Journey Inwards

Rule 9 : East, west, south, or north makes little difference. No matter what your destination, just be sure to make every journey a journey within. If you travel within, you’ll travel the whole wide world and beyond.

My journey of self-development started 10 years back but for many years it remained quite superficial. The goals were to be a better person but underneath there were always material goals like becoming better in communication skills to get better at sales or dealing better with stress to be able to cope with office issues etc. Increasing focus meant paying better attention to work or a movie or a song: in short anything which engaged my senses. There was always something to be gained in terms of mental, physical or financial health by engaging in the tools of self-development. 

The actual shift in my perspective started when I started doing meditation. Practicing meditation was kind of a natural progression once I started formally learning about yoga more deeply. I realized that my thoughts and emotions, my dreams and ambitions, my hopes and fears were guiding me to act or react. In short, my senses guided me. I started feeling a struggle between my senses and something within me which told me that I am not my thoughts and I am not my emotions. The ultimate question “who am I” was too disturbing to be probed further at that time and hence I just left it at the threshold of the realization that made me understand that I am beyond my body, brain and emotions. 

I gained better insight when I started doing ‘Vipassana’. It teaches you to focus on your body sensations. I realised that everything that we experience is through our senses. However, the same instrument that we have to experience the outer world i.e. our body, can be used to know and understand the inner realm of our emotions and thoughts. This understanding and knowledge can take us to a path of self-realization. This journey starts from looking inwards and understanding the signals our body is producing when it comes in contact with our perceptions of the outside world. 

Modern science says that bodily awareness and emotions are interlinked. Your physical state can change your mental state and vice-versa. Once you start understanding your internal world by looking inwards, you start realizing how it is affecting your whole outer world. In yoga turning your senses inwards is the fifth limb called ‘pratyahara’. Pratyahara or looking inwards works in two stages; first, it eliminates the old ways of knowing and understanding and then it leads to a new distinctive awareness. 

This is not an easy task to achieve. In my initial days of starting to look inwards, it brought frustration and guilt. Frustration of not getting what I wanted and guilt of feeling that I could have done things better if only I worked harder. 

Slowly I started to notice how my body reacts to my emotions. A little twitch in some part of my body when I felt sad, a pinch somewhere when I felt disappointed, a tingling when I anticipated something, butterflies when I felt happy, heat in some part when I felt jealous or guilty and many such subtle sensations which previously I had not noticed. I noticed how these sensations change my mood. How I can perceive myself to be unhappy even if I am in a very lively party and how I can feel happy even if I am stuck in a traffic jam. I realized that looking inwards not only makes me aware of my internal world but it also provides me a different perspective on things. 

I realized that my being happy or unhappy does not depend on any outside stimulus and most importantly that I have a control over my own states. I can choose to be happy or unhappy and my senses are not dragging me by the hair. This stage comes when we stop engaging our senses but start observing them with equanimity or neutrality. Slowly the train of thoughts will stop as it would not get the fuel from our senses. It is at this stage that you start to awaken to your own power and see the entire world differently. As per famous psychologist Carl Jung, “Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart:  Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens”.  

You can’t change things around you but if you change things within, the perspective to look outside changes and the same things are not be as irritating or painful as they were earlier. Here is where the barriers break down and you see the world with whole different eyes. I have always been judgmental about myself and others. The world has always been black and white. This slowly started to change. I was more forgiving on myself as well as on others. I felt love for everyone and every being around me. I must accept that I am not this poise and calm lade even now. But now I am more compassionate and forgiving. I feel that the more I break my own barriers and am open to receive, the more love will enter my life. This has become true for me in last few years. For me, Rumi’s words have become relevant “your task is not to seek love but merely seek and find the barriers within yourself that you have built around yourself. 

This is what Rumi’s friend Shamz must have meant when he told us to make, “every journey, a journey within”.