Ever ask yourself why your life can look amazing on the outside, but you still feel like something missing on the inside? If so, watch this...it will help you fix it.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Have you ever asked yourself why it is that you can live in the top 1% of world…
With a roof over your head, plenty of food in the refrigerator, every modern convenience at your fingertips, have a loving family, and good health, and STILL feel like something is missing.
And this despite your best efforts with your career, your family, and even, with your spiritual or religious practices…There’s still that sense of lack or yearning-for-something-more?
This is the exact situation I found myself in.
And as I said before, there is a reason for it, it’s because we’re not making the right effort. But that right effort is not what, even most spiritual people, think it is.
It’s not the effort to become more spiritual or worthy.
It’s not the effort to make your life less busy or overwhelming.
It’s not the effort to somehow reconnect yourself to your Divine Source.
One of my earliest teachers liked to explain it like this.
We’ve all constructed a prison cell in our minds. We’ve walled ourselves into a small and separate sense-of-being that feels constricting, binding, and sometimes even frightening or suffocating.
And most of us have *no idea* that this is what we’ve done. We believe these prison walls of this shriveled identity to be real.
Your belief in your separateness and persistent anxiety is one prison wall.
Your mind’s lie about your inadequacy is another prison wall.
Your worry and self-doubt about the future is yet another wall.
And on and on it goes…and of course, then there’s, the wall that tells you that all the walls are real.
And with all of these walls built in our minds, and us believing them to be true, we have successfully constructed our prison cell, a False Conception of Self that keeps us trapped.
You know, it reminds me of when I was a kid, I don’t know, maybe third grade, I had joined this group called the Indian Guides. It was some sort of YMCA knock-off of the Cub Scouts where we’d go on camping trips and earn badges for learning tasks and making crafts and such.
In any event, whenever we’d have a new boy join us, we had a devious little initiation ceremony.
We’d fill a room with a complex maze of chairs and tables and books and plants and tell the boy he’d have to memorize all of the obstacles, which to go around, which to go over, which to crawl under, and then, blindfolded, he’d have to navigate from one side of the room to the others without touching any of the obstacles.
If he so much as nicked anything, he’d be out.
We’d give him five minutes to memorize it all, and then we’d take him to another room where he was blindfolded, while some of the other boys would *remove* all the obstacles from the room.
And then the fun would begin.
The new boy, now blindfolded, was brought back in to the now empty room where he was let loose to try to avoid all the “obstacles.”
We’d all stand watching, and laughing hysterically, as this blindfolded kid weaved this way and that, crouched down, walked on hands and knees, stepped up and over, the complex series of obstacles that… no longer existed.
In most cases, it would take the kid a full five agonizing minutes to cover the twenty feet across the now empty room, all because of his efforts were completely constrained and controlled by the obstacles that existed only in his imagination.
And you and I are a lot like that.
Because, just like the blindfolded boy’s contorted efforts were constrained by his False Conception of the Obstacles in the room.
For us too, our efforts to live our best and happiest lives are constrained by our False Conception of Self.
And this is where it gets worse…
As we live our lives needlessly-limited and confined by the imagined walls in our minds, we have come to believe that the only way to feel better is to spruce up our prison cell.
In the same way the boy made no effort to walk straight across the room, as he surely could have; We make no effort to escape from the confines of our self-constructed walls, because we believe that escape is not possible.
Instead, we go to work painting the walls, we sewing new curtains, hanging new art work, and recarpeting the floors, all in the hopes that we’ll be able to become comfortable and at home in our prison cells.
But here’s what you need to know. You’re not SUPPOSED to be comfortable in your prison cell, because it’s a denial of who you really are, it’s a denial of your Divine majesty.
And the fact is, there’s a penalty to be paid for living in a constricted sense of self, disconnected from your True Essence.
And that penalty is called pain and suffering and mental and emotional dis-ease of every kind…sent not to punish you, but to prompt you to escape.
That’s right, your suffering is a messenger, like any other symptom, it’s simply trying to get your attention. It’s inviting you to come home to who you are.
Just like the symptom of indigestion is inviting you to stop eating gosh darned chili dogs.
The symptom of your anxiety or doubt or worry is inviting you to break free from self constructed prison cell, your FALSE CONCEPTION OF SELF.
But here’s where most of us go wrong…
Not realizing that we are trapped by our own devices, we unwittingly hold on to this small and constricted and utterly FALSE CONCEPTION, and then…
We do our spiritual practices, we participate in our religious activities, all with that small, constructed, False Conception of Self 100% intact.
We do our meditation AS the prisoner
We do our yoga AS the prisoner
We go to church or temple and pray and do good works AS the prisoner
And then wonder why we still feel disconnected and small and anxious and filled with doubt.
But it’s no mystery…because everything you do AS the prisoner REINFORCES your identity as the prisoner. It reinforces your sense of separateness, your sense of smallness, your sense of powerlessness and all of the existential angst that comes right along with that.
This is why you can spend your entire life doing yoga and praying and meditating, but if you insist on doing it with your false conception of self in tact, on doing it AS the prisoner, you’re only reinforcing your dis-ease, and sealing your fate.
And honestly, this is what most people do.
So the question is how do we break free once and for all? To connect with who we really are and experience the majesty and joy and true freedom that life is supposed to be?
Well that’s where yoga’s three pillars of transformation come in.
They are Right Perception, Right Intention, and Right Practice, and together, they will help you see the truth of who you are. And as we all know, the truth will set you free.
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