yoga philosophy of everyday

written by Dr Elena Bacash

This year at Fairfield Wellness I ran a course on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. As always with yoga philosophy the nature of teasing out the meaning in the material results in growth whether that is deepening the personal meditation practice or releasing a samaskara (a subconscious pattern)  and seeing more clearly where there had been a blindspot in the psyche before. 

Two of the most useful and practical aspects of Book 1 centre around relinquishing likes and dislikes and developing a loving detachment. These two concepts brought into daily living release our suffering and help us to better deal with the challenges in life. 

Buddhist teachings also mention this, as do all the spiritual teachings. The Buddha stated it as the need to follow the razor-edged path between pleasure (likes) and pain (dislikes). It's razor-edged because we want things to be the way we want them!  It is very easy to slip into everything around us being about us and for us,  so we become incredibly frustrated when something occurs in our lives that we don't like, for example it rains on our birthday or someone drops the pavlova at Christmas lunch, or someone cuts us off in the car. So we spend our lives trying to control everything and everyone around us or living thinking everyone else is the idiot! There is another way though, it's simply to just not get caught up in what we want and what we don't want. This is a really transformative exercise. For example, say we hate doing abdominal crunches - we can decide to change the commentary to 'I love this'  to neutralise the dislike to be neutral about it. We can expand the concepts of what we're ok with in the world so we don't fall in a heap when it doesn't turn out the way we want it.  

The Third Zen Patriarch described it like this;

'The Great Way is not difficult

For those who have no preferences

When desire and hate are both absent

Everything becomes clear and undisturbed

Make the smallest distinction however and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.'

The great wisdom teachings all describe a similar remedy in developing detachment and releasing our preferences - if we focus our attention back on the part of us observing our thoughts and feelings, called the Higher Self, we stop getting caught up in our 'stuff' and start to realise there are 8.3 billion other people on the planet who want things their way too!  The more we practice sitting in the seat of the Higher Self (which is the purpose of meditation) and then bringing that into our daily living 24/7 then we start living as Souls reduce our suffering and we start to appreciate  our interconnectedness to all others!