Most people live without full freedom in how they meet their life situations and relationships. Even when things appear to be going well, there is often tension, effort, and inner conflict shaping perception and response. Yoga begins with looking directly at this lack of freedom, and asking what within us restricts it.
In this article, Gurudev opens an inquiry into the nature of the human being and the deeper potential that lives beyond the conditioned mind. It explores why so much energy is spent managing experience, fixing reactions, and trying to change circumstances, and whether there is an inner dimension through which life can be lived with greater clarity and balance.
Most people do not have complete freedom to interact effectively with their life situations and relationships. This freedom is restricted by their conceptual understanding of others and the world.
I AM Yoga practice is a unique inquiry into the nature of human beings and their potential. Psychological approaches explore human potential through the medium of the mind in the dimension of time. We are born, however, with Being potential that functions from beyond the mind, time, and space. Human potential explores the secrets of the external material world of creation, while Being potential explores the inner world of the creator.
The practice of I AM Yoga recognizes that our one-sided human exploration has created as many problems as solutions. It has given us many scientific innovations that allow life to function more smoothly on the outside. Yet without access to the inner dimension of Being, we generate more stress than modern science can counterbalance.
Yoga practice empowers you to break through conflict-creating, stress-producing patterns and blocks. “Being” is the science of the soul, the creator. “Human” is the science of material, manifest creation. I AM Yoga brings the creator and its creation into harmonious, co-creative interaction. It gives access to the inner Being that allows balance between inner and outer life.
Human beings are conditioned by the environment, culture, and society in which they are raised. They are continually shaped by their parents, siblings, friends, and lovers. Personal attractions and repulsions become the interpretive medium through which they reactively process, collect, and store information from their environment and relationships.
No matter who your parents are, or what society, culture, or nation you were born into, you are consuming, analyzing, filtering, and judging everything and everyone you encounter through preprogrammed personal attractions and repulsions carried from your conditioned past.
For most people, where they find themselves in life is the by-product of how they have journeyed through the medium of the mind in the dimension of time. The practice of I AM Yoga focuses on how to break down the barriers you have built in your body and mind. This opens extraordinary opportunities and new options for expanding and exploring an entirely new dimension of life that you may never have thought possible.
Most of the conflict you encounter in life is within yourself. You continue to recreate it no matter where you go, what you do, or whom you are with. This is how self-concepts are accumulated and fortified, forming the self-image through which you interact with life.
The most common illusion is that the source of our problems and conflicts is others. This is an error in perception. Once you believe that the problems in your life are caused by external relationships and situations, you become dependent on changing things and people outside yourself in order to find resolution.
In the practice of I AM Yoga, your focus is not on changing others. It is also not on improving who you are. The real question is, “Who are you?” Modifying or improving behavior and attitudes is called reformation. These changes address the symptoms of the self-image that appear externally as effects. When they are changed, it is a re-formation of the past.
I AM Yoga practice is about transformation. Transformation means changing the hidden cause, the ego mind. This is the paradigm shift from believing, “I am my thoughts,” to experiencing, “I am the witnessing Being.”
As long as you identify with what you think about yourself, you are prevented from returning to the infinite source of energy and Being consciousness that you are. Unlike reformation, which rearranges the past, transformation happens in the present. Transformation is a quantum shift from the doer and achiever that lives in time to the time-transcendent Being that you are.
Simply changing self-concepts is modifying symptoms. It only reinforces the self-image. When the self-image reacts to what is present as effects, it feeds the cause, which is the self-image itself. This becomes a negative feedback loop in which the cause creates the effects, and the effects reinforce the cause.
The practice of I AM Yoga interrupts this recurring cycle. You learn to become the witness rather than the victim of reactive thoughts. During the practice of yoga postures, you observe your reactions as effects. When you witness your thoughts, you simultaneously withdraw from the reactive thinker as cause. In this way, you withdraw from both the effects and the cause. This brings about a profound transformation from ego mind as doer and achiever to the non-doing power of Being.
This is why Christ said, “Unless ye be like children again, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Unless you withdraw from your preprogrammed, conditioned past, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven within you. The subconscious is God’s creation. Self-consciousness is man’s creation. When you learn to withdraw from the past through pratyahara, you return to childlike purity and innocence. Buddha taught something similar when he instructed, “Be in the beginner’s mind.” Your karmic baggage is what keeps you from the Being that you are.
In the practice of I AM Yoga, you recognize that you are born a divine Being. Ignoring this reality, you have falsely identified with a mind-made sense of self. Mind-made means, “What I think about myself is who I am, what I think about others is who they are, and what I think about life situations and challenges is what they really are.”
What is not recognized is that thinking is filtered through memory, fears, and addictions. Everything you think about yourself, others, or the world is therefore distorted by unresolved experiences from the past. You cannot perceive the whole truth with a divided self-image that carries attachments to pleasurable memories and fears rooted in pain. This is operating in the darkness of ignorance.
Moving through life in this habitual, reactive feedback loop not only feels painful, it ultimately backfires. People and objects must be managed again and again, yet this strategy does not work. When the self-image is continually reinforced, it leads to loneliness, depression, anxiety, and fear. Over time, you may see that the result of this effort is the misuse of life energy, producing premature fatigue and inner aging.
Only the conscious practice of withdrawal from the self-image and its reactive perceptions brings you into the light of consciousness that liberates you.
The journey through time moves from Being, to becoming, and then back from becoming to Being. Becoming is an outward journey into time and space. Being is the inward return to the source. In the practice of I AM Yoga, the transition point is pratyahara, the withdrawal of outward-moving attention and energy and the turning inward.
The practice of I AM Yoga is an inward shift in where you live from. As attention withdraws from reactive thoughts, interpretations, and the self-image, the inner dimension of Being becomes available in direct experience. From here, perception is no longer organized by the conditioned past, and life is met with greater clarity and balance.
Let this teaching work beyond the page. Notice where your reactions begin, notice how attention is pulled into thought, and notice the possibility of witnessing rather than following. This simple inward movement is where transformation begins, because it brings you back to the source of perception itself.