Breaking the Shackles of Rigidity
During the practice of yoga asanas you realize how rigid you are physically. It takes a little more awareness for you to know the rigidity in your mind and emotions. Somebody who is very rigid in his thoughts and emotions believes that he is perfect because he does not allow room for any other way of looking, thinking or feeling. When you meet this man, you think he is pig-headed, but he thinks he is perfect. Similarly, there can be rigidity on the energy level. For someone whose energy is very fluid, on the very first day of the simplest yoga kriya, the energy will start moving and transforming, whereas for another person, even after practicing it for a long time, nothing seems to happen. This simply depends on how malleable the energies are. The rigidity in all these dimensions isn't really separate, it is all interconnected. The rigidity in one dimension manifests itself into the others.
On Patanjali's path, yoga is a system where it doesn't matter what kind of a fool you are, what level of unawareness you're in, what kind of karmic bondages you have; there is still a way for you. If you are willing to at least bend your body, you have already broken one karma. If your forehead touches your knee, then you have broken a physical karma. This is not a joke; it's quite an achievement for a person who has never done it before. This simple limitation would have increased with the passage of time. Even the little flexibility that's there in you today will become less as time goes by. A day will come when you're totally rigid, both physically and mentally.
This is happening to everybody. Look at your own life; see how flexible you were at the age of ten or twelve, both physically and mentally. At the age of twenty, the flexibility is considerably less and at the age of thirty, most of it has gone. Not only physically; mental rigidity has also set in; it's not progression, rather it is regression. Life is just a regression for most people. They are not growing; they are going backwards. Even with what little assets they have come, they don't grow; they just go backwards, unfortunately. Whatever advantage you were born with, you haven't enhanced it; you have only taken it backwards.
The spiritual path is actually very simple, but because of your personality it has become extremely complicated. The complexities that one encounters on the spiritual path are not because of the path. The complexities are only there because of the mess that is your mind. The path is very simple, but because you are there, it becomes extremely complicated. Nothing moves within you. You become rigid, as if rigor mortis has set in. You need the Master's Grace to quell the madness of your mind.
If you allow the Master's Grace, then the path is very simple, as the path is the destination. If you simply sit here now, everything will pulsate with the existence. If you just sit here, your whole being will pulsate with the existence.
You have kept your energies suppressed to such an extent, the mind has become so oppressive that it suppresses life to the point where nothing moves except what is needed to support the ego. Your energies are moving only to the extent that is convenient for your ego; a little more energy and the ego will burst. The moment energy rises within you, everything is dissolved.���The ego knows it very well. That is why it has kept it suppressed.
If you don't have any energy, then again the ego will become very weak. When all energy is cut off, the ego will feel very weak and it doesn't like that. So it just allows the amount of energy which supports and feeds it well. If the energy becomes too much, the ego will be shattered. If kundalini begins to rise, everything will be shattered and nothing will be left. You will be just a force merging with everything around you. You won't have a will of your own anymore. Since you are not willing to surrender your will, we are prodding you through this sadhana to provoke your energies. That is why the path of asana and kriya. Since you are not able to do it by yourself, just activate creation itself in a certain way. If it begins to move, it settles everything. It is like a flood; your centuries-old world is wiped away in only a few hours of fury. So your sadhana is not about getting somewhere. It is just a way, a method to unleash a flood so enormous that it wipes away your petty creations and leaves you as the Creator intended you to be.
-Sadguru Jaggi Vasudev
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