How to rein in the worldly Ego 

Among all the egos the spiritual ego is the most dangerous and difficult to shed off. To top it all, spiritual scaling is well neigh impossible without subduing the ego. This is the contradiction that I too face when I’m doing my daily sadhana. 

The reasons are not far to seek. In your various stages of spiritual practice, the ego throws up desires and fanciful imaginations of you becoming a great spiritual leader addressing large gatherings, having big followings, people falling at your feet, and what have you. Primarily also because this is the worldly image of a spiritual master. 

Secondly, if you happen to be also entangled with the world and doing your sadhana too, then your ego is all the more active. Not that ashrams totally banish all ego. There too it persists and ashrams too have their own set of problems but maybe less pronounced. 

However, the beauty of unfailing daily sadhana is that the answers come to you.

I am sharing one such experience of facing the problem in my sadhana and the answer also being revealed during the practice. 

During japa, Kriyas, my own vanity and ego do throw up thoughts of the kind I mentioned earlier. Every day it is different kind of fanciful imagination which distracts your mind. You are in a bind. The ego is the stumbling block in you rising to the very heights the ego is desiring. Forget about long term effects of the ego on your spiritual goal. The effect is instantaneous.

Here is how I keep experiencing it. My daily morning sadhana is a progression from simple limbering up, to asanas, suryanamaskar, shavasna followed by pranayama. By this stage I’m partially withdrawn from the world and both the body and mind are ready for an hour of sitting still in padmasana for the Kundalini Kriyas, and three mantras which I chant 108 times. 

Sitting still in padmasana you do the more difficult practice of keeping your mind on your mudras, breathing, mantras and external and internal trataka and many such combinations of mudras, bandha, mantra, jaap and focus on some symbol. These leave very little space for thoughts to push their way in. Just still posture impacts the mind and makes it quiescent. The rest add to see that it remains so.  

Even then thoughts and often ego linked thoughts find a breach in your well fortified dam of practice and flood you and hijack your practice. At that instant your breathing becomes faster, gross and body experiences tightness in some strategic places which are prone to take the brunt of the thought process which varies with each individual. 

One such day, when the train of thought and imagination was of me telling someone some egoistic claims of my practice, I was once again filled with shame and frustration at my inability to control my ego and thoughts. Just then it occurred to me, hey why don’t you direct this kind of boasting and egoistic crap towards your guiding light, Swami Satyananda ( who is my Guru) or even God.

I started to laugh uncontrollably at the thought. How ridiculous I myself appeared to myself in that vision. Yes, suddenly that same self indulgent thought seemed utterly stupid. 

This realization has somewhat reined in unbridled tendency of egoistic and fanciful imaginations. 

The motto has  to be to go on and on with sincerity, faith and determination. If you are not fortunate enough to have a Guru to guide you at every step, it matters not. There is a guiding light within which will surely light your path just as darkness of night is dispelled by the light of the day.  

Jai Gurudev!!

 

 

A simple secret of your Ego. 

Swami Satyananda Saraswati has been like a light house guiding my ship of sadhana through rough and calm waters. 

I’ve been reading intently a second time, Swamiji’s precious book, “Taming the Kundalini”. It is a collection of letters of instructions on daily sadhana written by him to a disciple between April 1959 to April 1962. Every sentence of this book is its weight in gold. 

Hence, when I came across a list of 27 preparatory instructions for awakening the Kundalini, one of them intrigued me and I could not fathom its import. It was as follows:

“ Purify the ego by transforming the objective of sleep.”

This foxed me. How can you purify your ego by transforming the objectives of sleep? What are the objectives of sleep? 

For many days it kept me thinking. But, the intellect is not always equipped to unravel such quandaries. And sure enough it was not the intellect but an experience that unraveled it for me. 

I was practicing Trataka on a candle flame and following it up with shambhavi mudra with Om chanting to see the candle flame at my eye-brow centre with eyes closed. ( Trataka, Shambhavi are explained in my book on Kundalini Yoga for All). During all my practices I try to keep my body relaxed. In fact, you can sit in padmasana for long swathes of time only if you are completely relaxed or else discomfort and pain begin to manifest and it becomes well neigh impossible to sit in padmasana. 

In my effort to see the candle flame at my eye brow centre with eyes closed after concentrating on it for sometime, I would find thoughts like, “ I am going to achieve this.”  Or if I saw it only briefly or vaguely, immediately I would think, “I will tell my Guruji that I saw the candle flame.” But, as soon as such thoughts came the candle flame went away. Also, I found that my shoulders hunched up and tightened some what. I consciously relaxed them. 

It suddenly flashed that with the slightest egoistic thought, my body experienced some tension, tightness somewhere. Concomitantly, it struck me that the practice  was not an achievement in the normal worldly sense of, “I did this.” In fact, it has to be the opposite. You are supposed to become ego-less. 

Your ego is the peg that tethers you to this world. How can you ever break free of it? Then and there it struck me that relaxation was essential to see that the ego or all egoistic thoughts don’t manifest. If tension, stress and tightness in the body are manifestation of ego, then doing the opposite to the body consciously will help restraining ego and egoistic thoughts.  

The best relaxation happens when you sleep. More so when you are in deep sleep. You are completely relaxed and there is no awareness of the world, the ego, egoistic thoughts or any external feedback to the senses. One can just sum it up in a neat equation:

Relaxation is inversely proportionate to Ego. 

Ego is directly proportionate to Stress both bodily and mental

Ego is directly proportionate to thoughts

Quiet mind is inversely proportionate to ego. 

Therefore, yoga practice factors in relaxation and thought control both of which are necessary for ego to feed on and survive. 

The objective of sleep is to rejuvenate, revitalize and puts your body at rest to accomplish this. But, if your ego is strong, then it is most likely that thoughts, stress will bother you even in your sleep. Thus, this will defeat the very purpose and objective of sleep. 

The stronger your ego, the more you are likely to have dreams revolving around your egoistic thoughts and activities of the day. This will result in disturbed sleep and interfere in the objectives of sleep being carried out. 

Thus, following the relaxation dictate and internalizing your awareness will help you contain egoistic tendencies. Instead of fighting against the Ego which is part of your Antahkarna, the basic tools of your individuality, you can work on it through simple yoga dictate, relaxation and thoughtlessness. 

WIth this realization, my practice has taken a quantum leap. 

Jai Gurudev!!!