Day Six-Withdrawal

I am practicing sense withdrawal today more out of necessity than rigor of discipline toward conscious bliss. You see I have a box of leftover pears and I am dehydrating them.  The house is filled with the smell of cinnamon, lemon and pears -Yummy! If I wasn’t practicing this sage old advice of Pratyahara I would be tempted to gobble down the whole tray or go crazy with my diet  coming off the fast this week.  Let me let other people describe it more aptly.

Pratyahara is the 5th limb of Ashtanga Yoga. It is necessary for the highest level of raja yoga, to perfect dharana (concentration), dyhana (meditation), and Samadhi (absorption into the highest). One of the results of pratyahara is the destruction of desire through the control of the sense.  This improves health as one of the biggest factors of disease, “the mistake of the intellect”. You know you’ve had enough but you have more because it tastes so good.  You know you are tired and should take rest but you want to see more.  When we are free from sense desire we have the freedom to follow our internal knowing.Patanjali, define Pratyahra as “the process of the senses imitating the mind’s withdrawal by withdrawing contact with their respective objects.  He also mentions, from that follows the highest mastery over the senses. 

Bhagavad Gita teaches to “expel outside contacts and put the gaze between the two eye-brows.  The mind must be unattached to the senses, in order to focus.  The sense feed the mind and spur it on, withdrawing them allows the mind to attain one-pointedness.Gherunda said, by such knowledge will all passions like lust etc. be destroyed.  Whenever (chitta) thinking principle wanders away, attracted by various objects of sight, bring it back under the control of self.  When faced with praise or censure, good or bad speech, withdraw your mind form these and place it under the control of the self.  From sweet smells or bad smells or from whatever odor, withdraw your mind a place under control of the self.  From honey-sweet or sour tastes, from bitter or any other by which the mind may be attracted withdraw and place it under control of the self.

An easy way to practice sense withdrawal is using your breath and mind to focus on points within the body as described in the Yoga Journal. Wish me luck I have a case of apples to dry out too!

Going within,

Deby

This entry was posted on 25. October 2009 at 09:37 and is filed under Groovy Tunes and Yoga. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.