Written by Gurudev Shri Amritji
The Futility of Mental Control in Meditation
Many seekers approach meditation with the idea that they must control the mind: pushing away thoughts, silencing mental noise, and achieving a kind of inner perfection through effort. But natural law reveals a hidden truth: what you resist, persists. When you effortfully try to suppress your thoughts, you trap them in your energy blocks. They circle back, louder and more insistent.
In the meditative practice of I AM Yoga, you’re invited into a radically different relationship with the mind. Rather than resisting thoughts, you allow them. You hold the Posture of Consciousness—not just in the body, but in awareness. As thoughts arise, you become the space in which they appear and disappear. This passive witnessing, free from resistance, is not weakness; it is the strength of choiceless awareness. You do not follow the thoughts or fight them—you simply let them come and go like waves on the ocean of your Presence.
From Outer Posture to Inner Presence
In I AM Yoga, the physical posture is not the goal. You are not here to achieve external symmetry or to perfect the body. Your true alignment is with the Presence that is aware of the posture. When you shift from outward control to inward surrender, you begin to notice something profound: the mind that wants to “perfect” is the ego mind—time-bound, masked, striving. But the awareness that simply is—silent, still, observing—is timeless.
When you hold a pose, stay long enough not to conquer the edge, but to witness the ego at the edge, a shift begins. The ego-mind wants to fix, improve, or escape discomfort. But Presence just observes. In this sustained meditative holding, you become aware of the internal conflict: the male ego mind trying to dominate the female energy body. This conflict is not just physical—it is symbolic of the inner divide humanity carries.
The Inner Polarity, Male Mind and Female Energy BodyWithin you, there are two aspects of being—what the ancient yogis called the Purusha and Prakriti, the Witness and the Field. The ego-self, which functions as the subjective perceiver, is masculine in nature: it analyzes, categorizes, tries to control. The energy body, which exists in the parasympathetic, felt realm of intuition and sensation, is feminine in nature: flowing, receptive, instinctive.
But there is a split. You are born identified with the male ego-self, disconnected from the female energy body. This is why, in moments of stress or stillness, you may feel judged by your own mind. Your stiff joints, tight muscles, or body image become symbols of rejection. Not because they are inherently wrong, but because the mind does not see the body as it truly is. It sees it through frozen, emotional memory patterns—what I call Emotional Memory Stress.
Memory’s Mask, Seeing the Present Through the Past: When you look at your body, your life, or even a loved one, you are rarely seeing what is actually present. Instead, you are seeing a look-alike from your past. A frozen memory event, triggered by the now, overlays your perception. You do not see your partner—you see the echo of your parent. You do not feel your energy—you feel your judgment of how it should be.
This misperception is the foundation of suffering. The ego-self survives by projecting these memory events onto reality. The person in front of you, the yoga posture you hold, even the sound of your breath—all of it can become filtered through the unconscious memory of stress.
As long as you are identified with this subjective perceiver, you remain trapped in a loop of re-living past karmic patterns, moment after moment, unaware that liberation lies just one breath away.
If you’re ready to move beyond mental control and experience true inner union, join us for the Inner Dimension of Yoga Retreat. This immersive training takes you deeper into the I AM Yoga practice—where you’ll learn to unwind emotional memory from the body, calm the nervous system, and access a state of deep, meditative stillness through conscious movement and inner awareness.
