balraj.yoga | the yoga of self awareness

THE STRUCTURE OF COMPULSION Lived experience is characterized by a non-optional dependence, contingency, and relationality—conditions that precede and exceed one’s individual control, conditions that one did not choose and cannot ever position oneself beh…

Meditation is a practice of self-awareness: a direct inquiry into how experience is organized before we ever begin to reflect on it.

“Whether we like it or not, our unwanted thoughts and painful emotions determine so much of our lives—but only because we avoid them.” - Why Composure Fails Under Pressure Facing our unwanted thoughts and painful emotions isn't simply a matter of doing mo…

THE STRUCTURE OF COMPULSION Lived experience frequently presents a background affective charge of friction or felt incompleteness, distinguishable from any particular, bounded episode of discomfort.

Self-acceptance is not something you “do”.

In traditional yoga texts, it was somewhat common to conceive of attention as something like the consequence of our sense organs ‘reaching out’ into the world to grasp things (sights, sounds, etc.).

Resilience is the capacity to inhabit crisis without being possessed by it.

If we weaponize spiritual practice—that is, if we use spiritual practice as a shield to protect ourselves against the thoughts and feelings and people and situations that create discomfort and anxiety—we're only ever reinforcing the very problem we were a…

Much of the Indian philosophical tradition shares a fundamental concern: understanding the nature of the reality in which we find ourselves.

You are meditating “incorrectly” if you are trying to become calm.

How you relate to your experience is your experience.

Is "embracing discomfort" the key to making progress in life, personally or professionally?

Whether we like it or not, our unwanted thoughts and painful emotions determine so much of our lives— but only because we avoid them.

Whatever our claims about such concepts as reality, self, consciousness, G0d, etc., these claims themselves only ever appear within experiencing.

In yoga, what you do is far less important than how you do it.

Managing emotions doesn’t require controlling them.

The practices of yoga are simple.