Some thoughts on YOGA

http://aliciakata.wordpress.com/tag/heart-chakra/

I have heard people talking about the ‘mystical yoga’ or being curious about what it all is ‘about’.

The yoga process is very simple; there is nothing obscure or secretive about it.

Yoga is what we all will do one day or another as we progress from incarnation to incarnation. But putting it even simpler, yoga simply means to be your true self!

Everything else comes from that.

Some might wonder but what is my true self? Also that is very simple, your true self is the self without a self!

To find your true self you have to lose yourself.

As long as we walk though life thinking that we are the body, the mind, our thoughts, our worries, our anxieties, our relationships, work, achievements, family and all these aspects of material life, we are bound to experience a lot of disappointment and grief. And I do not mean to portray a negative outlook on these things. Once you know who you are, you can enjoy all this, and it just won’t stick, it will leave no footprints in the soul.

As we all have experienced I am sure J the body is very fragile and it will deteriorate with age and suffer various diseases.

It will even disappear after a few years.

Relationships can be very happy… but again- much more likely if you know who you are and don’t step into it being needy or wanting someone to fill in some gap or void. If this is the case it will most likely fail. Real love does not need anything, it is a one way traffic.

Any achievement, job etc are temporary, never fully satisfying. People who earn a lot of money usually occupy their minds with how they can make even more and more and more. Money cannot buy inner peace and happiness, it cannot buy health and clarity and an equipoised mind.

Most jobs are rather unsatisfying as they are part of a system that is built on money and greed.

The list goes on and on..

Nothing in the material world stays forever and nothing in the material world is fully satisfying.

But we all are looking for happiness! And this is because it is our natural state. So rather than asking what can make me happy and run after the many illusory …that promise you such, we have to ask:

what is it that prevents me from realising the happiness that is already here inside of me.

No one has put it there and no one can take it from you, it is your natural state.

This is what yoga means, it means to re-connect (I am using this term, but really, we are never disconnected) with our true self which is always happy and content not depending on anyone or anything.

It goes even further than this, the true self is beyond happiness, it is complete, not one nor the other but beyond all definition.

Now it also might become clear why it even does not have an individual self. It does not think as ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’. These are very limited concepts and also are binding us to the material modes of existence. Think of how nice it feels if you give something to someone without expecting anything in return, not even a thank you!

It is so liberating! We don’t trouble the mind with thoughts like: why did he or she not even thank me for this? Or what will I get in return for it?

These are things that weigh us down, compromise our actions and our happiness.

You also might find that when you stop thinking as ‘I’ or ‘mine’ you become much more relaxed. You can wander through life as it unfolds, trusting that things will come to you naturally if you need them.

You can accept each moment as it is without tormenting the mind with thoughts such as ‘I wish it was like this’, ‘I wish I could do that’, ‘I wish I had this or that’.

Such thoughts always put us into an imaginary past or future that again are not real and compromise our inner happiness-

The higher self is one with a perfect intelligence and knowledge (and beyond that). So when we can drop that ‘dot’ on the smaller ‘i’, the ego, we can access our true potential which is perfect in each moment, not lacking anything, not desiring, being always super-happy. J

Om Namo Shivaya

Julia