The Tranquil Mind
The Tranquil Mind
January 30th, 2013
Picture your mind like a body of water. Sometimes it is calm and serene, the essence of tranquility as portrayed in this picture, reflecting so beautifully the nature of who you truly are. At other times it can be like a raging sea, tumultuously vacillating from one thought, belief or story to the next, violently covering over your beauty. You may have heard this analogy before, but it is worth repeating as it so beautifully expresses the path of yoga.
Sages, gurus and enlighten beings have shared with us through the teachings of the Yoga Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita that the path of yoga leads you to discover the qualities and gifts of the tranquil mind. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra 1.33 describes it this way, “By cultivating attitudes of friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous, and disregard toward the wicked, the mind-stuff retains its undisturbed calmness.” (Sri Swami Satchidananda’s translation.) Patanajali is offering us the awareness that it is possible to be in the world, with all that is happening and sit in the vast sea of the tranquil mind.
For many the question is how do I find the tranquil mind in the day to day nature of my life with all of the stress, time challenges, and feelings of being overwhelmed. Here are a few quick ways to attain the tranquil mind.
Number one: take stock of your breathing, and on the next exhalation make it a long, slow, easy breath. Too many of us let the stress build, and forget the powerful relaxation response that is built into an exhalation. The tranquil mind can be reclaimed in a single exhalation, and lost again a few breaths later. The beauty of this practice is that all day long you have the opportunity to exhale mindfully and clear or calm the mind. You are free to repeat as needed all day, all night.
Number two: sit quietly for only a few minutes each day and listen for the sound of AUM. It only takes a moment or two to sit quietly, fall in rhythm with your breath, soften your ears and simply listen. Allow yourself to listen beyond the usual sounds around you, and see if you can hear the sound of AUM humming. Fall in rhythm with this sound and you will be “attuning” yourself to nature. Immediately you will feel a softening in the tightness you have been experiencing.
Number three: recognize that the way you are living, is born from a habit that will repeat itself unless you make new choices. Start with numbers one and two, then open to other ways of shifting your life from a pyramid of stress upon stress lifestyle to one of tranquil mind. I sometimes see the mind like an etch-a-sketch and the breath as the way we can shake it clear. If you only discover it for a brief moment at first, the feeling of relaxation will be tantalizing.
Exhale, soften, create the space and make new choices. With every breath the cycle renews itself, and when you bring yourself to be aware of this, things will change. AUM!