Strengthen the right responses🔗

October 26, 2010

According to neurophysiologists, saṃskāras or deep-rooted mental patterns create grooves in your brain, just like rivulets in sand, which makes the water run in certain patterns. They say that each time you react in a certain way, you strengthen the power of the pathway.

Each time the water runs in the same path, the rivulet becomes deeper. Same way, each time you react in a certain way to a situation, you strengthen that pattern. For example, if you are accustomed to falling sick every time you have any stress or fear, you are encouraging and strengthening that engram of falling sick due to stress and fear. It is a very important truth.

The river running in the same direction becomes stronger, deeper, more permanent. Same way, in your brain you have so many rivers - Ganga, Kaveri, Yamuna, Saraswati, Godavari, Narmada, Sindhu!

Some of the rivers in your brain are wild rivers, forest rivers. They have the power to suddenly flood and cause calamities in your life. So you need to make a dam to divert such rivers; to make them flow in a different direction. Making that dam and diverting the river to a different direction is what I call sādhana, spiritual practice.

Neuroplastic science also says that your brain has the ability to create new grooves and pathways, and the existing ones will heal up and disappear if left on their own. So whenever you are really feeling the stress

or fear or anxiety, do something very active. Either do a cathartic meditation or intense weight-lifting to make the body active. You will create a new engram, a different flow of energy, a new groove in the brain.

So in future, whenever fear or stress happens in you, the whole thing will automatically get converted into useful energy instead.

When awareness is added to your rajas (restless energy), it can just become part of your life and can be directly useful to you. If you are stressed, if you have anger or fear towards somebody, just take it out with awareness in the gym, or do some intense cathartic process. I have given so many catharsis processes from different traditions - maṇipūraka śhuddhi kriyā, talking in tongues, prāṇāyāmas like bhastrika, kapalabhati, loud chanting of Upanishads, Vedic mantras. In the Christian tradition, talking in tongues is called Glasalolia. In the Hindu tradition we call it Maṇipūraka śhuddhi kriyā.

Release your stress in these ways, release your fear in these ways. You will see that you will be creating new rivulets. You will not be strengthening the old patterns, the ugly mental set-up of suffering and torturing yourself.