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YOGA HALE
Yoga: Sanskrit Word Meaning, to Yoke Oneself to God    Hale: Hawaiian Word for House
 
 
Leveling the Extreme Highs and Lows of the Emotional Ego
 
Most of us try to avoid depression at any cost. Strangely depression has reached near epidemic proportions in the last several decades. In many countries, people have more than they ever did in history, and yet they still feel empty, depleted and sad. They feel they have nothing to look forward to. They feel lost and, yes, depressed. Is it any wonder that so many of us feel this way, though? In the yogic view, what goes up must come down. Those with a level head, who have acquired certain wisdom, realize that any sort of elation should be looked upon with suspicion. Perhaps Kennedy had the same wisdom of the yogis on his inauguration day. When someone asked if he was excited, he replied, “No, I’m not excited, just very interested.”
The medical profession likes to look at depression as a disease that it can cure, but yogis believe that depression is an illness of the mind. It also sees excitement as an equal distraction. Eknath Easwarth is the director of The Blue Mountain Center of Meditation. In his book, The Mantram Handbook, he says, “Whatever form elation takes, it is only agitation, a storm in the mind which we have conditioned to regard as pleasant. When the mind oscillates wildly over good news, over pleasant prospects and unlimited possibilities, all this means is that we are dwelling more on ourselves and less on the needs of those around us. And once we have set the pendulum of the mind swinging, he inevitable reaction has to set in sooner or later.” This does not mean that we cannot rejoice in good news: the birth of a new baby, the winning of a new job, the many different accomplishments achieved. It does mean that certain equanimity of the mind is kept by those with wisdom. We realize that by appreciating this moment, we are appreciating something which is not eternal. Though we feel happiness now, we will surely feel sadness again in the future – as long as we are attached to the material world. It is not certain if President Kennedy realized the ephemeral nature of the moment he was sworn in, but he must have realized its precarious preciousness. He must have had some idea that he could remain detached from it.
When we remain detached from an outcome, we observe everything as if it was a grand plot, with excellent costumed and a fabulous set, staged upon an infinitely varied and rather ostentatious stage. No expense is spared by the ego. It will create feast and famine, laughter and wretched sadness all in the service of itself. This is the great wheel of samsara that the Buddhists speak of. The Greek philosopher and writer, Herodotus said, “Men's fortunes are on a wheel, which in its turning suffers not the same man to prosper for ever.” In other words, as long as we search for happiness and avoid suffering with our will, we are not free. The good news is that there is a phenomenon behind the will which is not bound by cause and effect. There is something behind the will, which supersedes it, that is free. Swami Vivekananda tells us as much.
While many western doctors try to assuage depression with a pill, many people never fully recover from it because they have not changes the base habits which form their depression to begin with. While we get rid of the symptoms of our suffering, we dampen our creativity, and our ability to look deeper within ourselves to see what habits we may have formed which are not serving us. This does not mean that drugs cannot help to alleviate the deeply made impressions of long term depression within the physiology of the mind and body, but it does mean that they should be used as a last resort and only in conjunction with some sort of therapy or yogic practice (or both) which aims to alleviate the suffering at its core. Why would you hack off the tops of the weeds growing in your garden just to allow them to grow back up to the surface within a short time? Treating depression with a drug is very much like hacking off the weeds at ground level.
One way to overcome both depression and excessive elation is to work at ridding ourselves of likes and dislikes. These are the things which cause our emotions to swing up and down like a pendulum. You like your neighbor to the left; you dislike your neighbor to the right. What does this cause you – boughts of anguish and relative happiness in varying degree. When we start to eliminate our likes and dislikes – our categorization of “things” that we have already deemed separate from ourselves, we heighten the emotional roller coaster. We should cultivate this practice when things seem “good,” because it is in these moments when it is easier. When something “good” happens, we should be thankful for the occurrence but remember that it is fleeting. Then when things are “bad” it will be easier to remember that this too is a brief and transitory moment in time. One way to eliminate extreme likes and dislikes is through mantra practice and meditation. We cultivate equanimity within the mind with these practices that make it easier to remember the transitory nature of life. When someone praises you, a mantra or meditation practice will keep the praise from going to your head. When you are given great amounts of money, you will remember that you are not better than others who have less than you. When you get too excited about something, you are projecting yourself into the future. When you become sad, it is often about something that has already happened in the past. Either way, you are exiting the now moment which is all that there really is. As soon as you take another breath, there is a new you, a new reality. You can recreate yourself only in the now moment, and it is here that you are free from depression and excessive excitement.
Nagarjuna once said, “After happiness comes suffering. After suffering arises happiness. For beings, happiness and suffering revolve like a wheel.” Meditation, pranayama, and mantram are all ways to step off that wheel. We can eliminate the yo-yo of suffering and ecstasy only to find true bliss which lies behind all that the ego grasps for. You can look depression square in the eye and know that it is a fabrication of the ego and shake it off. You can look excitement in the eye and say, hello, aren’t’ you an interesting emotion I am having right now, and not get too caught up in it, not become addicted to it. It is only when we expect the ever higher high that we experience the lowest of lows. Yogic practices help to humble us in our joy and our grief. After all, just like G.K. Chesterton says, “All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot.”
 
Archived Articles:
Being a Spiritual Warrior:  Dealing With Negative Emotions
 
For many people, sadness, grief and anger are emotions they would rather avoid. We would rather not face irritation, grief, rage, depression and, jealousy, not to mention embarrassment or fear. For those on a spiritual path, however, these emotions are like shining treasures found in a hidden cave. These emotions can show us where we are stuck. They are messengers of great clarity that show us where we are holding back, where our hearts have stunted in growth, and where, perhaps we need to breathe more. For the spiritual warrior, unfortunate circumstances and difficult people are a moment to seize great power.
 
In fact, all forms of negative emotion are really caused by the root emotion of fear. It may not seem possible, but all tension, worry and stress are caused by projecting ourselves into the future, or mulling over the past where we created unhealthy emotions. These all stem from fear. Psychological time is the cause of fear. It is our perception of possible futures – our longing for certain outcomes or our denial of the past that cause this pressure. Time is always recreated, though. Look at a candle flame. The flame you look at in one second is entirely different than the flame you look at in the next. This is how a spiritual warrior sees time. It does not exist except in this moment. A candle flame is not the same from one second to another. It is constantly re-created. This is how a spiritual warrior sees life. It is also how a yogi sees life. Negative emotions are our clues to when we are shutting down. They are a map to moments we are being unconscious or not living in the now.
 
Most people see negative emotions, like sadness or anger as something to run from. The problem with this way of dealing with these emotions is that the very thing you would like to eliminate, you give more power, and therefore it grows bigger. Your fear, your anger, your sadness keeps growing. Like a plant being watered daily and given plenty of sunlight, you are fertilizing the soil of the negative emotions in the mind. It is only when we look our fear, or anger or sadness straight in the eyes that we begin to take away its power over us. Meditation is a way for us to start to lose some of our fear, and look at all the negative emotions we are carrying. Most of us have hidden these emotions so deeply within that we do not even realize they are there. We are like ghosts walking around with a thousand other ghosts chained to our ankles with iron shackles. The next time you are walking around the park or the city, just imagine yourself this way. This is how much extra weight many of us are carrying. When we look at our fears, they begin to disappear, and those shackles dragging behind us simply fall off and lighten our load.
 
In Buddhism, teachers speak of egolessness. This means is that we allow hardness in us – always essentially a form of fear that has crystallized into our bodies- to start to melt. We observe our patterns. If we notice a certain person always makes us angry, we can ask ourselves why instead of letting the anger run away with us. We can become conscious of the reasons and ask ourselves why we allow that emotion to run rampant. Ironically, when we feel the emotions completely, they start to melt away like popsicles left in the sun. When we meditate we start to be able to see what is happening more easily. We start to be able to separate the “us” from the “anger” or “fear”. We are no longer the fear, we are having the fear and we can see ourselves acting it out as if we were watching an actor in a play. Have you ever watched a movie and been so engrossed in it that you forgot it was not reality, that the story was just composed of actor and lighting and props and camera angles? This is how we are able to ‘see’ reality when we meditate. If we have an issue that comes up, almost immediately we can look at the situation and discover, I am really angry, or I am really sad.
 
We can look at what is truly causing the sadness and often just by observing it, it begins to go away. Instead of protecting ourselves from whatever uncomfortable feelings we are having, we take them on with gusto as if we were watching a really great film. If you were watching a horror movie, you wouldn’t want to be just a little scared, would you? You really want to scream and squeal. If you were watching a romance, you would want to practically swoon from the love scenes, right? The next time you are feeling sad, really feel the sadness, allow it to consume you. Cry great rivers of grief and torment and then watch yourself as an observer as if you were in a movie. Soon you will start to laugh at yourself and think, “wow, what a fabulous role I was just playing as a very sad woman (man).” Perhaps, if the wounds are deep, you will not feel this way right away, but with patience and courage, a spiritual warrior sees straight through the veils of material existence. A spiritual warrior sees straight though the negative emotions as knows, first that if they are not love, they can only be fear, and second, to feel them and embrace those emotions. Those negative emotions are great gifts in the right hands.
 
A spiritual warrior also realizes that life is full of opposites. Today I will feel bliss, tomorrow I may feel pain. A spiritual warrior does not fret about the roller coaster of events in life because she realizes that these are just the great actors upon a fabulously outfitted stage – just as Shakespeare taught us. These events are just part of the circle of suffering, of the wheel of life. The “I” after all is just an illusion. We re-create the “I” in every single moment – in the now. Alan Watts said of meditation, “It doesn’t have a reason or a purpose. In this respect it is unlike almost all other things we do except perhaps making music and dancing. When we make music we do not do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of making music, then obviously the fastest players would be [considered] the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true of meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.” The real test of a yogi is if he can forever face the now. She must be a spiritual warrior to forever keep the mind in the present, and to look all emotions which would take one away from the now straight in the eye, and to slay those emotions like a knight slays a dragon. The warrior does not run away. The warrior goes straight into the dragon’s fire and slays the negative emotions (fear) at the source.
 
 
Previous Article: Destiny and Karma Yoga
 
Swami Vivikenanda says that, "good and evil have an equal share in molding character, and in some instances misery is a greater teacher than happiness." Does this mean we are destined to grow only through poverty, fear, and the lack of praise? Or, as the Course in Miracles suggests, can we also learn through joy? One's destiny (and ability to learn through joy or pain) is related to Karma more than they realize, according to yogic philosophy. The western conception of destiny is one of a predetermined course of events. The yogic view of destiny is that it can be changed via one's attitudes, beliefs and actions. It is akin to the Newtonian philosophy of action creates and equal and opposite reaction, or forces always come in pairs. In the words of Saint Kirpal Singh, "Each thought, each word and each deed has to be accounted and compensated for in Nature. Every cause has an effect and every action brings about a reaction. Uproot the cause and the effect disappears. This has been done by the [yogic] Masters who have transcended these laws..."
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
There are no hard and fast rules for the accumulation of banes and the riddance of 'bad' karma. In fact, 'bad' karma is a misnomer. There is only karma which aims to teach us valuable lessons about the laws which govern the Universe and karma which we enjoy because we perceive it to be pleasant; in other words, we have already learned the relative lesson and can bask in its inherent wisdom. However, even 'good' karma can cause us to have attachments. We are not to float through the world as apathetic ghosts, but we should try to minimize our attachments to certain outcomes. The question of how to affect our destiny, then, is reliant upon our attitudes.
 
It depends on if pleasure or wisdom is the goal of the aspirant. The word karma is Sanskrit for "action" or "to do." Karma yoga means that the things we do can either bring us closer to the Ultimate Knowledge or further away from it. Our destiny is
 
 
 
 
 
tied up in our past Karma, but it does not mean we cannot overcome it. As we 'do' things we create cause and effect, an inexorable law of the Universe. If you follow this law to its baseline, you would realize that all the opposite or dualistic instances of the universe eventually lead to zero, or the great Infinite, the Void, depending upon your semantic preference.
 
Although we may have set things in motion with our past actions, it does not mean that we must become fatalistic about our futures. A person's inner disposition or svabhava in Sanskrit, is determined by the accumulation of past thoughts and actions. We are now, the total result of our past evolution. Our destiny is that we are empowered to change our dispositions to propel us forward even further. Our bodies and minds allow us to work through whatever karma we have accumulated. The fact that we are on this planet at this time, when only one hundred years ago, we had not flown a plane or gone to the moon, there was no TV or Internet, means we have some beneficial karma. The fact that you are even reading this article means you have evolved with past karma that held some merit. The fact that you were born at all, means you still have some karma to work through. Perhaps you have lived in the past by way of the ego. Now, you have the opportunity to change your destiny and to leave that way of being behind.
 
There are three parts to past karma: The first is called prarabdha in Sanskrit. It refers to the karma which has already borne its fruit in our current lifetime. This type of karma cannot be annulled. It must be taken with forbearance and strength. You can probably imagine many undesirable experiences which were more than likely prarabdha. This is day-to-day karma you acquire through all your thoughts, words, deeds, interactions with others, your carbon footprint, your relationships, etc. In the yogic tradition if you do not work off this day-to-day karma you will have to work through it as sanchita karma in the next lifetime.
 
The second type of karma is called sanchita karma. This is karma which has not yet born its fruit. It is basically the balance left in your karmic credit account that you still have to work through. The effect following the cause is still waiting in the wings to be called onstage by the director. Sanchita karma is caused by our current thoughts and desires, and can be changed. You can change your destiny through changing your sanchita karma. These tendencies are often deep rooted and take patience and perseverance to change. It is important to have compassion for yourself and for others working through sanchita karma. In the yogic tradition, it is believed that this karma may have accumulated over many thousands of lifetimes.
 
The aspirant may not even realize why he is working through karma accumulated from these past experiences. Yogic techniques can be very helpful in removing sanchita karma. It is important to realize that if someone has a disability or is suffering from cancer, or poverty, it does not mean that they necessarily did something horrible in a past life. It could also mean that, at a soul level, they chose a certain circumstance in this life in order to learn a particular lesson. Unlike the Christian belief that, "'God is not mocked, what a man sows he must reap' there is no wrathful God which hands out reward and punishment. There is simply a system in place which governs cause and effect, and in some instances, the soul even chooses a circumstance that many might find unpleasant or even horrid. It is also important to forgive oneself and others for the karma they have accumulated, and will help to assist in working through it.
 
To draw from a different Christian tradition, Mother Teresa uttered the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi during her acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize. "Lord, make a channel of Thy peace that, where there is hatred, I may bring love; that where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness; that, where there is discord, I may bring harmony; that, where there is error, I may bring truth; that, where there is doubt, I may bring faith; that, where there is despair, I may bring hope; that, where there are shadows, I may bring light; that, where there is sadness, I may bring joy." In this simple prayer, the yogic principles of cause and effect are evident. When we say, "where there is error, may I bring truth" we are essentially saying, allow me to correct my ignorance so that I will not repeat my past mistakes. This, in a nutshell is karma.
 
The last type of karma is called agami karma. This refers to karma we are accumulating in this life that will bear its fruit in the future. We have complete control over this type of karma, perhaps the most control over all three types. It is by being aware of this type of karma that we can most easily shape our destiny and change the future. This is one reason we practice karma yoga, to remove the ego, so that our actions and words do not create future unpleasant events.
 
Swami Vivekenanda also says that, "Karma-yoga is no idle speculation. It is yoga in action. It is a life of intense activity inspired by knowledge. Genuine spiritual aspiration is bound to have active expression in every day life. The pursuit of Self-knowledge, unless it is idle imagination, will make the aspirant act for it. Love of God, if genuine, will make the aspirant express love through every action. The exhortation of the Bhagavad Gita is to act. The cause of a person's downfall is the performance of wrong actions, and a person's rise depends on the performance of right actions. Such a rise is never achieved by escapism, cowardice or hypocrisy. One is to sole the problems of one’s life by living it."
 
Through practicing karma yoga, one changes the effect by changing the cause. The destiny is changed by asking yourself:
 
1.How will this affect me and others after this moment?
2.How will this affect the people I love?
3.How will this affect the planet?
 
(c) 2008 All Rights Reserved Christina Sarich