Mind, Body & Ego: A Primer On Life In A Sensory World

I was lying in the dirt, my face pressed into the ground, bawling.

Then it turned to lowing; you know, like a cow.

One moment I was on the side of a boulder and the next I was rolling on the ground with a sickening pain in my ankle.

I pushed into the ground with my hands, tiny bits of granite stuck to my cheek. I looked at my foot and everything seemed to be intact. My husband, Aaron, took my pack and I gimped through the desert back to the car.

So here I am on crutches, “walking” with a protective boot. And this is what I’ve learned:

This experience? It’s not happening to me. It’s happening to my body

Ok, so this is a gross simplification of a really profound teaching of yoga philosophy. In essence, you are not a body, you are a soul living in a body.

At the outermost layer of your awareness is your manas, or mind. This is where the information coming in through your senses passes on its journey inward. It takes in all the sights, sounds and smells of the world.

 

The manas is the thinking facet of your mental instrument that gives words and descriptions to the impressions and experiences that are being made upon it. The manas is also where memory is stored.

And this is where it begins to get tricky.

Throughout life, subtle impressions from your experiences are left on you. These samskaras are not just stored in your manas, but are also stored in your energetic or etheric body, upon which your physical body is built. Your experiences with the sensory world, your memory and your body are all inextricably linked. It makes a messy, entangled and confusing experience —one we call avidya, or misunderstanding.

The great misunderstanding is to believe you are your thoughts, your experiences and your body. Rather, your spirit is much bigger than any of these. Your spirit is experiencing these feelings and what it’s like to live in a rich, sensory, complex world. It’s that old saying: You are a spiritual being, having a human experience.

You are not your body. You are a soul living in a body.

Out of the vast storehouse of information in body and memory, your manas offers it to your buddhi. The buddhi is your intellect —the aspect of you that has the power of discernment and the ability to differentiate and choose.

While the manas gathers information and explains, labels and classifies what it sees, the buddhi contains the power to witness, recognize and perceive it. It is the judge who is not identified with what it sees, but that can recognize patterns and habits and whether they’re healthy or not. It can weigh decisions and play out scenarios.

And here’s where it gets even trickier.

You can be in the exact same situation as someone else and have a completely different experience and come up with a different decision about what to do. (Just ask my sister; it’s like we were raised in two different families!)

What is it that makes the difference? It’s you.

It’s your unique expression of Self. Your personality, your individuality. God, embodied as you. Or in this model, your ego, the ahamkara. The ahamkara brings you into the arena of seeing, recognizing, discerning and aligning in the way that is best for your particular soul.

The ego is not some part of yourself that you need to cut away or stop from being. The ego, itself, is not a problem that needs to be solved. It only becomes a problem when it forgets that it’s connected to everything and everyone else.

You only have problems when you believe you are isolated and alone. The ahamkara needs to function in constant relationship with the world. You need it to distinguish you vs. me, friend vs. stranger, safety vs. danger.

Your memories, your hits of intuition, your deep emotion —they are all part of this, too. They arise from your uniqueness (ahamkara) and also reflect the knowledge from your memory (manas), the interpretation of your experiences and the wisdom gained from reflecting (buddhi) upon it all.

All day long, I unraveled from my fall, and everything made me cry. It was like a release valve was switched “on.” Out tumbled the flood of old, stored up emotion and the release of worn out patterns. The unhealthy samskaras let go and made way for a paradigm shift.

I feel a new-found freedom to be with experiences instead of to feel a victim to them. My body is injured, but for the first time in my adult life, I’m not feeling guilty or like I’m being punished. I feel connected to the Aham —the pure “I am” Presence that isn’t attached to anything at all.

There is a new space between my body—its stored memories, pain and trauma it’s been reacting from—and the awareness of my soul. And I’m more at peace.

Utpaladeva, a great sage of yoga, calls it the ahambhava, the I-feeling. He suggests this as a solution to the challenge of avidya: instead of identifying with the ahamkara, distill your experiences down to utter identification with the Presence of your Soul within. Look for the Aham beneath the ahamkara. It is spirit moving through you…

 

If you’d like to practice this in an embodied way, check out my class, here.