RASHMI KRISHNAN is a retired officer of the Govt. of India, and has been known for her open and helpful attitude in the Administration, while she was serving.
She is also a poet and writer who likes to write about the joy and pain of human experience. She is a follower of Paramhansa Yogananda and Swami Kriyananda through Ananda Sangha.
She lives in Delhi and now devotes herself to spiritual pursuits, which include study of scriptures, writing, and teaching. She believes in experimenting with spiritual principles and inspires people to do so. She generally looks after the Healing prayers group of Ananda Sangha and conducts workshops on healing, abundance, and other topics. Her blog can be visited at www.rashmisjustsharing.com
Freedom from Anguish (A Prescription)
Many of us would have experienced the pain and anguish of getting caught in the vortex of a strong and unpleasant emotion. However hard we try, that train of unpleasant thoughts, with its unpleasant emotions, refuses to die down and we find ourselves stuck in a downward spiralling chain of negative energy.
Some days ago, I went to visit an old relative, who was very close to my mother. I knew her to be eccentric and unpredictable, but I thought she might be lonely, and maybe I should cheer her up with some light family chit-chat. In my mind, I was doing a seva of love. However, God and Gurus had something else in store for me. We met with effusive displays of affection. Then, while talking, she moved away from casual conversations, and went on to generally criticise and complain against many of our common relatives, finally rounding upon me with some complaint about a past incident of which I had absolutely no recollection.While I fully endorse the traditional practice of respecting elders, I felt that what she had saidwas in bad taste, was uncalled for, unfounded, unfair and downright rude. A powerful reaction arose within me - a wave of resentment that grew as the days went by. My feelings ranged from hurt to injustice, to ‘poor me’ to “why do I have to tolerate such rubbish”, to “such people are suckers and suck your energy”, to “people don’t deserve to be pampered”, and so on. I was in a never-ending vortex of thought and feelings that fed each other… slowly and surely pulling me down into an emotional marsh…. believe me, I was aware I was sinking, but helpless to save myself
As a practising disciple of the teachings of the Yogananda line of Masters, I had been taught and trained to keep our energy uplifted and consciously choose to live in a state of high vibration. Despite my years of practising this teaching, and despite also, the close monitoring of my thoughts, I found myself unable to rise above this compelling experience. Where I had earlier accepted such events without much resistance, surrendering myself to some days on the roller coaster of unpleasant emotions, this time I felt severely challenged. My ‘spiritual ego’ was offended. Angered by the whole experience, I decided to put an end to it. They say that the ego is an enemy on the spiritual path. However, this time it was my ego that said to me, “Come on, how can you get so caught up in this spiral of unpleasant emotions? Where is your spiritual strength? Where is your sense of detachment? With the Great Masters guiding your life, and, as you say you are their disciple living their teachings, you haveto be able to get out of it. Passages and principles from the teachings of great spiritual masters started to float up from my subconscious into my conscious, reasoning mind
The first principle I remembered was, that strong emotions often have their roots in the past. If we look deeply at a persistent thought or emotion, we will find that it has a sort of personality of its own. It certainly wants to take over our heart and mind, and will resist every effort to curtail its reach and impact. You are in error if you think you are a free mind, that you have chosen the thought or emotion. It comes unbidden and takes you over. You have to see it for the vicious adversary that it is. Don’t be deluded that it is there to protect your interest. The fact that you are already suffering because of its presence, indicates that its basic purpose is to harm you. Having arisen out of seedsof past karma, itis now blooming because you have unknowingly nourished it with your energy. Do we want to continue living in this energy? if not, we have to consciously divert thought and feeling into another direction, one that is more pleasant and constructive.
If we can withdraw nourishment to that cycle of thought and feeling, start ignoring it, tell ourselves that we will not participate in and perpetuate it, it should wither away fairly quickly.
The next step is in fact a logical corollary to the first step: step back from the immediate experience and see it as just one event of many in the long journey of life; see this lifetime itself as only one of many lives. Some we have already lived, and some more we are likely to be living in the future. Tell yourself that you are eternal consciousness and nothing can really destroy you. Certainly not a skirmish of this kind, involving an unpleasant thought or emotion. Recall your connection with love and loving beings. Before this unpleasant experience there was the experience of love. We tend to forget the love that has sustained us so far, and then we start to feel unwanted and unloved. Give weight to and recall the love of your mother, father, brothers and sisters, friends, partners, whoever in fact. It doesn’t really matter whom it came from. All love and especially that which nurtures, is Divine in origin. That is a very profound thought, and has huge healing potential. Love, and the memory of love is something to feel blessed about. Developing awareness of it is a survival tool. Always keep it close to your heart and mind.
The third step is, to recall that suffering arises out of too close an identification with the role we are playing. All sadgurus tell us we can choosehow to perform our role: whether by totally by immersing ourselves in it, or keeping it in perspective as a role assigned. Paramhansa Yogananda, while discussing this issue says, “If you don’t like the plot, remember, the freer you are inside, the greater will be your ability to change it”. We are only one of the players in the particular drama that is our life. We have to appreciate that, however important our role may be to us and to others, the people in our lives have equally important roles assigned to them, and are living them with the same close sense of identification, which is for them, a source of joy as well as of pain. If you want to live in freedom from the extremes of joy and sorrow, of appreciation and disregard, and retain your equanimity and your inner joy, it helps to see things from this point of view. If that means losing an argument or apparently conceding a point, it is still worth it, because you can overcome that issue or episode or interaction and continue living the rest of your life smoothly and meaningfully, not getting sucked into a swamp of disagreement, acrimony and lingering sourness.
All of which brings us to the truth that it is sheer determination to get rid of that unpleasant energy of thought and emotion, that will lead you into free skies, and allow you to soar in joy.
Who says there is no ugliness or sorrow or misfortune in the world. However, we can choose to not dwell on it, and to dismiss unpleasant experiences as bad dreams that came, through which we lived, and which are now over.
As Yogananda ji has said, why look at the drains if you can look at the sky.
Otherwise, we would be committing the folly of living with sorrow as our constant companion where we could as well focus on the happy aspects of our life experience.
As evidence that this prescription works I have to say that it takes about a week of determination supported by persistent effort, to get out of a toxic cycle of thought and feeling, using a combination of these steps.
To flip this over, we are only one week away from freedom!
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