Patanjali Yoga Sutra: Day 02

DAY 02: HONOURING THE PRACTICE

• Mind can never be you. Mind can never go to where you are. Mind can never reach that depth.
• When we realize that something is just 'mind stuff', we feel free. The more aware we are the more free we become.

Abhyasa (Practice)

• This effort to be still/steady is practice.
• Practice is being steady, the stability, in the moment we call 'now'. How to get this - it takes time, require practice and then it becomes firm.
• Mind need more time for its growth than body takes time to grow.
• Every practice requires time, significant time and that too without gap. Connection should not be broken. Constant practice is essential. e.g any instrument or any sports.
• Another requirement for practice is doing things with honoring and respect. We should do it with gratitude and respect.
• We tend to lose the honor, respect with time. If you are not satisfied with your kriya or meditation some day, find that you have lost attentiveness and attention. You are not honoring it, you are not honoring your self.
• Honor is the total attentiveness to present moment with full heart  and complete gratitude.
• Respecting / honoring every moment - that is practice.
• Any practice is a practice when it is done over a time without gap with respect, is practice.
• If you don’t have respect for master your meditation will not work. Because it is that respect which will make you be in that moment.

Vairagya (Detachment)

• Mind goes to our senses. e.g. Sight, sense of touch, or something that we have heard.
• Craving for any of the senses or even for heavenly things are obstructions on the path.
• Vairagya: vairagya is believing that how ever good/great anything I am not interested in any of the act of senses. This is very essential for good meditation. We require this dispassion for mediation.
• If mind is obsessed with desires, it can not meditate.
• Having a thought that I don't want a desire is also a desire.
• Expectation in mediation in also an obstruction in the meditation.
• Craving for happiness brings misery. Don't even care for happiness. If you don't 'crave for happiness', you are happy. If you don't care for happiness you are free and liberated and when you don't even care for liberation you are in love (param vairagya).
• We should not stop from enjoying but we should not crave for enjoying. Because actual enjoyment can happen only when mind is without cravings.
• All your desires and craving for happiness should be dropped.
• Become free from feverishness and craving for happiness that is gripping our mind.
• Remembering of that fact that 'one day you are going to die' helps in dropping craving that comes to our mind. So if mind is bombarded with cravings, just remember this fact of death.
• All the object of senses have limitation but our mind doesn't have limitations.
• Without blaming anybody or anything, coming above these things (being in this world but still being centered) is the vairagya.
• Once you know the nature of your self, there is total pleasure. All fears disappear.
• Being centered even when you are in material world (vairagya), is second essential principle in yoga.
• Satva, rajasa and tamasa gunas keep coming  in our life in a cycle. Don't be averse to anything. Whatever you averse with you stay with and whatever you crave for you keep craving for. Just witness and watch.
• Yoga is a skill, skill to be centered, skill to be in love and a skill that doesn't let this love turn in into hatred.