Inner World of Yoga – Day 8
A Yogic Look at the Mind
YOUR MIND IS NOT YOUR MIND: Your Mind is not Your Self
Mind is not an absolute. It is just a continuous bunch of thoughts, concepts, ideas, dialogues and pictures. The mind makes fear feel like an absolute, but it is just a string of thoughts mostly based in the past and future. At its root all our stress is a product of fear – fear that the mind makes trying to find a solution to overwhelmingly non-life threatening issues. The mind after all, cannot be stopped and needs to be busy. We are essentially afraid almost constantly in one form or another that our needs won’t be met and we get worked up enough that it feels many times like life or death, or our world will end, and if only this person were to change, or we got more money, or our kid got better grades, or the dog didn’t bark … our life would be OK.
Go back to the three brains in one: We react from the reptilian brain even when there is no imminent physical danger. You know this is true if you’ve ever been in a potential life-threatening accident or situation where your perception of everything slows down, you seem to see it in slow motion, and your body/mind makes split second decisions based on saving your life or someone else – very different than obsessing over some irritating incident that happened in the workplace or in the grocery store on the way home which only seems so real because we are caught in the inner dialogue and have no perspective. Yet physiologically the body still goes through the stress response routine. No wonder our energy gets depleted.
