Bringing the Practices to Everyday Life
I want everyone to remember that what we’ve learned is that we can act creatively with our Divine Qualities that we’ve cultivated through our Deity Yoga Practice. And by doing that, we’re not clinging to circumstances to prove or to justify our actions. This is a very, very important shift in our manifestation. So what happens, in this instance, is that I’m driving down the road and people are driving kind of chaoticallywhich happens sometimesand I find myself saying harsh words. Now in the past, before I learned all the practices and exercises of The Everday Sanyasin and The Living Bardo, I would have been identified with the circumstances. In other words, responding to what’s going on in that moment circumstantially.
What happens in those cases is that it’s a snowball going downhill, and it just gets worse. But now I’ve learned, through these practices and techniques, first of all to realize that I don’t have control over those guys outside of me, that most of what they’re doing has very little to do with me. Instead I can actually take a deep, easy breath, I can actually expand my lungs and straighten up my posture and begin to feel more at ease in the moment. I can begin to cultivate my Deity practice and the Qualities that I really want to manifest.
Now we’re going to go deeper. So, instead of doing those thingsbecause I know that the circumstances don’t define me, and I’m not going to try to hang on to the circumstances to justify my anger; but I’m aware, within myself, of a tense sense of identity. I’m aware of that tension in my body that spoke that harsh word. I can even feel it in my body now as I think about when I have said something harsh, when I’ve gone into reactivity.
And then I very quickly say, “It’s not circumstance, so don’t try to define it in terms of circumstance.” Okay, so now what I have is this energetic in my body that’s not connected with circumstance. This is very similar to something we talked about, when we talked about free-floating anxiety.
Yogi Sean is the student of Swami Ramananda and the author of Dancing in the Fire of Transformation, The Everyday Sanyasin, and Experiments in Awareness, a workbook for yogis.

