Written by Gurudev Shri Amritji
Today, we are careful about what we feed our physical bodies. We read labels, count calories, take supplements. But we do not apply the same care to what we mentally and emotionally feed ourselves. The thoughts we think, the judgments we hold, and the unresolved memories we project shape our health, our energy, and our experience of life far more than we know.
Your mind is a miraculous instrument. It can project into the future, accomplish great things, and manifest success. But the same mind is powerless to return you to your inner harmony, peace, and love. It cannot bring you back to yoga—unification—because it is built on division. It functions by creating conflict: addiction to pleasure and fear of pain. Every time you feed your mind with mental and emotional food from past memories—whether positive or negative—you shape your current experience and you store it in your body as memory.
Every time you think angry, fearful, or blaming thoughts about someone else, those thoughts do not just disappear. They are felt in the energy body, which materializes thoughts in your mind into feelings in your body.
The ego self perceives everything that is happening through this lens. It does not see the world as it is—it sees only what it has already experienced. The person in front of you is not being seen as they are. They are being perceived through the unresolved subjective memory of someone from your past. This is the root of suffering. You are not living your life—you are reliving your memory.
Like the Chinese yin-yang symbol, you have evolved through the cycle of polarity. You have manifested from the unmanifest and your journey has passed from mineral to plant, from animal to human. You are an evolutionary unfolding of consciousness that has gradually become self-aware.
But in becoming self-aware, you have also become identified with the timebound ego mind. The timeless Presence has manifested through the energy body into the ego self. As a result, most human beings live disconnected from their inner source. They live in separation from the polar cycle that created them and instead live as fragmented selves, unaware of the unified wholeness they already are.
This is why I AM Yoga emphasizes the practice of witnessing. When you begin to witness, you withdraw your energy from the reactive, ego self. You stop feeding the illusion. You return to the choiceless awareness that lives in the timeless zone of the Now. Your body—the abode of the Presence—lives in this timeless zone. You only need to return to it.
When you stop living as the perceiver and start living as the Presence, the reincarnated cycle of memory ends. You no longer create new suffering through the same reactive pattern. You have awakened and recognize that you are not the ego that is suffering from the past; you are the Presence that was never touched by it.