There are many tools that all serve the process of awakening or liberation, and when you listen inward you can feel – or situations present themselves to show you that your energies are out of whack, or that your heart is too closed off.
Your mind can be full of high wisdom, but that’s in your head. There are times when I listen to somebody, and I can hear with my body. I hear in a certain way in which I’ll feel pressure in my head, or I’ll feel tightness in my chest.
There are two theories about how you do this: One is that you go for broke with whatever you do. For example, if you focus on quieting the mind, and the mind gets quiet enough, at the latest stages the heart will automatically aline and the energies will aline. The first strategy is to find your method and just keep doing it, and wait for the others to all fall into place behind it. There will be tremendous imbalance until very late in the game. The other is where you keep correcting the inner process along the way. I don’t really know that one is better than the other – you have to intuit which way to go.
I notice that in myself, when I feel very dry, I move towards situations that will open my heart; and when I am very moist in my heart, but my mind is full of hay and rags and stuff, then I really draw into meditation to clean my mind up.
I can just feel that a quiet mind, and an open heart, and flowing energy is a beautiful balance for this journey.
Sometimes you have to go back to therapy to work on where the energy blocks are, or you’ve got to change your lifestyle – I mean, sometimes I get involved in my relationships and my sexuality and all, because I see that I have places where energy is blocked. As long as it’s blocked I’m compensating for it by doing something else. So I say no, I’ve got to go back and work on that.
I understand that even though it looks like I’ve gone out into the world, I’m bringing something along that sort of got pushed aside along the way.
In the early stages of sadhana (spiritual work), you take your dominant thing and you work with it. You keep doing it and doing it, and you love it, and it gets thicker and thicker. But later on in your sadhana, for me anyway, I began to taste freedom and yearn for it so much that I looked and I shifted around.
There’s a point where you go towards the fire of purification, towards the places you’re stuck. You can feel where your stuff is – what’s got your number, and you realize that as long as there’s any aversion left in you, you’re stuck and you end up wanting to eat your aversions.
-Ram Dass
