Create An Inner Environment of Balance and Happiness
A constantly chattering mind will not allow any balance, any possibility of TRUE happiness because only a silent mind will be balanced enough to distinguish passing pleasure from true happiness. Only a silent mind can hear the silence, the happiness that is always bubbling there. It is so subtle that with the noise of the mind you cannot hear it. The outside can only be a mirror. When happiness flowing from within is reflected FROM the outside, with the outside functioning as a mirror, it is called pleasure and is impermanent.
When we live in a state of imbalance, more attention on the material world for happiness, we just exist in the endless, temporary and ultimately ending pleasures which leave us depressed because they are gone or anxious to find the next one to replace the last one. Unless you can have glimpses of happiness , you cannot stop your unlimited and futile pleasure-seeking efforts. If you are conscious, meditative, if you search for the real source, sooner or later you will realize that it is flowing from within. Once you know that it always flows from within, that it is something that you already have, you will stop hankering for insatiable pleasures from the outside to make you happy.
You are not killing desires, you are not fighting with desires, you have simply found something greater. Desires don’t look so important now. You simply neglect them because you have a greater source and you are magnetically attracted toward it. They wither away as you enjoy life from the state of pure happiness flowing from within!
Cultivate Pure Mind
Dedicating more time to silence and meditation is so valuable in observing a Sattvic or pure mind rising out of the state of Samadhi, the Eighth Limb of Yoga. The practice of meditation distills and dissolves our attachment to words, concepts, and false identities that make up most of our speech, our hearing and our daily world.
Everyday we use words and images to describe objects, people or events. Our world is so attached and identified to the use of words, but really words are empty objects. They are only a perception of an actual object. Yoga Sutra 1.9 reminds us that a word is nothing but a combination of sounds used together to convey a meaning. An attribute, characteristic, or identity is then created from these words and images. Confusion, projections, arguments and insecurities are caused when we associate qualities such as good/bad, rich/poor, honest/dishonest, this or that with people from which words have no foundation in them. We have been conditioned to use words to communicate, to trust labels and opinions, even on no solid truth. Attributes, words and images help to describe an object but have no reality. The formation of concepts, day-dreams, judgements and opinions cause more harm than they are worth. Every misunderstanding arises out of wrong knowledge or fantasy through words (vikalpas).
When we spend more and more time in the state of Samadhi, the silence beyond words, the false images in the mind are purified and we emerge with a refreshed, pure mind that radiates intelligence rather than illusion to extend out through us in our relationships with objects, people and events. In this silence there is peace and peace emerges. We are able to experience that words have no solidity and we should not become attached to them. We experience the state of freedom!
To lead us into this state of freedom we’ll access Yoga Sutra 1.9 along with Asana (light hip opening yoga poses) Pranayama (breathing practice), Dharana (focusing) and Pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses)to immerse us into a few mini meditations before culminating in a longer meditation (dhyana).
Sutra 1.9 translates as: Subject matter based on hollow verbal expressions, attributes or wrong knowledge is imagination. (vikalpa)