A YOGI CHA BLOG
IGNORANCE IS BLISS
Hi, I’m Charlotte (Yogi Cha). I’m a yoga teacher with a degree in clinical psychology. I’ve always had a deep curiosity toward eastern and western approaches to understanding the mind, and the ming/body union. You’ll find me in the lovely Canggu Bali, nestled amongst coconuts and palm trees 🥥🌴🌞
Ignorance is numbing our pain with social media and alcohol.
Ignorance is changing our words to make someone agree with us
Ignorance is manipulating for fear that we cannot have what we desire by just being ourselves.
Ignorance is disconnecting, separate, isolate from others for fear of losing ourselves.
Ignorance is the world we live in and it’s not a very blissful one.
The opposite to ignorance isn’t bliss.
It’s definitely not free from pain.
It’s taking the road less travelled, it’s looking oneself in the mirror and not turn away when the uncomfortable feeling of not knowing who that is comes crawling.
The opposite to ignorance is feeling the emotional state that someone else is in without engaging in it. When someone makes you feel insecure, angry, frustrated….. they are manifesting their own internal state externally. Through that projection, we end up in situations that seem impossible to solve because both parties of a misunderstanding have retired into their nest of fear. The opposite to ignorance is remembering who you are in that moment. It means you know that you are peace, you are confidence, you are whole. The vicious circle can then be stopped because you are not pingpong-ing back and forth the agitated state but instead you make a halt. You send that peace and calm back to them. That is the opposite to ignorance. That is maturity of understanding.
A reminder from social media showed me what I had posted a couple of years ago and I was surprised by my clarity of vision then. I was in a state of calm and secure and the writing mirrored back to me today, what I needed to come back to.
It said:
“To meditate on today: To really understand what surrender is, you must have experienced it. Only when you are fed up with treating the space as suffering will you actually choose to surrender. When I stop inflicting suffering on myself can I stop inflicting suffering on others. If I don’t know, I can not do. If I haven’t learned, I can not be.
If you can’t stop inflicting suffering on others, you have not learned how to stop hurting yourself. Have compassion for those who make you suffer, they are suffering of ignorance.”
The journey away from ignorance only really begins when the pain of ignorance becomes too prominent. There is no reason to come out of your cocoon of numbing activities unless you cannot stand being there anymore. Being on the spiritual path does not take away the dark moments. It’s the way you deal with them that changes.
The work becomes clearer when you understand that the idea of non-attachment isn’t what most people think. They have the idea that non-attachment means more or less isolating oneself from others, from things that makes us happy, from joy. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
My teacher Swamiji Abhishek translates the word Vairagya (what we are used to understanding as non-attachment) to MATURITY. It changed everything for me.
Maturity of understanding is the opposite to ignorance to me.
“Your understanding has expanded and made more clearer, more intense. We all experience sunrise and sunset but when you see that it does not actually exist: the day and night wont change, only your understanding. You look at the sun, not as something that goes from the east to the west but as something that stands steady. You experience day and night anyway but you are freed from ignorance. The horizon of your experiences has expanded.”