Purification

“Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretence. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.”

 – Adyashanti

The path of Yoga is no different, it is believed to be a path by many that leaves us feeling good and better about ourselves while traditionally this is not necessarily the case. As an 8 fold path, one might be under an impression that we follow the steps, climb the latter and finally one day may become some enlighten being. This “enlightenment” that we speak of is a force of light that is constantly present with us, it’s that destruction of our human self that leads us to a deeper recognition of this light, hence the human self enlightens. The struggles of life can therefor be seen as metaphorically or simply enlightened, as humans we are on autopilot, reacting out of our human perception which is limited without recognition beyond our own sense of self. The yogic path is multi faceted with endless directions and many styles that all are pointing towards one thing. We often look at the world with a sense of logic, which is a false sense of knowing what is to be true, this logic sometimes overrides our practice. Our logical mind is our autopilot, controlling the wheel and as we drive through this life we can actually run over all the connections right in front of the windshield. This life we have is blessed to be filled with abundance and endless connections. Logical minds don’t see that, they don’t see out of their windshield, as it has collected all kinds of dirt and impurities. The process of purification is one that is a destructive process, uncovering the windshields from all that obstructs our vision. When we start to realize the untruths, we are still looking outside, we still are choosing to be a part of this collective human experience. In my eyes, enlightenment is not a destination rather it’s already is right in front of us. The practice is always now, it is an act of integrating the fullness of ourselves and lessons into every moment regardless of the outside world.  A fascinating part of this practice is actually witnessing everything drop away, the logical mind is fearful and quick to rip away our connections to the heart as it is truly an act of softening our eyes to see that our world as we may know it is actually beyond reason. Unfortunately, this is the reality of our society, there is a massive blockage in connecting on a human level. Well, other than being the composed humans we have been conditioned to be. This is actually a space that has been the most challenging to integrate myself into, as I have seen beyond that form of collective behavior. The interesting thing that I see is that so many of us get on the mat to be healthy, to live a life of vitality and to live a balanced life. This mentality is very westernized way of approaching yoga nonetheless important as it gets brings a form of yoga into our lives. When we begin to shift gears though, we can acknowledge our most common human shadows which are relations to death, our struggles and confrontations. We may notice that our idealism of life is also interconnected to our shadows. I saw an interesting study that was referring to the number one factor in our lives that determine longevity… social integration. The second one was close relationships, meaning that having connections off the mat can actually predict how long we live. The logical mind may think that diet and exercise would create a longer life while connections throughout our day is what is fueling our life. (if we choose to live a life as part of society and not renounance from the worldly things) Our world is at a level of individuality that we have become so separated in our way of being that individuals poorly communicate and wouldn’t dare to be honest about themselves. Still, we cannot deny the reality of this honest type of sharing that imposes a risk in our culture, the risk of violating the norm of pretended invulnerability, an untruth that we face every day that is enlightening the planet for those that our grounding in their truth of suffering. A constant practice of removing the untruths is actually right in front of us, everyday, offering us an abundance of opportunities to being us to recognizing the truth.

Love,

Resa