A young wife is giving a party, she stops to observe the guests and the fun they are having. Her heart fills with happiness and joy in what she sees before her. As she surveys the room, she congratulates herself on what she has created. Everything seems perfect, the wine, the mix of guests, her nice husband pouring drinks. She realizes she is completely happy. Her guests are content. She viscerally radiates happiness and joy. She can feel the warmth this moment provides. Then she notices her husband whispering into the ear of a female guest and realizes that he is setting up a rendezvous. Her joy immediately goes away and is replaced with agony and loss.
This yoga parable is an example of our natural attachment to external conditions to control our happiness.
It doesn’t mean we can’t experience negative emotions as they arise. It is an example of attachment, where our state of happiness responds as life unfolds instead of the life unfolding from your quiet, joyful inner state,
It is possible to find and secure internal happiness, to limit these fluctuations in your own joy. You can create a deeper understanding that happiness comes from within, not without. When you experience happiness from the inside out, you still experience the changes life brings you, but it sits atop a foundation of self. You begin to see these contrasting experiences as something more. They become moments of deep growth and expansion, and bring forth more of the authentic you and what you came to experience in this life.
Mood making – is not inner happiness. We’ll talk more about this concept another time.
How to cultivate inner happiness
Inner happiness will result naturally. By taking time to quiet the mind each day, you will naturally bring this forth. This will not be work. It will take practice. Fluctuations that take us out of our natural state of joy and happiness are based on a lifetime of experiences held in our central nervous system. Meditation is the process of unbinding these and releasing them, thereby reducing our learned automatic triggers….returning to our automatic transcendent state.
Mantra and instructions-
Sa ta na ma using mudra (fingers)
It clears the subconscious mind of traumas and negative, unnecessary emotion
Commonly translated to: truth is our identity
Sa– birth, cosmos
Ta– life
Na– death, transformation
Ma– rebirth
Sa– index finger and thumb (for wisdom and Jupiter)
Ta– middle finger and thumb (for patience)
Na– ring finger and thumb (for energy)
Ma– little finger and thumb (for communication)
Tone
There are three different “voices” used during the meditation
Out loud- the human voice
Whisper- the lover’s voice
Silent- the divine voice
Practice
Pranayama – alternate nostril breath or just quiet awareness of you natural breathing rhythm.
Begin to chant Sa Ta Na Ma out loud for 3 minutes, then whisper the mantra for 3 minutes, next repeat the mantra silently for 3 minutes
Reverse the Sa Ta Na Ma mantra and chant silently for 3 minutes, whisper for 3 minutes and chant out loud for the last 3 minutes.
A version of this post was previously published on greetyourself.net and is republished here with permission from the author.
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Photo credit: istockphoto