Identity

Yogas Chitta-Vritti Nirodhah

“When you stop identifying with your thoughts, fluctuations of mind, then there is yoga, identity with Self, which is Samadhi, happiness, bliss and ecstasy”

Human beings start putting others into boxes the moment we meet each other… “are they smart?”, “are they a potential mate?” “are they a networking opportunity”.   We make a mental resume of person that we are speaking to… “what’s your name?”, “where do you live?” “which school did you go to?” and more, age, sexual orientation, occupation and so on… We tend to bond to each based on anything… such as music preference, food, diet, style of food, political beliefs… and so on.

Sometimes the question “what do you do? or what are your hobbies?” is like somebody is trying to squeeze you out of this tiny little box.  These categories are the ways that we identify with each other and they are simply too limiting.

To stop identifying others in these tiny boxes we have to first start, by not placing ourselves with these identities or categories… we have personal preferences, such as i’m not good at gardening, or, i’m only good at driving automatic cars, I cannot ride a push bike, or i cannot do a hand stand… these stories that we identify with, we get attached.  They start to limit us in various ways.  The impact of them is quite constraining… we start to believe in these so much that we stop evolving,  stop expanding our knowledge and stop growing to a point that when we even have a glimpse of what something different would feel like it seems impossible.  It becomes a fantasy.  A phenomenon. An unreachable goal, so to speak.

The yoga sutra 1.2 – Yogas Chitta-Vritti-Nirodhah – states that we must “stop identifying with our thoughts” then we can start to see ourselves in others… as our teacher writes in the focus of the month “we see ourself in all others, so deeply that the ‘otherness’ disappears and when that happens you only see pure love, the Divine in all beings.

In an interview Mother Tearsa was asked by an interviewer “You must love the poor?!”. The interview was not expecting the response, “No, I don’t love the poor”. He hesitated and said “But you spend so much time and energy taking care of the poor and the sick.  You must love them!”. Mother Tearsa responded by saying, “I don’t love the poor; I love the Christ in them”.  (from the book ‘The Wisdom of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, translated by Ravi Ravindra’) And this is an example of not being attached to identities you only see the Divine in all others.