Witness Counsciousness

Imagine you are a huge bodybuilder who can lift 1000 lb weights.  A little 4-year-old boy is watching this and gets  fascinated. He comes to you and says, ” I want to be like you. Can you give me weights like yours. I will lift them too”.

Of course you are not going to hand over your weights to the little boy!! They will crush him in a second!

You will start him off with maybe a 1 lb. weight.  You will tell him to practice daily. You will tell him he can use anything around him as weight to lift and carry as he goes about his daily business. Right?

As the boy keeps practicing his stamina will increase and he will be able to move on to bigger weights little by little. It is a step by step process otherwise he can injure himself badly.

If so much daily practice is needed just to build the body at the gross level, imagine the practice it takes to build our stamina to get through all the subtle layer to let our Spirit-self shine through?

So what is this Spiritual Practice?  There are millions of methods and techniques! We all differ  as to which technique or method is best suited for us. (You may want read my earlier article –  Unique Expression of Divinity)

Regardless of the methods or paths the purpose is to remember that I am the Spirit/Soul, not the body.  We have to separate our identity from Body Self and Spirit Self.

When you put clothes on your body do you say “I am my clothes”? Do you become your clothes?  Do you say I’m purple because my clothes are purple? You know the clothes on your body are temporary. You know you are separate from your clothes. You are ‘aware‘ that your clothes are separate from your body.

So it is with Soul and Body.  Body is temporary. We are not our body. We are a Soul (ATMA in Sanskrit) that has taken on a body, just like we put clothes on our body.

But we all can practice ‘remembering’ in our daily lives as we go about our daily activities. This  ‘remembering’ , this ‘awareness’ is called Witness Consciousness (Sakshi Bhaav in Sanskrit), leading to Krishna Consciousness or Christ Consciousness.

This is a direct result of Meditation. It doesn’t have to be and shouldn’t be just some practice we do for a few minutes or an hour sitting down somewhere. We can make our whole day a meditation.

Here are some of the ways:

1. Stop a few times ,or even when waiting in the grocery line or at a long traffic stop, during the day to just take 2-3 slow deep breaths each time, not from the chest but from the belly. Be with entire inhalation and exhalation. Feel it. Have your whole attention on the breath.

Here is an interesting experiment: Hold your breath for a few seconds. What do you notice?  Did you notice there are No Thoughts while you are holding your breath? !!!

Breathing is connected to Mind with all its thoughts and chatter. When the Soul leaves the body there is no breath and no Mind.  Breath  and Mind are characteristics of the Body, not the Spirit.

2. Be aware, be conscious of what you are thinking, saying, doing, feeling. It is like watching yourself as a person outside of you would watch you.

3.  For 20 minutes or so sit without interruptions and write down anything and everything  you are thinking and feeling, without censoring any part of it, exactly how it is flowing. Don’t stop to finish a sentence if another thought interrupts, just write the next thought.( Later you can discard the writing if you don’t want anyone to read any of your ramblings ;-))

This practice has so many benefits! e.g.-

• You will feel lighter, mentally and emotionally!

• You will notice how repetitive your thoughts can be and how they contribute to the incessant chatter of the mind.

• After a few times of this practice you will notice that you are yourself  getting solutions to any nagging issues you might have.

• You will develop more clarity of thought

• It will help you become more conscious of your thought process

More tips and tricks will follow in future posts.

Practice, practice, practice these daily anywhere, everywhere….it is free!

God gave us free air to breath and Thank God our breathing system is all automatic and effortless!! Imagine if we could breathe onlyif we focused on it?  Sometimes we take for granted what is freely given to us!

Our heart is pumping and our body is digesting food automatically.  Imagine if we had to pump the heart and digest the food manually by our own effort?  How many of us would survive that?

For every single step we take how many muscles, bones, nerves, organs work together to make our each step possible? Imagine if we had to co-ordinate all that ourselves for our every single movement!! Gosh, we’d last maybe 5 minutes. Our brains would explode trying to co-ordinate and keep up with all that effort!!

All we have to do is put in the effort to control and manage our mind! Mind is the only self-created, self-perpetuated, self-maintained aspect  that makes us run and run in circles like crazy; delusional of its own grandiosity; controlling our lives!

We are Divine Love, it is all around us, it’s pouring on us and through us but when mindless chatter and unconscious emotions interfere we are not able to experience our True Nature. Once mind settles and Witness Consciousness flowers our hearts open up to feel and enjoy the Divine Love.

Blessed Be!

Ritu

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