A mental double-edged sword
Are mental activities helpful or harmful?
Yes, they are. This month's May meditation is on viparyaya, imagination, so we'll center here today. At any given moment, we're usually imagining something. We look ahead a lot, even if it's to getting into the car after we walk out the door, going to sleep after a long day or ensuring we get what we need at the grocery store. There's nothing inherently negative about that, but there's a catch to viparyaya, as well as all mental activites.
The mental activities mentioned in Chapter One encapsulate all of the transactions the mind makes, through the senses, with the world around us: correct comprehension, incorrect comprehension, imagination, sleep and memory. Patanjali takes a neutral stance on all of them. They are activities only. Our own state of mind determines how they will impact us ; hence, they hold a unique place with regard to whether they cause us dukham or sukham. Rather than the activity itself, your momentary mental state lends itself to how your system processes, receives and interprets your transaction with the world within and around you.
Yoga’s primary aim is to steady the mind during practice. A constant process of visualizaton is evolving. For a time, the activities that lead us astray from a balanced abiding the present moment are cleaned from the mind, for a time. There, we meet deeper capacities for calmness, clarity, courage, ease and resilience. Once we leave practice, life gives us opportunities to sustain our more balanced presence. And we take the tool of bhavana, an empowered imagination, with us.
Perhaps it’s Saturday, and you’re going on a first date with a new potential love interest. You can use your imagination to dread and sabotage, or to fathom a pleasant experience, either way.
Or it’s Wednesday, and you’re commuting home from Manhattan at 5pm. Your imagination can have you cursing the two hours ahead, or benefitting from podcast or getting into a favorite playlist.
Maybe you’re going off to college, and you are afraid, understandably. You can imagine the future you want, growing into a capable, confident young adult with healthy study habits and a flourishing life.
Are you in labor? With each exhale, visualize surrendering the power of all of your ancestors moving through you to support you and that bambino/a through the birth process.
Have a diagnosis and unsure of what’s ahead? Visualize yourself healing with each breath, taking in prana, removing mala.
Maybe you have an overwhelming task at work. You can panic, and then you can summon faith in yourself and imagine yourself confidently breaking it down into a succession of manageable moments.
Maybe you can, as I do, surround your child with a shield of protection every night and morning to ensure harms stays off and they move safely through the days and nights.
Yoga strengthens the imagination so we can catch ourselves heading down a doomful driveway and 180 to empowerment and surrender for the situation at hand, whether it’s birth, life, death and all that happens in between.