S02E10 - Samskaras and Vasanas - How to Purify the Personality to Make More Room For the Spirit

I find it so intriguing, all the secrets of the teachings of Yoga that help us understand how to drive this human vehicle! Like Sn. Sivani said, our soul is like a pound of pure, unmarked butter and our samskaras are a hand print in that pound of butter.

So, what is a samskara? Samskaras are our deep seated unconscious memories that make up the personality we have been given for our human vehicle. Understanding this makes the whole experience a little less personal and to me, its gives us a little distance to witness from, so we can observe and adjust. Then come the vasanas, which is when we take belief in the samskaras as truth and unconsciously behave in ways that will create and recreate the circumstances to prove the samsakras to be true. There you have it, that’s the cycle of samskara. In our impulse to prove the samskaras to be true we create more karma to be worked through in the future. And sadly we don’t see each other for who we really are, which is pure consciousness, we see the samskaras that the other has identified with. What is really cool, is because we are so deeply connected as this one organism, we will often try to mold into the each other’s samskara and vasanas to see if the pattern or memory fits for us. We are such cute and interesting creatures, us humans.

 How do we break free of this? With yogic practices such as asana, pranayama, dharana and spiritual journaling, we start to see our samskaras, feel our vasanas, and if your are in Ashram it is a lot easier to see these and then have enough discernment to choose differently. Once we start to recognize these samskaras, we then have a chance to stop acting out the vasanas and there you have it, we have purified just a little bit more, and that makes more room for the purity of our spirit to drive our human vehicle! Happy Samskaras discernment to you all. Enjoy!