The Yoga of Relationships: A Practical Guide for Loving Yourself and Others by Yogi Amrit Desai

PART TWO

A sense of deficiency builds barriers to protect what we believe is ours. 

Consciously changing breathing patterns releases the conflicting unconscious forces that keep us from being relaxed and present.

Unless we take responsibility, we will never change the source of our unhappiness. We only continue to make more problems in the name of solving them.

  

The desire to change according to personal preferences means there is still someone inside the persona choosing one thing over another. This keeps us trapped in past conditioning. 

Being the Witness gives us permission to surrender, without pushing away what we no longer need. 

There is not one “you”, but a whole crowd of personalities that live within you.  They deafen your ears with their conflicting views and voices. The crowd is made up of many facets of the self-image, each identifying with different memories of the past and expectations of the future, all vying for attention vs the self that lives always in the present.

By not succumbing to passing moods and following your determination, you establish your consciousness, which carries through into all your daily situations.

When you connect with physical sensations through choiceless awareness, it reintroduces you to the self-healing transformative wisdom of the prana body.

Faith and trust are not functions of the mind. Faith is an aspect of the supernatural possibilities within you. The mind is human; but faith is superhuman.

The groundwork of faith is self-trust and courage. 

Self-trust is the basis of developing faith. Fearlessness is the foundation of faith.

Once energy is no longer projected as strategy, it returns to a state of equilibrium where everything remains peaceful and points toward that silent awareness within where all thoughts and perceptions come and go. 

Clarity of mind brings about a relaxation from old patterns.

Instead of trying to explain ourselves, it is better to open our heart to the other before speaking.

How often have we regretted harsh words spoken in an emotional state? The words seem to multiply and take on a life of their own.  Who then is speaking? The insulted self-image or the real you?

Accepting responsibility for our part in any misunderstanding is a quantum leap.

Communicating objectively with others without blame or shame is paramount. 

The Yoga of Relationships: A Practical Guide for Loving Yourself and Others by Yogi Amrit Desai

PART ONE

What you want in the end, you must have in the beginning.  

When others behave in a way we don’t like, we make them wrong and continually blame them until we make ourselves sick. Over and over again, we replay the story in our mind, rationalizing our position and making another the guilty party.  Despite whatever self-belief we cling to, by holding onto the conviction that someone else aggrieved us, we will never be free and will never be able to create the loving relationships we so desperately desire.

Our self-image, or ego, is conditioned over time by our parents, society and culture. We think of the self-image as ourselves.

The ego has needs; it makes demands. And when needs are not met, it leads to frustration, anger and resentment. We believe we are looking for love, but it is not love we are seeking.

Our self-image creates the world we live in. we exist in a fantasy world, not the real world. Distorted by our perceptions, our happiness morphs into sadness, loving becomes revenge, and satisfaction turns into expectations.

The “I” is needed to sustain the body. There is nothing wrong with it, but it is vastly misunderstood and overrated in terms of reliability.

As we listen to the messages of the body, we must discern what it is really telling us, all the while remembering that the mind has a mind of its own.

There is no advancement or awareness until we learn to consciously let go of the past with all its blame and shame.

Understand you did not come to this life empty-handed. You came with the baggage of unfinished karma from your past.

Justification is not figuring it out.

We have an animal body, a human mind and a divine potential.  Animal consciousness is limited to physical survival…. Our identity is based first upon safety and survival.

The human consciousness of “I” extends beyond the body into the realm of “who I am”. The sense we develop as “who I am” is a vast, definable nebula of changing self-concepts, belief systems, personal perspectives, attitudes, opinions, biases, likes and dislikes, attractions and repulsions.

Growing up doesn’t necessarily mean emotional maturity. That depends on evolving conscious self-awareness.

The first thing a relationship does is show you everything about yourself that you do not want to see.

Wherever we go, whatever we do, we do not meet life as it is. Rather we experience our expectation of how we think life should be. Expectations are silent reactions. They are conditioned by our past and re-occur in the present.

Expectations are extensions of our beliefs based on memories that exist nowhere but in the mind.

Reactions are our entry into dualistic thinking. Duality is separation.

Any feeling of conflict is the result of habitual unconscious reaction and is not real.

In the light of consciousness, we have a choice that is neither fight nor flight. The third choice is the important distinction between separation and union. This is “the gap”. 

In every moment, we are making decisions, passing judgments on others, setting ourselves apart from what we don’t like and clinging to what makes us feel better. All of these emotions come from reactions.

To be released from knee jerk reactions, one must learn the techniques that create space between what is actually happening and the formation of the reaction.

Life perpetually moves us toward self-healing.

You have to do the painful work of seeing yourself in all your expectations of the other.