Since then so much has happened: an explosion in the popularity of yoga from a handful of followers in the 1960s who at first thought I was talking about yogurt, the healthful sensation from the mid-East (itself 6,000 years old) to the estimated 20 million practitioners in the U.S. alone in 2015.
Just as so much has changed, so much has stayed the same, as the saying goes. After a half century of teaching, I find myself returning to this topic of relationships again and again. When students come to me for counseling, their situations run the gamut, but at the core of every outpouring, I see that their distress is a relationship problem that has spiraled out of control, consuming their thoughts and their precious life energy. Literally an emotional death by a thousand cuts, relationship issues are at the heart of all human suffering—the misunderstanding of the roles we play with our parents, teachers, friends, enemies, and most of all, our lovers and children, those who are the closest to our hearts and cause us the most pain.
But who is causing the pain? Unfaithful spouses or ungrateful children? Neither. We are causing your own pain and until we acknowledge that fact, we remain caught in the grip of relentless recrimination. 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 on to 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. Even after an event is long over, we continue this self-destructive dialogue until there is no hope for resolution. Yet there is always the potential for transformation. We just have to be willing to take responsibility and let go. Then miracles begin to happen.
Just as the foundation for this book is indebted to Patanjali’s first two limbs of Ashtanga Yoga, the Yamas and Niyamas, I also derive inspiration on relationship issues from the great Indian scripture, the epic “Bhagavad Gita,” authored by Vyasa. Chapter II focuses on a key yogic principle—equanimity in all things. This truth is the bedrock of my own teaching. Often it is difficult to be objective in relationships because emotions are so dominant we cannot see past them. Remembering the wisdom of Krishna to Arguna when he was faced with the task of warring against his own family, we, too, must dispassionately observe ourselves, accepting our faults and weaknesses, as we have unjustly judged those same frailties in others.
It is my heartfelt desire that readers will realize that the timeless teachings represented here are the gifts of the sages, Patanjali and Vyasa, and those of my own lineage of masters, Lord Lakulish and Swami Kripalvanandji, whose practical wisdom is as true today as it was 5,000 years ago. Read, embody and absorb. These truths have the potential to come alive in your own life and bring you back home.
With love and blessings,
Yogi Amrit Desai
Chapter 1
The Urge to Merge
Love is the elixir of life, the nectar that nurtures every level of our body and being. Our inborn, evolutionary urge to merge compels us to search for love and the promise of completion it brings. We seek love in its myriad forms and in every expression of life, craving the experience of ecstatic union, where the walls that separate us from others dissolve into oneness.
With our first breath in, we arrive in this life pure and without attachments, yet it is an existence devoid of consciousness. As infants, we live purely in the moment, delighting in our own toes and giggling at whoever shows us affection. In these early years, our demands are purely biological. When we are hungry, we cry and are fed. When we are wet, we get irritable and our clothes are changed. When we are tired, we get restless and are tucked into bed. At this stage, closeness to our mother is not personal affection, but an instinctual bonding for the fulfillment of basic needs and the preservation of life.
It does not take long for the innocence of childhood to wear off. In ages past, it was said that a child was with God for the first seven years. Today, with the influence of mass media messages, it is closer to two or three years. By this age, the individual personality is already developing. The demands are no longer purely biological; they come with conditions because the sense of “I” and “mine” are very strong natural inclinations in children. Any parent of a toddler knows how conniving they can be. Parental and societal responses to experimental behaviors have a lifelong effect both on the individual and everyone around them. This is the beginning of the self-image we show to the world. Our self-image, or ego, is conditioned over time by our parents, society and culture.
We think of the self-image as ourselves. At this age, we are too naive to realize the falsity of this impression. We have no ability to separate the truth from fiction. 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. It is our ego trying to fill its insatiable void. It is at this juncture that the word love gets its bad name. The ego’s hunger for more and more can never be satisfied, leaving us feeling confused and miserable. If we never reach the realization that we are not only individuals, but simultaneously part of the whole, we develop self-centered behaviors. This is natural and happens to all of us in varying degrees.
In short, 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. With duality comes unconscious separation. This sense of the false self develops separateness from others as it acquires definitions, concepts, memories and expectations of how life should be. Our immature emotions become a roller coaster of ups and downs, continually counteracted by their polar opposites.
This is a difficult trap and sometimes it feels as if we will never escape the cycle of disappointments. We repeat the same mistakes. We get stuck in our own patterns of self-destruction. But life is a perpetual therapeutic irritation. It is a school for learning our lessons over and over again until we get it right. The merry-go-round of life always gives us another chance to grab the brass ring.
Grown-up Children
The expectations of the ego follow us into adulthood. Adults have the same “I” and “mine” as children, solidified over the years through acquired associations from a collection of personal events, experiences, prejudices and false perceptions.
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. The mind is an extension of the body. The body would be incapable of exploring its human potential without the facility of the mind. All experiences of pleasure and pain, comfort and discomfort, are registered in the mind. This is nature’s device. The mind can be our worst enemy or our closest friend. It is our choice to use the body and the mind as tools to explore both our human and spiritual potential. 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. It is not beneath the mind to lie to us. In fact, it lies more often that not. The body–if we listen closely–never lies.
From our early pre-programmed conditioning, we unknowingly create an inner split. The “I” that originally focused primarily on nurturance goes beyond that role and becomes deceptive. As we grow into adults, it uses the body and itself as objects of manipulation for pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance. Pleasure nourishes; but pleasure-seeking malnourishes.