Continuing on with the Yoga Sutras we were involved with last week:
We often concern ourselves with anger and fear, these intense base emotions that can seem to push us into imbalance and discord.
But let’s look closer to the source of discord. Let’s not wait till something develops into fear or anger and then emotions override conscious awareness. What happens when we try and simplify the situation to focus in on the origins of fear and anger? We might find the essence of a situation by simplifying our experience like in this example:
- “I’m afraid that I’ll fail at my new job.”
- (something that might happen) makes me feel (something unpleasant)
…. no, not really like that, how about: - (thoughts of something that might happen) make me feel (something)
- (some particular thought) causes me to feel (something)
So like this we might find the essence of fear, anger, and emotions to be essentially our reaction to thoughts we’re having. This helps us see that the emotions are not coming from the present situation, but instead originate in our own thoughts.
In this week’s meditation we’ll work on separating ourselves from our thoughts. We’ll have a guided meditation based around separating from our thoughts, seeing each thought as a separate entity. We’ll label and set aside each thought, and then explore how feelings and opinions can develop around the thought. We’ll use the idea of ‘colored thoughts’ from swamij.com:
https://swamij.com/yoga-sutras-10511.htm
Background music from Jonathan Goldman, a piece centered around the 528 Hz frequency, with chants and mantras overlaid: