Author: lyelton

Have you ever had to interact with someone who just drives you up the wall?  Have you had to be around someone who was mean, condescending, and self-aggrandizing?  How about someone who shuts you down before you have had a chance to speak?  I know I have. 

Recently, I had to attend meetings with a person who was so toxic to me that it took me a day to get over it.  I was angry, hurt, unable to function.  I felt sick and was unable to do my work or enjoy any leisure.  I had to find a way to cope with my feelings, otherwise, this interaction would paralyze me.  So I turned to Yoga to find the way.    

Yoga gives us a set of ethical principles and practices that lead to calmness, balance and ultimately to union with the ineffable.  These principles and practices are called the Yamas and Niyamas.  I had faith that practicing the Niyama called Svadyaya would help me find my way. 

In Yoga, Svadyaya is self-examination.  It is one of the Niyamas or spiritual practices that ushers us toward meditation by giving us contentment with who we are as a person.  Svadyaya guides us to look at ourselves objectively.  In Sanskrit, Sva means “self” or “belonging to me”, while Adhyaya means “inquiry” or “examination.” 

Yoga master B.K.S. Iyengar explains Svadyaya as reading your own book-of-life at the same time as writing and revising it.  He says that by the practice of Svadyaya, one becomes aware of life as devotion.  We become aware that all life is divine. 

Svadyaya takes effort.  It takes a close, objective, look at ourselves that includes becoming aware of those aspects of yourself that you do not like.  In modern terms, the aspects of yourself that you do not like are commonly called your Shadow.     

The psychologist Carl Jung coined the term Shadow to refer to one of the main archetypes residing in the personal unconscious that have the most disturbing effects on the Ego. 

Jung wrote:

The Shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole Ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the Shadow without considerable moral effort.  To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. 

This is not an easy task.  Jung goes on to add, “This act is an essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance.” 

The resistance comes from our emotional reaction to those dark aspects.  To admit we have those traits makes us unlovable, and we all want love.  Thus, when we see ourselves as mean, lazy, gluttonous, lecherous, greedy, aggrandizing, or envious, we fear that we are unlovable and therefore unloved and that is a difficult blow to our ego. 

Yet, we see those traits in others quite easily in a mental process psychologists call “projection.”  In other words, in order to protect our ego from being unloved, we project those qualities that we fear most about ourselves onto others.  We project our Shadow onto others.  We see the characteristics of our Shadow in other people.    

The practice of Svadyaya made me look at my own Shadow relative to the person who had vexed me.  When I judged that person to be toxic—mean, condescending and aggrandizing—I knew I must be projecting those traits and that they were attributes that I fear most about myself. 

Was I, in fact, mean?  Did I condescend to others?  Was I aggrandizing and did I shut others down?  I reached back into my memory to find times when I had done so.  They weren’t hard to find. 

I am mean.  I had been mean recently.  I had said some extremely mean things about another person, in fact, about that person!  I’m not physically mean.  I don’t kill or hurt anything.  I’m one of those people who escorts spiders out of the house on a piece of paper.  When it rains, I pick worms up off the sidewalk and place them on the dirt.  But my thoughts can be dark and my words can cut deeply. 

I have condescended to people.  I condescended to my niece when she was a little girl.  I aggrandize.  Aggrandizing was a critique I received on a work review once.  And I do shut others down, especially if I think they are less intelligent than I am. 

I found, through Svadyaya, that I had all the qualities I had projected on the person who drove me up the wall.  Indeed, that person is a reflection of me, of my Shadow.  In that person, I confronted my own Shadow and I didn’t like it—at all. 

My practice of Svadyaya reminded me that I am still a work in progress.  Indeed, B.K.S. Iyengar’s idea of Svadyaya as “reading your own book-of-life at the same time as writing and revising it” fit with this experience exactly.  It is time for me to do a bit of revision.  It is time for me to recognize my Shadow, accept it, and recognize that when I judge someone else harshly, it is likely because I see something in that person that I don’t like in myself. 

I am so confused by what is happening in the world today.  I had intended to write my introductory blog-post about my social media bio, which is simply Sat Nam.  The intended post went like this:

Sat Nam, a Sanskrit phrase, is frequently used as a mantra in Kundalini yoga practices.  It is typically translated as something like “the truth is my identity.”  But the phrase is much simpler yet more illusive than that. 

Remember that Sanskrit words are often the source of words in Indo-European languages, including English.  Sat, then, is the root for the English word such which alludes definition:

• Dictionary.com says such means “of a kind.”
• American Heritage Dictionary adds “itself alone or within itself.”
• The Cambridge Dictionary calls the word such a determiner—whatever that means.  

In Sanskrit the definition of sat is much the same as such.  It is of an entity, species or existence and variously implies that which is true, being, happening, real, existing, enduring, lasting, essential.

Thus, sat is the suchness of a thing, its existence, its essence, its eternal being. 

Nam is easier;  it means name. 

Sat Nam, then, as my bio means “I call myself existence.”  This phrase might sound familiar to those raised in the Judeo Christian tradition.  Is it not similar to “I am that am”, the name of God, the infinite consciousness of the universe? 

Thus, I am not a female human.  I am not my long list of career accomplishments.  I am not even the multiplicity of cells and microbes which make up the temple into which my existence projects.  I am a projection of infinite consciousness focused into a field of time and space where I share the experiences of existence with other such projections.  There’s that word such again. 

Thus, I undefine myself from any illusion of materiality that separates me from the infinite.  I am surrendered to the infinite, allowing it to bring me into the domain of pure potential from which I can choose, with my focused consciousness, I can choose my experience on a momentary basis using time as my creative medium.   

I gained this knowledge from Yoga, from practicing the eight limbs of Yoga, from adhering to the ethical principals that free the human mind from the chatter and clutter that block perception of, and union with, infinite consciousness.  I know that each experience is just an expression of my own dharma—and karma— and my reaction is what creates my experience.  I can choose my experience if I simply regard each moment in time without judgment, with a sense of equanimity.  I needn’t think of any experience as bad or good, just as its own eternal essence of being without any attachment to “what’s next” because I know “what’s next” is my essence projecting on the field of time. 

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I wrote the above amidst the Covid 19 shutdown, assuming that I would choose not to participate in the illness or be masked.  And then. . .and then. . .and then all hell broke loose. 

Just as people were emerging from their quarantine hidey-holes to retake their positions at work, at play, at school into what was supposed to be a joyous reunion, a rogue white cop killed a black man and all the unhealed wounds of racism burst open and the world wailed and bled.  All the people who felt unheard cried out in unison for justice. 

For me, the current events recalled the race riots of the 1960s, which burnt entire cities.  Yes, I am that old.  I was there when Martin Luther King gave the “I Have  Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial to the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators on the Washington, DC Mall.  And I, I thought those wounds had healed, or at least were stitched up.  After all, I live in peace, friendship and harmony alongside all races in Virginia, on a Civil War Battlefield, equidistant from the old Capital of the Confederacy and the current Capital of the Free World.  Many of my very closest friends, members of my family, and my co-workers are of a different race than I am, and I never really notice.  It just doesn’t register with me—honestly. 

Then a young woman, one young enough to be my grown child, called me a racist because I didn’t know the meaning of POC, thus, I must not be in dialogue with any other race or I would know that POC means “people of color.”  And I flipped into an angry, cursing bitch.  She had to be a stupid, shallow, inexperienced little twit to say that.  I, who claim to be a projection of infinite consciousness, suddenly became a focused fragment of fear. 

How about you?  How is this experience affecting you?  I know I am as confused as can be because this has happened before.  Why and how could it happen again?  How did I, and we, create this reality—again?  How does one regain equanimity in an environment of doubt, fear and confusion?

Is this happening because the media is divided into two factions, each reporting only the extreme version of its corporate-narrative and projecting that narrative into our collective reality?  There is certainly more going on than just a virus and racially motivated demonstrations.  It appears to me as if there is a destructive agenda being activated.  And that alone is certainly a reason to step back and disengage; to go into yourself and find your own place of calm, and act, or not, on what feels right for you. 

Or, you may ask, should we even try to regain equanimity?  Should we instead join the crowd and demonstrate for justice knowing that we will confront opposition, possible violence and confusion? 

I am not sure of the answer for you.  I can’t be the one who determines your action or reaction; no one else but you can, nor should they.  But if nothing else, it might help to share our thoughts and experiences.  So tell what you feel and what you will do or are doing to balance yourself.  I await your comments.

The sacred light in me honors and recognizes the sacred light in you.