self-awareness | Shiva's Dance

“You can observe a lot just by watching” — Yogi Berra

I have become a voyeur-a silent witness of my inner self. I can watch my thoughts, my emotions, and my bodily sensations. I am a voyeur of “me.” It is as if there are two “Mes”, there is one that is watching, and there is one that is being watched. I can watch all of “me” dispassionately, like a scientist. This is the single biggest step forward in my journey of self-discovery. One small step for the new me and one giant leap for the old me. Apologies to Neil Armstrong.

It has taken me many years to develop the ability to watch my thoughts and emotions without judging them. I have learned a lot about myself just by watching my thoughts, emotions, and sensations in my body. It is a skill I developed through practice. Normally, I get swept up in my thoughts, one thought leads to another and another, and the mind wanders off. I had to work at breaking this habit. I had to learn to let go of thought as soon as it appears. I had to train myself to look at a thought as a cloud wafting through the sky, watch without attachment, and see it as an object as it drifts. Slowly the thoughts stop coming when I do this now. My mind becomes still.

The act of watching, non-judgmentally, quietens my mind, quells my emotions, and removes tension in my body. My mind, body, and emotions become harmonized. Borrowing the language from the Vedas, my chakras become aligned, my nadis[i] open up, and I feel connected to the universe. In this state, there is no “I.” There is just emptiness. I am like an empty vessel, open, spacious, and accepting. And attuned to the wisdom of the universe.

Paraphrasing Yogi Berra, I observe a lot just by watching. There is no need for a guru; there is wisdom within us. There is a knowing beyond knowledge. We can access this wisdom. Unfortunately, we are not taught to get in touch with the wisdom within us. Some, like me, stumble into it, many turn to religion, and most never discover it.

Scientific methods cleave the observer from the observed. But the voyeur in us, or the silent witness, turns us, the observer, into the observed. Only humans have this capacity to observe themselves. I am an object to the voyeur in me that can be watched and studied “scientifically.” I can gather data on the workings of my mind and analyze it like a scientist. Equally importantly, I change the contents of my mind by watching and witnessing them. Quantum physics has proven that the very act of observing a phenomenon changes it. By observing my thoughts, I release the baggage associated with any negative thoughts I may be holding on to. Observing one’s thoughts erases the associated network of thoughts from the memory bank, leaving less material for the mind to dredge up. Over time this practice empties the mind and frees it from past conditioning. It opens the mind to experiencing life fresh and anew in each moment.

The Vedic sages were scientists of a kind. Their method of inquiry was from the inside out. Their starting point of inquiry was their mind (and emotions). Through this process, they transcended their minds and accessed “truths” that western science is just beginning to approach. The process of the sages was the inverse of the process of western science. The Vedic sages started with the subjective self and discovered that the rest was a projection of the self (mind). Modern scientific methods exclude the personal, the self, from their study of the phenomenological world. Thus, western science has not yet made the connection between the subjective and the objective — the world inside and the world outside.

“Science describes accurately from the outside; poetry describes accurately from the inside. Science explicates, and poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe.” Ursula K. Le Guin.[ii]

The voyeur in me is a scientist. The voyeur observes and collects data on me, just like a scientist. The very act of observing “me” changes me. The change happens automatically without additional effort. By watching one’s thoughts, the entire structure of related thoughts and beliefs is uprooted; it is like pulling out the root structure underneath a weed-. The practice of witnessing one’s thoughts and feelings is transformational because it empties our minds of past conditioning.

[i] (yogapedia, n.d.)

[ii] (Brainpickings, n.d.)

“it is with heart one sees rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye” Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince.

“The Caterpillar is the first character who tries to guide Alice on her journey. Since she’s tired of growing larger and smaller due to circumstances beyond her control, the Caterpillar teaches her to eat parts of the mushroom to control her size. Some critics, and especially people in popular culture, see Caterpillar as a representative of drug culture since he’s smoking a hookah and shows Alice how to eat a magic mushroom. But we prefer to see Caterpillar as a lackadaisical guru who helps Alice figure out how to control the imaginative world that she’s exploring. The Caterpillar also reminds Alice that changing in size and shape isn’t always a bad thing — after all, one day, the Caterpillar will metamorphose into a butterfly, and instead of being unnerving, it will be the high point of his life.” [i]

Everyone needs a lackadaisical hookah-smoking guru. After all, we also must be reminded that changing isn’t always a bad thing and could be the high point of our lives. Metamorphosis, for us, is akin to a “heart transplant.” Why?

The latest findings by neuroscientists are that the seat of all passions is the amygdala, two almond-shaped structures that sit on top of the brain stem. Daniel Goleman (Goleman, 2005), who popularized the concept of emotional intelligence, explains in his book that humans have two brains- the thinking and the emotional. The thinking brain is the neocortex, and the emotional brain is the amygdala. If the amygdala is severed, one loses the “ability to gauge the emotional significance of events.” A sad condition to have, as one becomes a robot devoid of feelings.

The Vedic sages did not understand the structure of the brain, but their exploration into human emotions led them to conclude that we have three bodies-the physical body, the emotional body, and the mental body. And they came to similar conclusions as the neuroscientists that the emotional body is impulsive and acts at times without “forethought,” hijacking the mental and the physical bodies. We have all experienced instances where we lost control and acted in ways that we later regret. In these instances, our thinking brain is no longer in control, and our emotions have taken over.

Emotions are powerful energies. In Hinduism, there is an imagery of a coiled serpent representing the energies trapped in our bodies. This energy is called Kundalini, best explained as a parable of Shiva and Shakti-two deities in Hinduism.

The parable, as described in (https://www.gaia.com/article/what-kundalini-awakening, n.d.), goes as follows:

“Lord Shiva symbolizes consciousness and the unmovable power of the observer. He is said to have meditated for thousands of years while Shakti danced for him. Her longing to be one, dancing with her beloved, provokes him to open one of his three eyes. She beckons for him to dance with her. He closes his eye and rests back in meditation for thousands more years, awaiting her absolute clarity that joining in harmonious union with him is her true desire. As her longing intensifies, she determines that she must dance with her Beloved Lord Shiva. At that, his three eyes open, dance together, and the universe unfold into creation all at once. All of nature is created as a result of their union.”

Both neuroscientists and the Vedic sages have concluded that when the emotional and the mental bodies/brains work in harmony, we reach peak performance levels. The ultimate state of being is when the mind, body, and heart are perfectly aligned and in harmony with nature.

“Nature is all that dances, moves, and changes in this world. The witness or seer within each of us is Shiva, and the nature of all things around us and within us is Shakti. When Shiva and Shakti are separate, spiritual awakening cannot take place. That separate state is known as a duality. The very merging of Shiva and Shakti obliterates duality and opens the spiritual river of oneness through which Kundalini flows.”[ii]

Our negative emotions are trapped energies (Shakti) seeking release. Our spiritual metamorphosing happens when we transmute our negative emotions into healing energies. It is the transformation that Gary Zukav refers to as the journey from the head to the heart. I have come to think of it as a heart transplant.

Learning to recognize my emotions and how to deal with them has been the most difficult part of my journey and the most transformative. I have learned to pay attention to my negative feelings. Negative emotions draw our attention to areas in us that need to be healed. The energies trapped in our emotions are looking to be released. We can release these energies consciously, or they will release themselves, often causing drama in our lives. Emotions held back and not released leave an emotional scar in us.

We often use the analogy of a musical instrument to describe our emotional state. We say that “our heart strings were pulled,” “we are high strung,” we are “tight as a drum,” “felt played like a fiddle,” etc. There is a good reason for it; our emotions are energies in motion that create sensations in our bodies. Each emotion has a unique “signature movement” in our body. Anger feels different than love, and sadness is different from joy. We respond emotionally to life events. It is as if life events strum our emotional strings to produce different notes in our being; Love, happiness, gratitude, and awe feel as if our entire being is in tune with the harmony in nature, whereas sadness, anger, fear, and disgust produce discordant notes in us.

“it is with heart one sees rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye” Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince.

I taught myself to watch my emotions. Emotions become objects to be watched. Watching releases blocked energy, which releases tension in the body. I began to track my emotions every day for eighteen months, built a database of my emotions and mental states, and recorded how my body felt in response to an emotional charge.

I have become a scientist of my own emotions. I can watch my thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations dispassionately. I have discovered a lot about myself just by watching. As the incomparable Yogi Berra[iii] said, “you can observe a lot by watching.” I learned that I can get my emotions off my chest by staying current with my emotions. I do not hold them in. They no longer fester in me, becoming toxic.

I have noticed that negative emotions feel different in the body than positive ones. The body feels weighed down with negative emotions, hence the expression, “I feel like I am carrying the weight of the world.” Positive emotions make my body feel buoyant, almost weightless. Not surprisingly, our emotional state affects others around us. Emotions are like vibrations emanating from us and creating a field around us.

Negative emotions in us bring negativity in others, and positive emotions positively affect others. Neurologists attribute this effect to mirror neurons in our brains. These are the “monkey see; monkey do neurons.” “When I see you smiling, my mirror neurons for smiling fire up, too, initiating a cascade of neural activity that evokes the feeling we typically associate with a smile. I don’t need to make any inference on what you are feeling; I experience immediately and effortlessly (in a milder form, of course) what you are experiencing.”, according to Marco Iacoboni[iv], a neuroscientist at UCLA.

Negative emotions alert us to the broken pieces of our psyche. They are the tip of the iceberg; we have to look beneath the surface and discover what in us triggers these emotions and why we feel the way we do. Heeding the message embedded in our negative emotions is a big part of self-discovery. If we fix what is inside, the outside will not matter.

[i] (https://www.shmoop.com/alice-in-wonderland-looking-glass/caterpillar.html, n.d.)

[ii] (https://www.gaia.com/article/what-kundalini-awakening, n.d.)

[iii] (https://ftw.usatoday.com/2015/09/the-50-greatest-yogi-berra-quotes, n.d.)

[iv] (http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/marco-iacoboni-mirror-neurons, n.d.)