A YOGI CHA BLOG

What you keep doing becomes your priority : shape yourself into what you want it to be instead of being a victim of your surroundings.

There’s  a famous quote from Mahatma Gandhi that states:

Your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, your values become your destiny ( and I would want to add, your destiny = your life). 

Let’s start from the ending of that sentence.

Begin with looking at your life situation today : what is your day filled with? What does your body feel and look like? What is the state of your mind and emotions? Can you imagine that this is a result of your beliefs?

If we can agree on that, another question arises. Where do our beliefs come from? Well they are shaped of course from what information our senses take in and what sense our intellect is making of that information. Our brain is made for survival and this survival happens at its best when we are capable of quickly adapting to our environment. For us to adapt quickly we need to understand it and for that understanding to take place, we need to see how it makes sense. This also means when something has a pattern that we can follow. If there is no pattern, we would say it is random. What is random is something we cannot make sense of. There is no logic. So we create an understanding of the world around us by taking in information and making sense of it. We also learn what our place in this world is through this. 

We learn what is important based on what the people who raise us find important. The very deepest of our behaviour patterns are being laid into the soil at this time. 

We truly are the fruit of that labour, we are the apple falling not so far from the tree. That which we call the automatic mode of our mind, our consciousness takes in all these behaviours and, like the gas pipelines buried deep under the Pacific ocean, we have no idea that they are there. 

The whole essence of this is that everything is happening below the line in the circle of awareness. What I am referring to is the definition of our consciousness by Joseph Campbell who simply makes a circle with a line straight through it. What is above or below the line of awareness. That which is below, we cannot see and therefore not control. Instead it is controlling us. 

My sister once said to me “I guess we repeat what we do until we don’t anymore” and that sounds simple but nonetheless it’s very true. It is the same thing as saying “you are who you are”.

And most of the time, this is how we live our lives. Blissfully unaware of what drives us really and the idea of taking responsibility for it seems impossible. 

But we do not have to let the automatic mode of our being be structured simply due to what we have been given from the people we are surrounded by. We do not have to live our lives passively. If you would pause and look at what your day looks like today, then you would see that this is how you live your life. It’s not just the day of today, it is a whole belief system. 

Have you ever heard that you are the average of the sum of the 5 people you spend most of your time with?

Whether that statement is solid or not, what is definitely true is that you will take on the habits and behaviours of the people you surround yourself with. 

This is why it can be really hard to know where we have gone wrong when we are not feeling well. Because it’s not just one thing and it’s often not the things you think. Furthermore, it’s often the things you really don’t want it to be. The things we have become quite attached to and believe we need to feel good are often what we use to compensate behaviours that are bringing us out of balance. 

The other day, just as I was leaving the audience of a workshop on Ayurveda, a lady stopped me and said : I really want to make some changes but it all feels so overwhelming, what would you suggest is the way to start?

One of the first ways to upgrade your health is to observe your natural urges, your body’s needs. In order to do so, we need to be very present because we need to actually become aware of what we do. We might need to note that down. 

If you look at what your day consists of today, you find that this is actually what your life consists of.

And what your life consists of is what your world looks like. And the way you look at the world shapes who you are because who you are shapes how you look at the world. 

The first step is to begin with becoming aware of all the things you do that lay under the line of awareness in the circle of consciousness.

You have to see what you do, so actually you have to start with observing yourself.