has as many answers as there are people who ask it.
As human beings, we are complex organizations of physical events, energy, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and emotions, and something more that we will simply call for now the spirit. What others see in us, and how we see ourselves, is what we often refer to as the personality. But there is far more to us than meets the eye.
Enchanted with technology, we often think of ourselves as bio-computers, sophisticated biological machines. But machines are closed systems. We can take apart and put then back together again. If we don’t like the system we build, we change it around and create new system. But human beings are more than the physical parts of the body. While some scientist would have us believe that we are only the body, our experience tells us another story. We are living “open system.” We constantly interact with our environment, change it, and in turn are changed by it. We are not simply biochemical reactions, but living systems. We are sustained by a life force that cannot be flipped on and off. A computer “comes alive” when you plug it in and run an electric current through it. You can switch the computer, or any machine, on and off without doing any harm. It’s very difficult to do that with human being. Our life force is an essential part of who we are, and plays a vital function in our ability to live without stress. On still another level, we think, we feel, we dream – our rich mental and emotional life plays a crucial role in determining our health and well being.
When we act as of different elements of our lives are separate from one another, we lose our human power. For example, when a cardiologist treats high blood pressure with medication and ignores the role of diet, exercise, emotions, family and work life, he treats the patient as a machine. When we ignore our intuitive knowledge, deny our emotions, and rely solely on so called logic, we act as if we are machines. We must look to all aspects of our personality system if we want to achieve self-mastery. We come as a complete package. Any action we take involves all aspects of the personality. We do not take decisions without our memory playing a role, nor do we play hockey without our liver functioning. Just as teamwork makes a world-class team, it’s teamwork within the personality that makes a world-class human being.

THE SIX DIMENSIONS OF IDENTITY

We use concept of six dimensions in yogic tradition to define the relational structure of body, mind, and spirit. The outer five dimensions are like sheaths that fit over the core sixth dimension, the spiritual self. This spiritual self is the core identity while the other dimensions constitute the expressive vehicle, the instrument through which the spiritual core expresses itself in the world around us. These dimensions have unique functions but they cannot be separated from each other. We always function as a whole person and not as individual, mechanical pieces. Whenever we think, or talk, or act, all parts of our body, mind, and spirit are involved. By exploring these dimensions, we can see where our resources lie and how to use them to create magic.
We begin our journey with the physical dimension, the body, and then travel inwards through increasingly more subtle levels of energy that make up the life force and mind. We end with the sixth dimension of pure awareness, the spiritual self. Each succeeding dimension is more subtle and contains more powerful resources than the previous one. The more subtle the dimension, the greater the potential for personal power and freedom.

Mind and its Three Dragons:

To become skillful with our health, we must understand even more subtle dimensions of our being than the body. In yogic tradition body is considered to be the semi-solid extension of our mind. The condition of the body – can certainly effect the mind, but the real power of health and happiness, as well as for social and environmental health and well being, lies within the mind. When the mind is disturbed, that disturbance is reflected in our environment, in our social relationship, and in our bodies. To create a healthy body, a healthy environment, and a healthy culture, we must become masters of the subtle thoughts and emotions of our own minds.

There are three destructive conditions of the mind: fear, self-hatred, and loneliness. These dragons blur our creative force of mind and corrupt our resources, creating disease, unhappiness, and suffering. They seem to be very powerful and we tend to forget that we are their only source of power, and that we can take it away from them.

FEAR:

The most dramatic consequence of self-mastery is the ability to live without fear. Much of anger and resentment are rooted in fear. Greed often begins with the fear of not having enough or of not being important. Then when we have enough we become obsessed in protecting what we have. We want power to protect ourselves, and more powerful we become, the more we worry about someone else becoming more powerful. This is the fear that in worst of scenario leads to terrorism and all the expenditure we have to incur to win the arms race.
But on more personal front our fears are more dramatic, but not the less destructive. Some people spend their entire lives fearful that they will not meet someone else’s standards. Religion, government, and communities use fear to control others, and parents use fear to control their children.
We usually don’t like to think of ourselves as being fearful. We use softer words, such as “worried” and “anxious,” which seem a little more acceptable. Most of become so skilled at worrying that it becomes part of our lives. And yet the only thing we accomplish from worrying is misery for others and ourselves. Worry and fear aren’t created by lack of things; they are created by how we think. It is a useless habit of mind that is the biggest cause of disease and unhappiness. There are people who live without being afraid. They realize that fear is the fantasy of mind that grips and destroys. Getting over your fears is the basis of yogic tradition and even martial arts master of Japan, the samurai used to master their minds to overcome fear. The greater our self-mastery, the greater our ability to face situation without fear and to live our lives without worry.

SELF-HATRED:

At times it seems that we are the masters of creating misery. When we aren’t worrying about whether or not something awful going to happen to us, we remember all the hurts, mistakes, and failures in our past. After so many failures, mistakes, and broken dreams we begin to give up on ourselves and on life. Some of us become depressed, withdrawn and passive thinking whatever this world has to give they have to endure. Others, angry at themselves become angry at the world, taking out their own misery on others.
Attacking ourselves is only the habit of the mind, a consequence of the way we learned to see ourselves as we grew up. Like fear, the dragon of self-hatred feeds on our lack of self-awareness and skill. The secret is to stop feeding the dragon by experiencing your own inner strength and beauty. You can’t create self-esteem by constantly telling yourself that you are a wonderful person. Self-esteem and self-respect grow out of the experience of committed effort. Whether or not you succeed is not as important to your self-respect as when you know that you tried your best. And if you continue to make effort, if you continue to work with your resources, you will eventually succeed. Self-mastery arises out of effort. The only true sin is sloth, the unwillingness to make effort. Mistakes are the necessary part of learning, not reasons for punishment. But without effort, personal power remains undeveloped and unused, and the outcome is self-hatred.

LONELINESS:

It is most difficult to defeat in part because it hides in our misunderstanding of its nature. We think if we have friends and family, people around us who love and care for us, we will never be lonely. But it doesn’t work. As rewarding as friends and family are, they do not keep us from being lonely, they only distract us from our loneliness. We think loneliness involves our relationship with others, but it really involves our relationship with ourselves. It arises out of our sense of individuality. Our life experiences seem to confirm that we are truly alone.
Yet there are times when we experience a sense of wholeness, of completeness, of kinship with the universe at large. It may happen when we look up at the starry heavens, or the birth of child, or participate with others in working through a crisis situation. It doesn’t happen because we have expectations or make demands, we simply experience a strong sense of belonging to something greater than ourselves. At this moment, we lose our ego-sense of self, and experience being part of a greater identity, a greater “SELF,” and the loneliness vanishes. Unfortunately, these experiences are short lived and lost in day to day distractions. When we are genuinely loving, we also break free from our ego-sense of self. But we confuse “loving’ with “being loved.” Most of us engage in a desperate search for someone to love us, but we confuse the issue by saying that we need someone to love.
We all have a remarkable, unlimited capacity to love one another. There is a wide range of expression of love, from brotherly and sisterly love to romantic and sexual love. But as long as we continue to confuse love and emotional attachment, we will continue to be lonely, even when we have someone to love. We can conquer this dragon of loneliness, but we must turn to our deepest resource to do so, our spiritual self. When we become aware of self, we experience the mystery of life, the unbroken and unending connection we have with each other and with the universe.
Picture life like a large Banyan tree filled with leaves, twigs and branches. Our ego sense of self makes us feel like a leaf on this tree. When the wind blow, the leaves rub against each other. Sometimes this is pleasant experience and sometimes not. As leaves, we feel isolated and apart from one another, even though we can see that we all belong to the same tree. When we become conscious of our spiritual self, we realize that we are far more than just the expression of a single leaf. We are more than even a branch and the trunk. We are the life force within the tree.
We cannot realize the power of this experience by analyzing it. Those experience of wholeness gained by watching a birth or gazing at the stars are not intellectual, logical events. We must go beyond the intellect and become conscious of the human spirit directly. This is the heart of meditative tradition of self-mastery – to calm the mind so completely, to be focused, that we experience this spiritual self directly. This is what we call Samadhi, and in west it is known as “mystical experience.” As we become more skilled in our ability to have this awareness, we gradually lose all sense of loneliness, all fears are vanquished, and all self-hatred is eliminated.

Living with strength:

This mystical experience is not an empty promise, but the consequence of the systematic development of self-mastery. As we experience our inner strength and confidence, we become more flexible, unlocking rigid belief systems, losing our fear of mistakes and what others may think of us. The way we relate to others – our close personal relationships, our sense of community, our capacity to give, to belong, and to relate to other human beings – depends on who we are as individuals. If we teach our children and ourselves how to live without fear, we would have a culture without violence. If we teach our children and ourselves how to love and respect others and ourselves we would have a culture free of hatred and condemnation. We cannot have a society free of fear, violence, and hatred until we have the citizens free of fear, violence, and hatred.

Taking back the power- through Self-mastery

These myths reflect our ignorance and our inability to deal with life from a position of inner strength. Instead of responding effectively and confidently to the pressure and challenges of modern life, we find ourselves playing the role of victims. Only through self-mastery can you use the power of your inner resources to create a loving, fearless, and joyful life.
Like two sides of a coin, self-mastery has two aspects that cannot be separated: self-awareness and self-discipline (skill). Having one without the other is like trying to eat milk with a fork. It is the dynamic interaction of these two elements that gives us the power to live life the way we choose.

As our self-awareness deepens, we become more aware of the power and beauty of our personalities. As we grow in our ability to observe, we discover the hidden relationship between body, mind, and spirit. We begin to see that mind is already creative. We find that we do have the wisdom to choose the right course for ourselves. We find the inner strength that is unaffected by the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Self-awareness means to consciously experience the different dimensions of our finest instruments, our minds and bodies, and experience at the deepest level their relationship to our true self, the spiritual core of our being.

All of our awareness is useless without the skill to use it. Self-discipline is the other half of self-mastery. Each one of us has skills, and everyday we use self-discipline. But because we aren’t aware of what we do, we become skilled in ways that create problems for us.
Let’s take a simple example. For many of us, flossing is a habit that many of us learned in childhood. For those who didn’t learn that habit performing it seems to be a chore they have to remember. When they meet you at a party and naturally discussion turns to gingivitis, they look in amazement when they hear that you floss every day. “My how disciplined you are!” they remark. You can’t get it, as you don’t consider yourself to be that much disciplined. After all, you know all the things you would accomplish if only you had more discipline.
To be skilled means that we practice until that particular set of things becomes a habit. The key word is practice, but practice what? If you want to be a batsman you practice batting, if you want to become accountant you practice accounting. But what do you practice when you want to become skilled human beings? Unfortunately, we seldom think in these terms. Formal education fills our head with facts, figures, and systems but it doesn’t teach us how to use the most important tools that we have, the powerful inner resource of our own minds.

We need a systematic, practical approach to help us develop our inner skills. This is the essence of this our program build on yogic traditions. It provides us with the concepts and tools that allow us to live our daily lives with awareness and discipline, with skill and power. It is the practical science of self-responsibility.

Taking Control

Because we aren’t skilled human beings, we feel powerless and ineffectual and become more dissatisfied and cynical about ourselves and our ability to make a real difference in life. We never realize the unlimited resource of power and abilities, but it doesn’t come in pill, it isn’t dispensed by a therapist, and it isn’t and it isn’t activated by crystals hung around the neck. We ourselves, already have this resource. But we must develop the knowledge and discipline to use it. This is what it means to be responsible. Think of responsibility as two concepts: “response” and “ability.” One obvious dimension of response is the capacity to respond rather than react. When we react to something, we are not making a conscious choice, but acting out of habit.
Let’s take an example
I imagine you have one of those workdays when nothing seems to be going right. No matter what you tried to do something or somebody would come along and throw water on your plans and frustrate your efforts. Finally you leave for home. You get into your car, pull out on the highway, and some jerk pulls out right I front of you. You crowd up behind him, lay on the horn, scream obscenities, and give hand signals expressing your anger. It’s only then you notice several antennae on the car and a license plate that says “State Police” in small letters before the numbers.
If you hadn’t been in reaction, you probably would have chosen a different set of behaviors. Your emotional state led you right to reacting in ways that might very well prove to be troublesome. The stronger the emotional reaction, the more predictable our behavior becomes, the less creative we are, and less freedom we experience.

Not too many years ago, western medical science insisted that we had little control that happened in our bodies, and even less control over disease. Fortunately, in the early 1960s we found that by using biofeedback we could control and change physical events in our bodies that, according to the experts, were uncontrollable. Suddenly we were learning how to consciously regulate blood flow, control the firing of muscle neuron, and even change brain- wave patterns. Almost overnight, everything science had told us about the “involuntary” nervous system was being questioned.
The recognition that the west had in 60’s about the control that we have over what happens in our bodies was something the yogis have known and demonstrated for more than 4,000 years. It is beginning to have a impact in modern society, we find a anew philosophy and practice of medicine emerging called “holistic health,” which involves the whole person – mind, body, and spirit – in creating health and wellness.
What greater magic is there than to discover that you have the power and knowledge to become free of ulcers or high blood pressure, or eliminate headaches that you have had for years, or live your life without anxiety or depression?

Physicians and health-care experts generally agree that a high percentage (about 70 to 80 percent) of our disease are psychosomatic. This does not mean that our symptoms (ulcer pain or headache) are imaginary; they are certainly real enough, and real physiological changes do occur. The term psychosomatic means that our emotional, mental, and behavioral habits play a subtle but critical role in creating the conditions which allow disease to develop. But then, the opposite is also true. If we become aware of how the mind and body work together, and become skilled in using the mind to direct our emotions, we can heal or minimize many of the diseases from which we suffer, and even prevent many of them from developing.
High blood pressure is the most commonly known problem in our society these days and it is almost always a stress reaction of the vascular system and not caused by an organic disease. Because we don’t know how to control our emotional reactions or maintain inner balance, we can’t control our blood pressure. A doctor treats us with medication to lower our blood pressure, but that doesn’t eliminate the disease or solve the problem, it only manages the symptoms. If this is the only course of action you take, you are engaging in disease maintenance program, not becoming healthy. We have seen that even arteriosclerosis, hardening of arteries, can be reversed with proper diet, exercise, and self-management techniques without the use of medicines.
But it is nowhere written that we must wait until we have heart disease or some other problem to help ourselves. Although we might have not learned these skills while growing up, no one prevents us from learning them now. Why not teach ourselves and our children to use the power of our resources. Now is the time to become skilled, not after the heart attack.

Myths about STRESS

Myth Number 1: Stress is something that happens to us

We look for a cause, same “thing” that causes stress – a germ, poor working conditions, difficult economic times. If we could only identify it, we could reduce our stress. We focus our attention outward in a futile attempt to come to grips with whatever is giving us stress. When we blame outside world for our stress, we become victims. We cannot point to another person, a situation, a “thing” in our environment and say, “that is stress.” Our work, the time pressure we face, or even our spouse, they are not stress. They may act as stimuli to our stress, but our stress exist in one place in the world…inside ourselves.
We are the source of our own stress. Stress never happens to us; stress is our reaction to the things that happen to us. We can’t control the world around us…though we try to. No matter how hard we try, we cannot protect ourselves from change.
The good news is; we are the source of our own stress. If we have the power to create stress and unhappiness, we also have the power not to create stress and happiness. The solution to the problem is self-knowledge and skill, becoming aware of our inner strength and knowing how to use it.

Myth Number 2: There is good stress and bad stress

Stress experts talk about good stress and bad stress, yet not one of them can define the difference between good stress and bad stress except in terms of consequences. Let’s say you go jogging. You exercise your body, increasing your heart rate and making your muscles work. You come home feeling refreshed and alive. Then someone says to you, “ See you have good stress.” The next day you go jogging and suffer from heart attack. While you are lying in the grass, that same person comes to you and says, “ Now you suffer from bad stress.” So you end up with a game of stress roulette. If you win, and have good stress, you get to play the game again. If you lose, and suffer bad stress, you end up in coronary care unit. Not a very useful way of understanding stress. So whether you have good or bad stress would never be clear until you suffer with the consequences… and I don’t think we would like to take that chance.

Myth Number 3: We need stress to achieve optimum performance

This myth is seen quite prevalent among supervisors, managers, and people who feel they must control someone else’s behavior. Far too many bosses use fear as a management tool. If you motivate people with fear they increase their activities. But what happens tomorrow? Fear causes an immediate increase in productivity quickly followed by an even greater decrease. Fearful employees soon become hostile, angry, resentful, all of which damage morale and interfere with productivity. The rapid increase in productivity is short lived, but hostility, fear, and resentment continues for long period of time, reducing overall productivity. No one wins through intimidation.
Still others think that if they put themselves under pressure, they will do better. They confuse being stressed with being challenged. The arousal or excitement we feel when challenged does not lead to stress. We need challenge in life to excel, to reach heights of performance that we would not normally reach. This is very healthy for us. When we does don’t have challenge, life becomes rather dull and meaningless. In fact, lack of challenge is a significant source of stress for those who feel regimented in their work.
On the other hand, when we are fearful, which is emotionally and physically different from feeling challenged, the arousal we experience is stressful. Our bodies tense, and our minds become clouded. We don’t feel well or think clearly, and life becomes more and miserable. The more fearful we are, the more unbalanced and we become, and the more stress we experience.

Myth Number 4: I don’t have stress

Many of us deny stress because:
1. Real men don’t have stress.
2. I am superwoman, I can (have to) do it all.
3. Only weak people can’t cope with pressure.
4. We are unconscious of the reality of our lives.
There are few people in our society who are really free from stress. It doesn’t matter how many degrees you have, or how much money you have, stress is in all probability a significant part of your life. The most dangerous part of stress is that often you don’t even know you have it. You become accustomed to a certain level of chronic stress, and it begins to feel normal, part of everyday life. You even believe that some stress is good for you. In reality, this unconscious and constant level of unrelieved “normal” stress often leads to disease.

Stress Management Daily Series

I am starting this stress management series, i will be posting a chapter daily. This stress management series has helped many corporate heads and individuals in recent years. i hope that u read and practice it at your own pace. I know you will benefit from this, happy stress free life living to all.

Stress Management-Part-1

I went to my first yoga and meditation class along with my friend. I thought yoga and all this meditation were some fermented dairy products for health freaks and old people. But the meditation class quickly captured my attention. There I came with the totally different perspective of life and personal psychology, one that I had never thought about. As I struggled to understand the meaning of what the mythologies meant, I began to see underneath the images and stories of our mythologies lies a powerful, systematic and scientific approach to understanding the entire person. The details of how mind, body and spirit all successfully come together in human form. As I discovered more, that this was nothing less than the science of inner life, a prescription for personal power and excellence. The colorful and dramatic symbolism of heroes and villains in our mythologies is necessary where knowledge had to be passed from teacher to students verbally without the aid of books or modern electronic devices. The stories and myths, heroes and villains, are remembered far more easily than fact and figures.

Like most people, we grow up learning to look outside ourselves to find answers to our problems. Doctors and medicines would cure our disease, friends and lovers would end my loneliness, attaining status, position, and power would bring me self-esteem and fulfillment, and money and all the things it could buy would bring me happiness.

We all know here that this doesn’t work. But we don’t know what else to do. We are so externally oriented that we know little about what happens within our inner world. It is an unknown region, a scary place filled with the terrible things the psychiatrists talk about, all the things we struggle to forget, all the powerful desires and fears that we work desperately to suppress.

The way that most of us deal with the problems of life is more than a little misdirected. We basically ignore our inner resources. We are so caught up in the world around us that we don’t see that both the cause and the cure of our suffering lie within ourselves. Because we look in the wrong direction, we have a distorted view of ourselves, and very little ability to use our powerful resources. As a consequence, our human skills have not kept pace with our technological skills. We have become so enamored of the power and speed of our technology that we increasingly ignore the nearly infinite power of minds. In doing so, we become dependent on external means to solve internal problems. We overuse drugs, blame others for our own choices, and become victims of circumstance. The more things we have, the more disturbed we seem to become. With all our technical and scientific knowledge we still feel powerless, alienated from each other and fearful of the world around us. Instead of understanding and mastering the source, our own self, we keep dancing round and round with the endless things outside of ourselves.

Fortunately, we have yogic tradition that doesn’t demand that you believe in a certain way or in certain individual. It is not that people were more intelligent 4,000 years back, it’s only that they had less external disturbances and aid from technology. So they dedicated more of their time for studying human psychosomatic (the body and mind relation). The whole thrust of these traditions of yoga, Sufi, Zen, Reiki and several different styles of meditation is to become free – of self-doubt, of neuroses, of self-imposed suffering of all sorts. But this freedom is not something that can be given by anyone or any master. Anyone who has gone through these research and practice can help you navigate through the labyrinth of your mind. Through examples and methods, bringing you face to face with your greatest resource, yourself. But no one can make it work for you; only you can become masters of yourself.

It does not matter what culture we live in, which religion we practice or which part of the globe we live in, nor does it matter what calling in life – doctor, lawyer or executive. We all want to live without worrying and being fearful, we all want to share joy and life with others. In other words, we all want to be successful human beings.

We can accomplish this if we understand the fundamental truth that lies at the heart of our humanity: self-knowledge and self-discipline (skill) lead to self-mastery alone leads to freedom, to happiness, to success in life. Self-mastery has two essential elements: self-knowledge and skill. Like two sides of a coin, we can’t have one without the other. When we have self-knowledge but no skill we become paper tigers – we know all answers but we can’t live any of them. Many of us think that making more money, hearing enlightened sage, or wearing the right crystal will somehow magically eliminate the misery of our lives. Bur nothing can save us from ourselves. There is an old saying that “ you must light your own lamp”. We are provided with unlimited resources, but unless we become skilled in there use, they are of little benefit. The more skilled I am at using my inner resources, the greater ability to respond successfully to any situation without creating stress, disease, and unhappiness.

Today stress has become a household word many of us think that we know all about stress and how to cope with it, unfortunately this is far from the truth. Life has become more complicated, with greater pressure and higher levels of stress. Our ability to reduce these pressures has diminished, not increased.
The problem is that we approach stress like any other disease-find out what is going wrong and fix it but stress is uniquely different. It is a dis-ease an inner imbalance that we constantly create and maintain within the body and mind. Stress is psychosomatic in the true sense of the word involving both mind and body. We create stress when we mismanage our own inner resources. Its source is in the patterns and habits of our lives, a consequence of how we regulate or rather, how we do not regulate, the mind and body. The chaos of inner world, emotional turmoil, thoughts and attitudes and lack of exercise creates physical consequences like ulcers and high blood pressure

We have created myths about stress and we need to understand them before we get to the path of self-mastery.