Breaking through barriers on mat

The more we break through barriers on our mat, the more we can break through the barriers of daily life.

Yoga Netri shares how we cultivate rigidity on many levels, which creates a barrier that does not allow us to flower.

It is our rigidity that prevents our flowering. One can become rigid in many dimensions. During the practice of yoga asanas, you realize how rigid you are physical. It takes a little more awareness to know the rigidity in your mind and emotions. Somebody who is very rigid in his thoughts and emotions believes he is perfect because he does not allow room for any other way of looking, thinking, or feeling.

Similarly, there can be rigidity in your energy. For someone whose energy is very fluid, energy will start moving and transforming the very first day of the simplest kriya. Whereas, for another person, even after practicing for a long time, nothing seems to happen. This simply depends on how malleable the energies are.

On Patanjali’s path, yoga is a system where it doesn’t matter what level of unawareness you are in, or what kind of karmic bondages you have, there is still a way for you. If you are willing to bend your body, you have already broken one karma. If your forehead touches your knee, you have broken physical karma. This simple limitation would have increased with the passage of time. Even the little flexibility that is there in you today will become less as time goes by. A day will come when you are totally rigid, both physically and mentally.

So how to break barriers?

If you simply sit, your whole being will pulsate with the existence. There is no other way to be unless you make an effort to be some other way. How can you be away from the existence in which you live? How is it possible? It envelops you in every way, inside and out. No one can ever be away from it. It is just that you are doing everything to stay away, maybe unconsciously. Just stop doing that and everything will be okay. So, just to get you to stop all that we have kriyas and asanas.

Activating Creation Itself

If you look at it, all of this is not necessary. But unfortunately, it is needed right now. You have kept your energies suppressed to such an extent, and 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 and it doesn’t like that.

And if you are willing to surrender your will, we prodder you through sadhana to provoke your energies. That is why the path of asana and kriya. If it begins to move, it settles everything. It is like a flood. 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.